On a day in May 1969, I first met Jim Laxer. Almost by chance, I heard of a meeting that was about to take place in Toronto, called by Laxer and Gerry Caplan, to talk about the future of the NDP. I was a supporter of the NDP but, having only recently returned from Ottawa where I had worked for the Liberal Walter Gordon, I was not a member. I got myself invited. The decision was made at that meeting to write a resolution to take to the NDP federal convention that fall in Winnipeg, calling for the NDP to get a life appropriate to the radical times of the late 1960s. Laxer wrote the first draft of what was to become the Waffle Manifesto for an Independent Socialist Canada. (It is hard even to type those words these days, but that was then and this is now and there can’t always be progress.) I wrote the second draft and Gerry Caplan the third, after which it became more or less carved in stone, fit for throwing at the establishment of the party with its vested interest in...
Mel Watkins is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. McGill-Queen’s University Press recently published Staples and Beyond: Selected Writings of Mel Watkins, edited by Hugh Grant and David Wolfe. He remains a political activist, most recently as a member of the Maher Arar Support Committee.
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