Coming to Canada

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I came up through people who were related to the Student Union for Peace Action, SUPA, who I had met at the Upland Institute, which only existed for a year or two, training people for peace and civil rights movement involvement in Chester, Pennsylvania. That would have been ’65/’66 Leadership for the Institute was primarily a couple of radical Quakers with connection to others. So I met peace folks and I was looking for something to do after finishing that year-long course located at the American Baptist Seminary at Chester, Penn., which I don’t think exists anymore, but it was a training ground for a lot of southern American Baptists, Black evangelists.

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So, I decided to come to Toronto to visit and in the process, connected through Sarah Spinks and SUPA people, and with Brewster and Cathy. Because they were involved in Christian-based political activities, I was very interested because my background in university had been as part of the YWCA group on campus (the YW in Boulder, Colorado was the closest thing there to something like the SCM here). There was only a YW – no YM – at the university in Boulder because there had been sit-ins to de-segregate the downtown lunch counter, and so financial support evaporated for the YM. The student YW in the Midwest was then connected to what was going on with students in the South. I remember going by bus to part of the Selma Montgomery march as a spring break learning trip one year, travelling with one black member from Denver, which taught us a lot!

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First Recollection of LAWG

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By the time I came, LAWG was already meeting. I remember Brewster and Cathy, and John Foster and Norm, Judy and Hugh Miller from Kitchener. And Peter Warrian. He was also at some of those early meetings. At that point Cathy and Brewster were living on a house on Belsize Drive up off of Mt. Pleasant. That’s where the first office was. I used to take transit from where I was staying, back in the days when there was a trolley bus on Mt. Pleasant.

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I remember LAWG having day-long meetings, like on a Saturday, out in Scarborough at Norm’s folks’ place, because it was a way of getting people away from everything. They were doing research and looking at Canadian corporate involvement in Latin America. In those days Brascan was involved in Brazil. Basically LAWG was trying to establish those connections and see how that influenced Canadian foreign policy.

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Getting Landed to Work on Staff

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So basically, I came, I visited, and then I went back to apply for landed status. It was really easy to get landed status in those days. Those were the days when there were lots of Americans crossing because of the draft, and everybody assumed that I was crossing because of the draft evasion, but I wasn’t.

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To get landed status, you had to cross the border and apply, which I did. That was in the days when the Thousand Island Crossing was very small. I remember persuading the custom’s officer that I really did have a job in Toronto and that they were going to pay me $35 a week, and that it was church-related. He sort of said, “Well, you’ve got some kind of a religious pamphlet that’s okay”. He called it a religious colporteur – in French – that was a category of immigrant back then. While we were talking to him there were wild turkeys wandering around outside the building – very bucolic.

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I did research and coordination, that was around the time Norm first went to the DR. There wasn’t a library at that point like there was later on. There was just a little office in their house. I don’t remember if we had a newsletter then. I wasn’t actually working there that long because I then went to work for the SCM at York. So from that point I was involved, off and on, as a volunteer. I was always on the contact list but sometimes I was elsewhere, like the year in Ottawa when I worked for the Canadian Union of Students.

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By the time I came back, the office had moved to Foster’s house on Bedford Rd. I remember going there for stuff as a volunteer and then around Chile, there was lots of activity. I still remember all the work that went on around Chile.

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How LAWG Was Perceived

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In the progressive Left, LAWG was seen as doing good work in that area and as a group whose work demonstrated the position of the government in terms of international relations, trade and aid policies and all that. Within the group, there was a lot of honest engagement. I mean, if one person or another was being too high-handed, they would tell them and there would be a discussion. And that’s healthy I think. There was certainly a United Church connection, and before there was much real contact with people from the Catholic tradition. That was another change or crossing, when folks coming out of Catholic traditions could see the connection and common cause, but that happened later. But I think that in terms of motivation, I guess you could say that was a missionary drive. You wouldn’t have said that at the time but there was that urgency there which, to me, comes from the tradition.

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Contrary to political parties in the New Left at the time, where people were much more ideological, and took the view that you’re either ‘here’ or you’re not. LAWG was very different. It was trying to work within Canadian culture to change it, not overthrow it. So it was very different. Through the time I spent at York and elsewhere, and comparing it to some of those other groups, I’d say that yes, the group culture, about how you do or don’t make progress in situations – in that way, LAWG was different as night and day.