The following describes my introduction to the RSM (Radical Student Movement).  While I wasn’t involved in organizing specific events -- I participated.  I don’t recall any hierarchy of position or specific leadership titles.  So, in retrospect, it would be good to have others’ insights into the workings and happenings of the RSM.  For me it led to participation in “On The Line”, and later – “Dumont Press Graphix”.

                                   A Radical Student

When I quit teaching English at St. Jerome's High School in November 1969, I had already been introduced to student politics at the University of Waterloo.  In striking contrast to my graduation two years earlier, when excitement was a football game and a dance, the campus was now alive with the phenomenon of the radical student movement (the RSM).

Since Winnie's enrolment at U of W in September, I had: marched in an anti-Vietnam demonstration, shouting the praise of Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Min; listened, enrapt by speaker Eric Mann, a Black Panther from Chicago; attended near all-night public meetings in the campus centre; and had shared supper with folks from "the King St commune" -- across the street from the home where my father was raised in Waterloo.

To my mind, until my amazing discovery of student politics, the world had been going to hell.  Yet here, at last, was the possibility of positive change, and a chance to be involved in the making.  As Bob Dylan had intoned, I knew -- I'd "better start swimming", or I'd "sink like a stone". 

My real initiation to student politics arose from a friendship Winnie and I developed with a group of Marxist historians, and their mentor, Professor Leo Johnson.  Bob, Leo's teaching assistant, paid immediate attention to my need to find a meaningful replacement for the teaching career which I had just abandoned.  This largely consisted of his patient explanations of Marxism, the theory of the dialectic, and how, with the knowledge of history -- one could actually change the future for good.  I was hooked.

Bob introduced me to Leo, and Leo recommended me for enrolment within the History faculty as a graduate student.  In fact, I had arranged most of this prior to quitting SJHS, and all that was needed to flow from one separate reality to the next, was a student loan.  No problem.

Then, through a series of pot-luck suppers at Bob's, we met his wife, Judy, and Jim and Mary, who were new to Canada from Boston.  As Winnie, Judy was an undergraduate.  Jim was a Philosophy Lecturer working on his PhD, and Mary, like Bob, was an M.A. student and TA in History.  This group, unlike the King St commune, consisted only of couples.  And, unlike King St, who were into an unfamiliar mix of politics and cultural anarchy -- our politic was ‘almost religious’.  In the long run, for me -- one blended into the other.

With our student loans, and a part time job I found in the University library, Winnie and I were able to maintain our basement apartment.  At St Jerome's College, she also attended classes on the U. of W. campus.  So together, for a while, we shared the heady life of "born again students", immersed in the pursuit of studies which seemed totally relevant. 

Winnie joined an extra-curricular ‘red’ study group, led by Professor Peter Dembski.  An American from New York, Peter idolized the infamous Berrigan brothers whose ethical commitment to peace led them to instruct young people to publicly burn their draft cards and destroy military recruitment records.  Despite the fact that the Berrigans were Catholic priests, and that Peter taught at a Catholic college, he was not popular amongst his peers. This was not at all surprising to me...

Together, we also joined The Organization for Social Justice and Reconstruction (OSJR). Led by Sociology Professor, David Kirk, we mostly carried out our good works by selling Northwest Ontario Indigenous crafts at the Kitchener market. 

Randy and Wally, two other OSJR members, were hard-liners whom the King St people referred to as "Stalinists".  Beside Bob, who would chuckle when he referred to himself as a "revolutionary", Randy and Wally asserted their conviction with defiance.  Their participation in OSJR, they admitted, was to meet and "politicize" do-gooders and liberals like Winnie and me.  Joy, Randy's partner, was quiet and somewhat shy, but clearly of the same purpose.  At first, their intensity was unsettling; but after a few visits and a few beers, Randy became human, and Wally -- a teddy bear with a gruff voice. 

I can’t recall how Winnie and I agreed to become a "political commune” with ten other people, including Bob and Judy, Randy, Wally and Joy.  But there was a definite fervour, and a driving need to "change the system".  Before Christmas we had moved into two rented houses and became known to the rest of the radical student movement as "Eby Street". 

Unfortunately, our political intent wasn’t enough to sustain us through the unexpected interpersonal issues which arose amongst young adults in their twenties.  After only four or five months, we'd all had our fill of political communes, and went our own ways.  

But by now we had graduated from OSJR to participation in the militant Dare strike -- a long and nasty workers' strike at a Kitchener cookie factory.  And etched forever in my memory is standing righteously, arm-in-arm, with Leo, Randy, Wally, and the Dare workers, against a wild police attempt to burst management officials through our human barricade into the plant.  I also remember watching, across the street from the Kitchener police station, where Dare executives had parked their luxury cars for hours while they conducted their mutual strategy meetings. 

We certainly ‘knew how the system worked’, and ‘whose side we were on’. 

Meanwhile, the Strange St commune and the King St commune, some of whom had been engaged in the production of "The Chevron", began a community newspaper called "On the Line".  The Dare strike was an opportune focus for their first issues. I was immediately attracted to the paper and soon began working with them.

I’ll let others, more central to the story, tell how “On the Line” flowed into, and overlapped with, "Dumont Press. Graphix". 

One of the defining characteristics of the era was the proclivity of people to live in co-operative and communal housing. No history would be complete without some acknowledgement of this fact. Indeed, the very foundations of Dumont Press Graphix were conceived in a communal dwelling and involved most, if not all, of the communards therein.

The popularity of student-run co-operative housing actually got a kickstart in 1966 with the opening of Hammarskjold House on the eastern edge of the University of Waterloo campus. Named after Dag Hammarskjold, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, the residence was financed by the student federation; the building replaced a number of houses across the street that had been used as co-op housing, and served as a more affordable alternative to the Student Village.

My introduction to ‘Hammer House’ occurred in March 1968 after I, along with Cyril Levitt and Grant Gordon, was evicted from the neighbouring Waterloo Towers apartment building following an overly boisterous party. Given 72 hours to vacate, I was fortunate enough to find a room in the residence for the remainder of the term. I can’t say it was ideal. Residents were required to perform chores, or “fags”, as part of the deal and as one of the last people to move in I got the fags no else wanted, one of which was to empty the institutional-sized garbage cans in the cafeteria. Try to picture a disabled kid trying to shift around a bag of garbage that weighed almost as much he did. Students sure threw out a lot of food!

Meanwhile, the co-op divested itself of the houses across the street, except for the one which had been used previously as a kitchen for the residents. The co-op’s intention was to convert it to a coffee house so they leased it to a group of people who would carry out the alterations and run the coffee house in lieu of rent. Over the course of the summer of 1968, Jim Hunter, “Corli” Shirley and Graham Dadson built the coffee house in the basement, named it “Cape Fogo” and waited for the masses to pour in. Alas, the masses never showed up so they agreed to rent the house and invited me and Charlotte von Bezold to join them that fall. This became Waterloo’s premier hippy house and was known thereafter simply as “132”. One of the notable features of the house was the jukebox in the living room which had a never-changing collection of 60’s hits. I remember many a morning waking up to the gently soothing strains of “Harper Valley PTA”.

Soon after I moved in, as more and more people were being busted for smoking dope, Jim and I went and talked to a lawyer (Morley Rosenberg?) about our legal rights and subsequently printed a flyer entitled “What To Do When the Cops Show Up” which we distributed on campus. This was my first real taste of political activism.

The house became a bit of a landmark and home to a number of students, hippies and general ne’er do wells including several who later worked at Dumont. Meanwhile, across the street was the aforementioned Waterloo Towers, where a group of students lived en masse in a 10^th floor apartment, sharing two bedrooms, the living room and the balcony.

The original 1968 tenants, Eddie Hale and Philippe Elsworthy, were eventually joined by Gary Robins, Mike Corbett and John Pickles, five hippies in the two-bedroom apartment; Jim Klinck moved in the following May; Roddie Hay showed up two weeks later and lived on the balcony for the next three months. Brian Switzman and Cyril Levitt became regular visitors, as did Brenda Wilson from the co-op house next door. Bryan "No Notes" Anderson and Gerrit Huvers also became regular visitors and eventually forgot how to find their way home. Larry Burko and Bruce Steele were Friday night regulars after Film Night (which Larry ran), but generally did find their way home before sunrise, which was handy, as all the beds, couches and assorted spaces were already full. On many levels, it felt like a cultural oasis. By July, there were nine people living in the two-bedroom apartment. Then they got evicted.

The denizens of 132 also used to socialize (read ‘smoke dope’ and ‘drop acid’) with their friends at 1009. Now, 132 may have had a jukebox, but 1009 had a TV and so it was that on the afternoon of July 20, 1969 a motley assortment of hippies and other adventurers gathered round the TV to witness the first moon landing. On a personal note, the event proved to be anti-climactic as I had dropped acid the evening before and stayed up all night so that when the astronauts set foot on the moon for the first time, I was sleeping peacefully beside the TV, oblivious to history.

However, the eviction from 1009 proved to be pivotal in the history of Dumont Press Graphix. Forced to find a new home, the residents, along with a few friends, fourteen people in all, moved into a new home at 192 King St. South. Forsaking the original moniker of “Pepperland” from the movie Yellow Submarine, they named their home the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Co-operative to honour the military leader of the Riel Rebellion, although it was most commonly known as 192. It subsequently restructured as the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Commune.

I moved into the house in 1970 soon after On the Line began publishing and plans were being developed for Dumont Press Graphix. I can’t say I had much to do with either of these initiatives, preferring to spend most of my days and nights (mostly nights) creating music with Nick Sullivan of Running Dog and His Electric Lackey fame, and in 1971 I moved to the farm at Markdale where I stayed for two years, eventually moving back to the city to work at Dumont.

Upon my return I moved into another house of renown, the House of Zonk, a big old farmhouse on the southern edge of Kitchener. At any given time it was home to 10-15 people, an ever-changing cast of characters bound together by a love of good times and good dope. It featured multiple bathrooms, a chicken coop, the largest kitchen and living room I had ever seen, and a real coal furnace. Real coal! Oh, the luxury!

Until I moved into Zonk I had been fortunate enough to have never been in trouble with the law, not for lack of trying. That changed one night after Larry Caesar was arrested for drinking wine while attending one of the local movie theatres. He also happened to be carrying a couple of joints, enough evidence to give the narcs cause to raid his home. Rumour had reached the ears of the constabulary that Zonk was being used to peddle drugs so this was just the excuse they needed to conduct a full-blown raid. After frisking the half a dozen of us who were home at the time, they herded us into the kitchen while they searched the rest of house. As mentioned, the kitchen and adjoining living room were huge and at one point, I noticed the cops were nowhere in sight, so I took the opportunity to get to the phone and called my brother who was a lawyer in Toronto. As the cops looked on, stonefaced, I had everyone speak to him in turn so he could advise them of their rights. The cops were not amused and exacted their revenge by making me accompany them to the station when they had finished their search. They let me leave at about four in the morning. They found almost no dope in the house but still charged everyone with possession, charges which were dropped at the first court appearance. Hippies one, cops zero ...

There were many such houses in Kitchener-Waterloo in those days. Some were co-ops providing cheap accommodations for students and low-income people. Others were full-blown communes where the residents shared everything – expenses, incomes, each other – in a grand experiment in alternative living. When I look back, I realize how important and formative the co-operative experience was to me and, I am sure, to many of my friends and the people reading this. We learned how to share, to be open with each other, to solve problems together, to support each other through the hard times and to celebrate the good. By writing this I hope to jog a few memories and inspire others to share their stories of co-operative living. I look forward to reading them.

-- with contributions from Gary Robins

So infused with the spirit of era (and no doubt a generous dose of marihooji), I wrote the following little ditty:

(To the tune of Solidarity Forever)

Mine eyes have seen the dishes piled up in the sink all night

Our electric bill is soaring ‘cause we won’t turn off the light

Tom and Mary are not speaking cause they had another fight

But the commune must go on

Refrain

Weeeee don’t want responsibility

Won’t get a job and raise a family

And we’re broke as you can plainly see

But the commune must go on

In 1968, as opposition to the war in Vietman gathered strength globally, Waterloo's Radical Student Movement staged a symbolic burning of a dog to protest the American military's use of napalm. The demonstration set the authorities' hair on fire until it was revealed that the dog to be sacrificed was a hot dog.

Funding for the library became a major issue for the Radical Student Movement in 1969. Despite a surplus in the university's budget, the share of funding for the library had not kept up with other funding priorities and the RSM alleged the administration favoured spending on capital projects at the expense of operations. The RSM ogranized a "study-in" at the library to protest the funding disparities. Despite it being a peaceful protest, Chevron managing editor Bob Verdun was arrested for disturbing the peace by banging on a door. 

Since my memory of events of fifty years ago is not always reliable, I need to "crowd-source" a coherent story of how the mock-up of the new student residence room came to find its way to the campus centre. Anyone that has a recollection can contact me, and I'll try to put together a tale.

From another contributor:

Well there was the one that occurred when the library began demanding that you needed a UofW ID card to use the premises. One reaction was outrage but another took a different form. These protestors obviously knew about the tunnels because they entered the library through them into the basement and took the elevator up to the second floor and entered. Now the second and third floors did not have a handy button to allow you to stop there. You needed a key. But if you timed your ascent correctly you could hit the red Help button and the doors would open automatically. It was what they did and then they blocked the doors from closing and proceeded to haul books from the shelves and filled the elevator car. They were found in the morning along with a note suggesting that if the administration were worried about strangers stealing their library books out the front door maybe they were missing the point.

I received these clippings of articles from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record from rych mills.

Since the text is a little difficult to read, I will gradually add transcriptions of the articles. Here is the introduction to part one of the two-day series.

New outlook, but still radicals

Jim Nagel, former editor of the University of Waterloo student paper and then a reporter for The Record, is now working in a religious communal farm he helped organize at Glastonbury, England. On a trip to K-W, he revisited radical students. In the first of a two-part series, he reports what they are doing today and what they thought about the student activist days.

By Jim Nagel

Special to The Record

Whatever happened to the student radical wave of the 1960s?

At the University of Waterloo for much of the period, editor of the student newspaper for two years, I knew all the activists and probably had an idea of what they were about—even if I was too much of a fence-sitter to play a passionate role,

A full decade—the 1970s—has passed since the crest of the radical wave. I have looked up my friends who were active in Waterloo student affairs then to see where life has led them.

Some went into law; others into government to save the environment. Some went into organized labour; others into their own small businesses.

Some went into (or stayed in) the news and publishing game. Some went back to the land. Some went into university faculties to analyze where the movement went.

Most of the radical wave of the 1960s is still rolling, although the ripples have changed. The individuals who made up the wave, for the most part, have not changed their radical personalities of the past. But they have spread thin. Students of the baby boom are no longer concentrated on a campus, reinforcing one another’s ideas, but are separated across the country.

It was Hush, the Toronto tabloid, I think, that headlined Waterloo as “the Red university.” The UW, along with Simon Fraser University in the West, had the reputation of being English Canada’s radical hotbed.

That reputation surprised me, because the most spectacular thing that ever happened at Waterloo was the bookstore sit-in of 1966. For example, in all of Canada, the only real violence of that era was the 1969 computer-burning at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. While students here held Protests, outside Canada it was different.

In Paris in May 1968, student revolutionaries were on the verge of overthrowing De Gaulle’s reactionary government. The Sorbonne was occupied, riot cops faced cobblestones in the streets, ten million French workers joined a nationwide strike led by the students.

At the same time in New York, police were dragging Columbia University students from buildings. In Washington, the widowed Mrs. Martin Luther King was opening the Poor People’s Campaign and its plywood city at the Lincoln Memorial.

In Bonn, the government was laying down the law on student demonstrators. Someone tried to assassinate the radical leader Red Rudi Dutschke. In Prague, Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” was blooming. And the wind was blowing rumours of Soviet troops massing on the border.

Back in Canada it was the time of flower power. Pierre became prime minister in April and called a general election three days later; Trudeaumania was sweeping the country.

In Saigon, a secret U.S. army directive was calling for an all-out Vietnam offensive. President Johnson asked Congress for $3.9 billion more for the war. Paris peace talks stalled.

Today, a full decade separating us from these concurrent hurricanes, that world has calmed down. The Vietnam war has at long last been repudiated, blacks got civil rights, students got some say on university boards.

The campus is quiet. Students today are more concerned about jobs amid high unemployment than they are about causes.

Students of the ’60s are now in the wide-open world beyond university. Most of the students whose integrity I respected in 1968 have not lost it in 1990. And they’re still concerned about worldwide problems:

Unemployment, education cutbacks, power of huge corporations, half the world starving, the bomb still hanging over it all, authoritarian government lurking to “save” us.

4 leftists turn into lawyers

In 1969 and 1970 a half-dozen of the University of Waterloo student leaders intended to carry their ideals from university polities into law school.

Their intention: Gain understanding of the power structure. Learn to use the system to carry their ideals into the real world.

While at school they planned to live communally in a big house. During the next two years, the household &endash; and some of the marriages and friendships &endash; split up.

Now in 1980, they are practising law, each going their own way, with varying political positions.

Steve Ireland says of the law school commune it was “really bourgeois” to other radical students sharing housing. “That was the time when Stewart (Saxe) had the Mercedes,” he chuckles.

Success surprised us, ’60s “firebrand” recalls

“Firebrand Ireland” I used to call him for fun when he was student-radical president at the University of Waterloo 12 years ago.

Today Stephen W. Ireland, B.A., LL.B. ts a respectable Toronto lawyer wearing a [obscured; maybe “sports jacket”?] but at least it’s corduroy,” he is quick to point out.

Ireland never was one of those slogan-shouting types that, at least in media imaginations, characterized the 1960s. At Waterloo, the most outwardly spectacular event in that period was the bookstore strike of November 1966, when several hundred students sat in the campus shop with guitars, protesting; the university’s high-profit prices on textbooks.

Former university president Dr. J.G. Hagey refused to come to talk to the students, so 210 students trooped up to his office. It was all good-natured, and it worked. The university changed the pricing policy.

“Nobody thought that sort of thing could happen,” said Ireland, “Least of all those who organized it.”

The bookstore success bolstered the student leaders’ confidence. Issue followed issue. “There was a lot of controversy,” said Ireland, “And that was the point.”

Students “saw that if you made your concerns known and had a bit of force behind them — if you were organized and had numbers behind you — you could be heard.”

As a result of student pressure while the new athletics building was planned, for example, planning was done for the general student apart from league sports. Similarly, a sit-in persuaded the library to adopt more flexible hours.

Get the student federation incorporated: that was one of Ireland’s first priorities as president. That legal framework proved to be a structure that weathered the turbulent months following.

Ireland’s biggest contribution was in “getting the principle recognized about student participation in university government.”

He was one of the main authors of a 1967 report that opened a long debate. Some faculty were bitterly opposed but students were granted seats on most university governing bodies.

“How that’s being followed up today— whether, students are playing a meaningful part—I have no idea,” said Ireland.

(One seat on UW’s board of governors today, as it happens, is filled by John Bergsma. An engineering graduate, he is now president and general manager of Columbus McKinnon Industries in Burlington.)

Times have changed for students since the economic slump of the 1970s, Ireland says. In our era, “We had the world by the tail. We were able to flaunt the authorities, to say obnoxious and unpleasant things without worrying about the consequences,

“We all got degrees, got tickets into the Establishment, and we’re all doing good work.” Today students worry how to support themselves.

Ireland and a partner (and a secretary each) are now set up above a bank opposite the central Toronto law courts: “Not plush, but convenient.”

"Criminal cases, “which I’m not all that fond of,” used to make up half his clientele, He now devotes most of his work to family law — divorce, separation, custody of children and property. Working with real people he finds more satisfying: &endash; especially when out of the blue a year later comes a thank-you from a past client.

Steve and his wife Sally, themselves recently separated and reunited, own a [obscured] musical taste might be a barometer of his political views: some Beethoven and a “fair amount of not-too-hard rock.”

Activist student now activist lawyer

Brian Iler, barrister and solicitor dressed in cords and cardigan, drives a 1971 Datsun with 132,000 miles on it and prefers to do his legal work in Toronto with community groups “which tend to be substantially to the left of the NDP.”

It’s 12 years ago that Iler, from Guelph, was elected student president and helped form the Radical Student Movement. [obscured] Today he believes in getting housing, food and such co-ops legally established because “the process people go through in running their own lives is an important part of social change. It’s a matter of bringing institutions down to a size people can feel comfortable with.”

Toronto now has a federation of housing co-ops, each with 10 to 100 units. The federation’s staff of a dozen helps new groups set up, does management services, deals with the mortgage corporations, and so on.

Brian and his wife Arel Agnew — a fellow Waterloo student — and their two children share a house in central Toronto with another couple. They take turns at chores in a day-care centre and food co-op. Iler is involved in the Law Union of Ontario, a federation of 500 left-wing lawyers, law students, and legal workers. He is not in a political party.

Iler practises on his own, sharing space with two native-rights lawyers. He rides his bicycle four blocks to work — even in winter.

An engineering student in 1965, he became active through Circle K, a campus service club and went on to organize the university’s Tenth Anniversary Week in 1967 to mark UW’s first decade. He succeeded Ireland as student president in 1968, the year of the radical crest.

Behind the scenes, radical action was being orchestrated by a small cell including ILer, tongue-in-cheek calling themselves the Committee for Intellectual Mobility. They met Thursday midnights.

“We’d hatch issues to raise shit on.”

They organized an outdoor rally on the shortage of student housing and decided to set up a protest tent city. Iler laughs that the tent city was not very successful. “Gerry Hagey (then UW president) came round one Sunday morning to visit people in their tents, and there was hardly anyone there.”

A mass resignation of student council and Iler as its president was another Thursday-midnight idea aimed to stir up discussion by students.

That was how Iler’s presidency ended, in October 1968 in a “town-hall” impeachment referendum of over 2,000 students. In the ensuing election he was defeated by conservative John Bergsma.

A 1971 summer job in Morley Rosenberg’s law office in Kitchener brought Iler into the middle of the Market Square controversy. The city council and the K-W news media had kept quiet about a deal with Oxlea Investments Ltd. to rip down the old city hall and farmers market to make way for a new mall.

Someone leaked news of the deal to The Chevron, and the student paper hit the streets with a special city-wide extra.

“We fell down badly on organizing the opposition to that afterwards. No one had had any experience organizing that kind of campaign.”

In his Toronto office, one of Iler’s biggest cases was a successful suit in 1976 against a guard at Millhaven maximum-security prison &endash; apparently the first such action against a prison guard to come to court.

Is he still reading Marx?

“I’m not too familiar with his stuff any [obscured] have been. Tom Patterson and Cyril Levitt (in 1968) theorized; I worked.

“I practise law because I enjoy working with people and doing practical things.

“And not just that. It's working with people towards a saner society.”

Student organizing “taught us a lot”

Steve Flott, one of the chief theoreticians at UW in the heyday of campus radicalism, admits that life now is outwardly “upper-middle-class traditional.”

He specialized in transportation law and since 1978 has been executive vice-president and general manager of the Ontario Trucking Association, in Toronto. !Some of the basic (radical) “concepts are still there They take a [obscured].”

Finding his job challenging enough, Flott has decided to stay low-key regarding politics for the next five years. The job involves him with trucking companies of all sizes in their licence applications to the provincial transport board.

One of his ex-radical friends calls him a workaholic. He always was one. He polished off an MA degree in history in only eight months in 1968 at Waterloo. American by birth, he had come to UW from Catholic priesthood training.

He was in on the secret steering committee at Thursday midnight.

You learn as much from working on student council or the campus newspaper as you do on your degree courses. “Part of the success that a number of us have had since leaving school was due to our experience at organizing things and managing during our student-politics days. We gained a lot of political skills which weren’t only used in politics.”

He was wearing his Saturday cords, turtleneck, and 10-year-old sweater at the interview at the large house he and his wife own in Toronto’s suburbia.

“I’m not saying society works well, but it’s there. I can’t see why I shouldn’t take advantage of that situation.”

Ex-radical maps out battles with labour

Stewart Saxe in 1968-69 published 1,000 pages of radical manifestos as editor of the University of Waterloo’s student newspaper The Chevron.

Today he has become a member of the biggest law firm in the world, representing multinational corporations.

Besides becoming a lawyer, he is owner of a modest estate, a rather isolated country house overlooking the Credit River near Georgetown.

Moreover, he has become son-in-law to Morton Shulman, Ontario’s outspoken ex-coroner, ex-MPP and author of Anyone Can Make a Million. Dianne Shulman Saxe is also a lawyer.

He sports a pocket watch in the vest of his three-piece suit and in its inside pocket the inevitable Daytimer, the efficient appointment diary like the one radical student executives carried back at Waterloo in the late ’60s.

He practises labour law — on the management side, How does this fit with his left-wing ideals?

“Poorly!” said Saxe laughing. “But let’s say it’s no trouble in my case. There are some people who practise labour law in ways that I will not.”

His job is to make quick deals between management and union, avoiding public battles. “I don’t think there’s anything anti-employee in this.”

After four years of legal studies at Osgoode Hall plus articling, he started in 1975 as a senior solicitor at the Ontario Labour Relations Board in Toronto. A year later he was its director &endash; meaning in charge of the 100-person secretariat responsible for deploying a field staff of [obscured].