by Judy Rebick
When I arrived at Vancouver airport, it wasn’t only Leonard who came to greet me; Alvin was there with his new girlfriend, Glenna. They had decided to drive out west for a visit. After a few days in BC, I flew home to Toronto.
I first stayed with my parents, but it didn’t take me long to find a room in a house with a couple of journalists I knew. At the time, many young people lived together in communes, sharing houses, food, and company. After almost a year of constant travelling, I had terrible culture shock. On top of that I was still quite sick. After my doctor initially misdiagnosed my condition, I went to the Tropical Disease Unit at Toronto General Hospital and was diagnosed with amoebic dysentery.
After receiving treatment, I was finally ready to fulfill my promise of changing the world. The anti-war movement was at its height, succeeding in forcing peace negotiations between the U.S. and the Viet Cong. In the fall of 1970, members of the FLQ kidnapped a Quebec politician and a British diplomat, greatly escalating their tactics, which up until this time had consisted of blowing up federal symbols like mailboxes.
In response, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared the War Measures Act on October 16, suspending civil liberties and creating a police state in Quebec. Five hundred people were arrested, most of whom were not affiliated with the FLQ. The youthful Left that had been protesting the Vietnam War and supporting the civil rights movement turned its attention to the Canadian state. Most Canadians supported the War Measures Act, but the Left, including the New Democratic Party under the leadership of Tommy Douglas, opposed the overreaction to a small number of FLQ activists. One of the kidnappers’ demands was for the media to publish and broadcast the FLQ Manifesto, which called for an independent and socialist Quebec. While there was a lot of support for the manifesto, the kidnapping and subsequent murder of provincial cabinet minister Pierre Laporte lost the FLQ mass support in Quebec.
The War Measures Act turned my attention away from U.S. imperialism as a target of protest to Canada. I worked with my old friend Bob Chodos, and other friends in Toronto, publishing a new left-wing magazine called Last Post, which took a strong position against the War Measures Act.
I was also looking for a job, and the Addiction Research Foundation advertised in the newspaper for a youth drug crisis worker. I got the job working as a counsellor in the famed Trailer in Yorkville, which brought drug treatment directly to the youth who were hanging out there.
Alienated youth had become the social service challenge of the early 1970s. For several years, young people had been hanging out smoking dope and dropping acid in Yorkville. The cultural side of the sixties youth radicalism rejected consumer society and thousands of young people lived in voluntary poverty, doing drugs and often living collectively or crashing wherever they could. One of the slogans of the youth culture was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” and they didn’t. It was difficult for established social services to cope with them. My job as a counsellor was to help kids come down from bad trips, refer them to a medical clinic for VD, and sometimes help them find a place to stay. I was good at it, but it didn’t really engage me.
Then I found out about Grass Roots, a coalition of alternative services and political groups. As many youth groups were at the time, Grass Roots was a collective with very little structure. Decisions were made at group meetings, most of which were held at 132 Carlton Street, a commune of activists. People who worked together politically also lived together and slept with each other. We were not only challenging the political system, we were trying to create an alternate culture rejecting the strict moralism of the 1950s. Not only did I find a boyfriend, good friends, and a cause, I learned a lot about organizing and fighting for change. Before I arrived, Grass Roots had decided to set up a self-governing youth community that summer, one that would be open to all those who needed a place to stay.
In the summer of 1971, Toronto was getting ready for the invasion of thousands of transient youth from across the country. Newspapers were full of articles warning of the lack of facilities for young people who would be grabbing their backpacks, leaving home, and joining the masses of young travellers hitchhiking across North America. Grass Roots had the idea of creating an outdoor community for transient youth that would be democratically run by the people living there. The proposal was for tents that could house up to a thousand people, and the site we were recommending was the University of Toronto campus. We called it Wachea, which we thought was a Cree word for “everyone is welcome.” The Cree word is actually spelled wachiya and means “hello.” The media called it a tent city.
Wachea became the centre of cultural and political activity. Everyone wanted to be part of this new experiment. The student council tried to negotiate with the U of T administration, which was desperately pressuring the provincial government for permission to use Mercer Reformatory as the site for the tent city. Grass Roots wanted to stay at U of T because Mercer looked like the grounds of a prison (which it was), a grim warehouse-type building on a large dirt plot. And there were no facilities such as running water.
After the university officially turned down the student council, all three student organizations invited Grass Roots to occupy the circle in front of Hart House and set up our community. We set up tents, served free food, and held concerts, yoga classes, and free university classes. In many ways it resembled the Occupy protests that were established in 2011. On July 16, 1971, a judge granted an injunction forbidding us from establishing a community in front of Hart House. The police cleared us out early on a Sunday morning and were very rough with people who resisted. Twenty-one people were arrested.
After weeks of protests and negotiations, the provincial government gave us the Mercer site and on July 22 we opened Wachea there. About thirty people set up tents. Most of the young people who showed up had nowhere else to go and were not the least bit interested in our participatory democracy ideals or our free university. By the end of the first week, there were 150 campers. We provided one hot meal a day, prepared in the kitchen of the West End YMCA. The federal government provided a grant of $25,000 as part of the Opportunities for Youth program, which encouraged young people to do community work. Later I came to see these grants as an attempt to co-opt the youth movement, but at the time the funding helped pay expenses, especially setting up portable toilets and running water on the site. The grant was designed to provide salaries, but we used most of it for expenses. I got paid about $200 for the entire summer.
Nevertheless, we were middle-class and most of the kids who stayed at the camp were poor. They were just looking for a free place to stay, where they wouldn’t be hassled about taking drugs, having sex, or drinking. They couldn’t give a damn about our ideals.
Our idealism about a democratically run youth community was being destroyed. And there were divisions within Grass Roots among the service providers, journalists, and radical political activists. We had set out to create a self-governing youth community but had succeeded only in providing tents, food, and sanitary facilities to a group of young people with little interest in social change.
Still, I learned a lot from this battle. Fighting back really did work. My experiences at Wachea also helped me to appreciate that there were real class differences in Canada, too. In a way, I understood the campers’ anger at us. We had education and could rely on our families should we run into trouble. Even though we were choosing to be poor, it was our choice, not a condition imposed on us by social circumstances. This realization spurred me to find a new way to battle the inequality that I saw. I started looking for another political route.
* * *
Like most sixties radicals, I believed that the revolutionary transformation of society required systemic change. So in 1971, I began studying Marxism, eventually joining the Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG).
Marxism made the world I saw make sense. It wasn’t just the extreme poverty I witnessed on my travels, it was also the brutality of government autho
rities against anyone who opposed the war in Vietnam, the extreme oppression of Black Americans during the civil rights movement, and the Trudeau government’s response to the October Crisis. Marx argued that because the capitalist ruling class had gained their wealth through violence, they would never give it up without violence. Therefore a violent revolution led by the working class would be the instrument of its destruction. Marx called the transitional society that would follow a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which would lead to a peaceful Communist society. Class would no longer be a defining factor; each person would contribute according to their abilities, and each would receive according to their needs. Stalin’s and Mao’s interpretations of Marxism resulted in the creation of strong states based on proletarian interests, but used violence or mass imprisonment as a way to stop dissent. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin took over the leadership of the Bolshevik party and went so far as to imprison and murder those who disagreed with him even within the ranks of his own party. The Russian theorist and politician Leon Trotsky was the first to argue against this authoritarianism. He warned that party bureaucrats were taking the place of the capitalists, instead of building an alternative society where workers and peasants controlled their own communities and lives. Trotsky was vilified by the Communist regimes in Russia and China, but we loved him.
In the United States radical groups like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, a Latino group like the Panthers, were linking U.S. imperialism to racism at home. The Weathermen, the radical group that emerged from Students for a Democratic Society, were so convinced that a revolution was coming that they tried to instigate it by bombing government offices. The FLQ had similar politics, linking their struggle to national liberation struggles around the world. Starting from the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya and the Algerian Revolution, almost all the anti-colonial national liberation struggles used forms of guerrilla violence. Most of the people involved in revolutionary politics in Canada did not think violence in the present context was useful, but we believed a violent revolution would ultimately be necessary because the bourgeoisie would inevitably defend their power with arms.
The other factor for me was the leadership. The RMG, and the Red Circle before it, had powerful women leaders. Jackie Larkin had been the Ottawa organizer for the Waffle, a radical wing of the New Democratic Party, and managed to convince them to lend her to the Abortion Caravan, the first national action of the women’s movement. Jackie was small, lithe, and tough, while still being charming and loving. Deirdre Gallagher came from a trade union family and already had quite a bit of experience in the labour movement. She seemed softer than Jackie but she, too, was tough and powerful. Deirdre was one of the few in our group who had a child. In those days, we weren’t interested in having children and considered it a diversion from the movement. She says that she got almost no support for her parenting. Varda Burstyn was tiny but mighty. She was, and probably still is, one of the smartest people I have ever met. I knew Varda because she was a friend of my brother Alvin in high school. All three of them were powerful women, great speakers, tough feminists, and very sexy. They played a leading role in the Waffle and in the RMG. They were all friends with each other and I, too, became friends with them. Even today it’s unusual to find a political group in which women play such a major role, but in the 1970s it was unique and irresistible to me. The three women, and in particular Varda, played a key role in establishing International Women’s Day (IWD) as a yearly march in Toronto that would bring together and make visible diverse feminist groups.
About a year after I joined, the RMG wanted to start a chapter in Vancouver and asked if I would be willing to go. It seemed like an exciting opportunity, so I took off with my boyfriend Will Offley and another friend, Heather MacNeil. When we arrived, we were living in a collective house in Vancouver’s east end with Steve Penner and Gary Crystall. Gary was what we would have called a “contact,” someone identified as a potential recruit. Later, Gary went on to found the Vancouver Folk Festival, but he was already interested in music and had lived in Chile for a while before returning to Vancouver.
Since Gary had lived in Chile, pressuring the Canadian government to allow Chilean refugees to come to Canada became a major activity. In late fall of 1973 we occupied the Vancouver passport office in protest. It was the second time I got arrested in Vancouver. The first time was a month before. Will, Gary, a fellow comrade named Heather Prittie, and I were at a party. The RMG was involved in picket support for the mostly immigrant workers who were striking for a first contract at Artistic Woodwork, a picture frame manufacturer. The company called the police to escort scabs over the line and it became one of the most violent strikes of the time.
A couple of our comrades had been beaten up and we were pretty upset about it. We didn’t realize that Artistic Woodwork had an office in Vancouver until we were getting into Heather’s car and Gary noticed a big display window saying ARTISTIC WOODWORK.
“Let’s break it,” he said.
“Great idea,” Will responded.
Heather and I didn’t think so, but that was irrelevant.
Gary told Heather to kill the lights, drop them off, and circle the block so they could jump in the car just as the window was shattering. The moment they started throwing the rocks, a squad car drove through the nearest intersection. I can still hear the thunderous crash of glass shattering into a million pieces. The cops were at our car in an instant.
“Judy, you talk to them,” Gary said.
I figured if I could talk my way out of being searched for drugs at the Israeli border, this should be a breeze.
The cops told all of us to get out of the car.
“What’s the problem, officer?” I asked.
“Didn’t you hear that window break, miss?”
“Yes, of course, but we don’t know what happened.”
I kept chatting to him, calmly and respectfully. My ability to dissociate from fear and anxiety was serving me well until he said, “Open the trunk.”
Inside the trunk were piles of the newly printed Old Moles, the RMG newspaper. On the cover was a picture of the picket line at Artistic Woodwork with the headline “Smash Artistic Woodwork.”
We were all arrested but only Gary and Will were charged. Gary had a record so Will took the rap. He got two years’ probation, which was a lot more than we expected.
I left Vancouver almost a year later, mostly because I couldn’t take the rain. What I didn’t realize then was that I was suffering from another depression.
When I arrived in Toronto, I was elected to RMG’s political committee, a group of about seven people who met weekly to decide on the direction of the organization. I was leadership now, which meant I was even more devoted to the political work. My day job was working at City Hall as a clerk. It was a boring and depressing job. When I heard from a friend that the Canadian Hearing Society was looking for a secretary in Information Services, I jumped at the chance. Within a year Denis Morrice promoted me to be Director of Information Services at almost twice my starting salary. Even so I still considered it just my day job with politics being my real work.
The strange thing was that the only person from Vancouver I was missing was a man named Ken Theobald. Ken was a Maoist and most of the Maoists in Vancouver treated us Trotskyists like maggots. But Ken wasn’t like that. He was a working-class guy and curious. I met him at a BC Federation of Labour convention and we started hanging out together. He came to my goodbye party, and much to my surprise the only image I had of leaving was of him. When I arrived in Toronto, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Sackville Street in Cabbagetown, then one of the cheapest neighbourhoods in the city. That summer, Ken stopped by on his way home to visit his parents in Windsor. He called to see if he could stay with me. I was surprised but agreed.
We talked most of the night and then he held my hand. One thing led to another and he stayed the night. When I tol
d Varda about it, she suggested that we take the weekend, go to her parents’ house (they were out of town), and spend some concentrated time together. I guess we fell in love.
After a few months of a long-distance relationship, he moved in with me. Ken is a rather unassuming man. Very attractive, quiet with a sense of emotional depth. After my relationship with Roger ended I was never again attracted to alpha males and preferred men who were not aggressive.
The first couple of years together were good. For some inexplicable reason, even my father liked Ken. We went to my parents’ place for dinner every Friday night, which had been my habit ever since I moved back to Toronto. Ken liked my parents and his presence seemed to have a calming influence on the family. He thought my father was hilarious and there was nothing Jack liked better than an attentive audience.
After some study, Ken joined RMG, even though he never felt very comfortable among all the high-powered middle-class intellectuals and was not nearly as engaged in the work as I was. But life was good. We both had good jobs, decent incomes, a healthy sex life, and a stable home life.
About a year after Ken moved in, I heard from Roger for the first time in years. He was back from England and claimed he was off the booze. He asked if he could visit. I asked Ken to stay in the apartment, just in case things became difficult with Roger.
I was shocked at how old Roger looked when I opened the door. Of course I knew he was thirteen years older than me, but when I was twenty-one he was still a relatively young man. Now he was well into middle age and much the worse for wear. He kissed me chastely on the lips and was overly happy to see me. He was a perfect gentleman and as loving as ever. But seeing him did not bring back those old feelings. In fact, I was a little anxious. I didn’t feel a close connection to him anymore — I had buried my feelings for him, along with all of the other feelings I didn’t want to deal with.