Ross Dowson
Ross Jewitt Dowson (September 17, 1917 – February 17, 2002) was a Canadian Trotskyist political figure.
Early life
Dowson joined the Trotskyist movement as a teenager during the Great Depression. The Canadian Trotskyist movement collapsed at the beginning of World War II as leaders such as Jack MacDonald, Maurice Spector and Earle Birney dropped out due to factional disputes. Dowson reorganized the movement near the end of World War II with the founding of the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP).
Dowson ran for mayor of Toronto nine times in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He campaigned openly as a Trotskyist, and garnered over 20% of the vote in 1949.
Cold War
The RWP declined however due to the pressures of the Cold War and ended its activities. Its members joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) as an entrist faction. A split in the Fourth International in 1953 had ramifications in the RWP and in Dowson's own family. His brother Murray and brother-in-law Joe Rosenthal formed a pro-Michel Pablo minority, and split from the RWP to form a Trotskyist tendency within the CCF. It soon disappeared.
Federal politics
Ross Dowson ran for the Canadian House of Commons on two occasions. He was a candidate in a 1957 by-election in the rural riding of Hastings—Frontenac, in which the CCF decided not to run a candidate. Running under the "Labour" label, Dowson received only 266 votes in a two-way race against External Affairs minister Sidney Earle Smith. In the 1958 general election, Dowson was again a candidate in the Toronto riding of Broadview. He placed fourth with 477 votes. This time he ran as a "Socialist" candidate, despite the fact that the democratic socialist CCF also stood a candidate. Dowson also filed his nomination papers as a "Labour" candidate against new Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield in the 1967 Colchester—Hants by-election but withdrew when Elwood Smith entered the race as an independent candidate with informal NDP backing.[1]
Election results
| Canadian federal by-election, 4 November 1957: Hastings—Frontenac | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Candidate | Votes | ||||||
| Progressive Conservative | SMITH, Sidney Earle | 10,513 | ||||||
| Labour | DOWSON, Ross Jewitt | 266 | ||||||
| Called upon Mr. White's appointment to the Senate, 20 August 1957. | ||||||||
| Canadian federal election, 1958: Broadview | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Candidate | Votes | ||||||
| Progressive Conservative | HEES, George | 15,364 | ||||||
| Liberal | TAYLOR, George A. | 4,738 | ||||||
| Co-operative Commonwealth | LEE, John A. | 3,356 | ||||||
| Socialist | DOWSON, Ross | 447 | ||||||
1960s
By 1961, Dowson and his Trotskyist group had returned to an entrism policy towards social democracy and joined the New Democratic Party (NDP) at its founding. In that year, the Trotskyist movement relaunched itself as the "League for Socialist Action" (LSA), with branches in Toronto and Vancouver and Dowson as national secretary.
Dowson was also editor of the LSA's newspaper, which was first called Vanguard and later Labour Challenge. The LSA grew during the student radicalization of the late 1960s, bringing youth into the movement.
In 1964, the LSA developed a Quebec counterpart, the Ligue Socialiste Ouvriere (workers' socialist league).
In the late 1960s, Canadian Marxist academics, under the influence of the then-predominant dependency theory, tended to view Canada as an economic colony of the United States. Dowson was influenced by this analysis, which also influenced the Waffle movement in the NDP. Dowson moved towards a position that held that Canadian nationalism was progressive against American imperialism, a view that put him in the minority in the LSA.
Split from the LSA
Dowson's faction was defeated at the LSA's 1973 convention and, in early 1974, he and about 20 supporters left the LSA and the United Secretariat of the Fourth International to form the Socialist League. This group came to be known as the "Forward Group" after the name of its newspaper. The group grew initially, but soon declined. By 1989, it had been reduced to a small group of friends around Dowson when he suffered a devastating stroke that left him unable to speak or write for the rest of his life.
Conclusion
Professionally, Dowson was a machinist as a youth and later a lithographer and printer by training, but spent almost his entire working life as a full-time paid staffer (at times the only one) for the organization. For the new generation of recruits in the 1960s and early 1970s, he was the major link to the older generation of class-struggle militants and Marxists who had built the labour and socialist movements in previous decades.
Dowson's brothers Hugh, Murray and his sisters Joyce (Dowson) Rosenthal and Lois (Dowson) Bédard were also active in the Trotskyist movement.
Dowson's niece, Anne Lagacé Dowson, is a broadcaster and politician.