Ross Dowson

Ross Jewitt Dowson (September 4, 1917 – February 17, 2002) was a Canadian Trotskyist political figure and perennial candidate.

Early life

Dowson was born on September 4, 1917, the third of seven children in a working-class family in Weston, Ontario, then a suburb of Toronto. His father was a printer, an atheist, and an anarchist and his mother was a stenographer.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Dowson's older brother, Murray, joined the Workers' Party of Canada, a Trotskyist organisation, while a student at York Memorial Collegiate Institute and brought Ross along to meetings. The pair set up the York Memorial High School Spartacus Club. The younger Dowson joined the party and declared to his mother at the age of 17 that he intended to spend his life as a professional revolutionary. Harry Kopyto, a long-time friend and follower of Dowson, told the Globe and Mail that Dowson "got his politics from the hungry thirties, seeing working-class people share what they had while the upper class kept what they had to themselves... "He believed in the social ownership and democratic control of the wealth of society."

As an entryist, Dowson joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Youth Movement (CCYM), the youth wing of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, in 1938 and but was expelled due to his political activities.

The Canadian Trotskyist movement collapsed at the beginning of World War II. Leaders such as Jack MacDonald and Maurice Spector had already left due to factional disputes and disagreements and the leader at the time the war broke out, Earle Birney, dropped out to focus on being a poet and because he disagreed with the Trotskyist position on the war. The movement suffered a further blow when the Socialist Workers League (as the Workers party was now called) was declared illegal under the Defence of Canada Regulations.