|
Reflections A Veteran from Student Days in 1968I have been with the Party and the Internationalist for over 52 years. I recall as a student in Ontario in the '60s I was sympathetic to the civil rights movement in the United States and opposed to the Vietnam War and the military draft the youth in the U.S. were subject to. Discussion and questioning of these developments swirled everywhere. But little of it concerned Canada and our life. This changed dramatically for me as an individual and for my fellow students with the visit to the University of Guelph in the summer of 1968 of a contingent from The Internationalists that had been reorganized in Montreal. They set the campus ablaze with discussion of the role of U.S. imperialist culture in Canada and the manner in which it blocked people from organizing on a conscious basis to bring about change. The discussion went on for more than 24 continuous hours with heated exchanges, debates and views. I was out of town with a summer construction job but as I landed back in town my circles were abuzz and others had joined in to keep the discussion going. I was introduced to students at the University of Waterloo where I attended who organized campus literature tables and discussions around the Marxist-Leninist classics and especially The Necessity for Change pamphlet. It was the beginning of two years of dizzying developments that led to the formation of the Canadian Student Movement at a student conference in Montreal in December 1968, a particularly freezing winter where students from Ireland, England, the U.S., India and South Africa joined students from Quebec, Ontario, BC, the prairies and the Maritimes, to exchange views and experiences in discussions led by Hardial Bains. This event was followed by the opening of a revolutionary bookstore in Toronto on Gerrard Street; the Conference of Anti-Imperialist Youth in Regina in May 1969; the Vancouver Conference held in Vancouver in 1969 and my deployment as part of a contingent of Canadian revolutionary youth working in industry and participating in developing and strengthening of the revolutionary organs for working class propaganda according to my abilities in southern Ontario. After all this activity, we founded the Party in Montreal in March 1970. All of this was possible thanks to the guidance of The Internationalists who worked to found the Party and the workers, students and youth who answered the call. The 50 years of work the Party has carried in
very difficult circumstances is a testament to the
tenacity of the comrades at all levels in the
setting of the tasks and the work necessary to
move forward. It is indeed an occasion to
celebrate our collective work for people's
empowerment.
|
