Keeping the Dream Alive: The Survival of the Ontario CCF/NDP, 1950-1963

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University, the
author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom,
and the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste. Marie.

Why, one may ask, would anyone bother to write such a book? The 1950s
was the era of the paternalistic Leslie Frost, whose Progressive
Conservatives swept the Province of Ontario election after election.
Unlike their counterparts of today, the Progressive Conservatives
provided low-key, competent government. The resulting consensus almost
annihilated the opposition parties, Liberal and CCF/NDP (the CCF won
only two seats out of 90 in the election of 1951, three out of 98 in
1955, and five out of 98 in 1959).

Azoulay justifies 241 pages of text and 47 pages of endnotes with the
claim that what party workers did during those barren years paved the
way for the successes of the following three decades, and further, that
few others have devoted much attention to the subject.

Azoulay argues convincingly that a study of failure can be as
worthwhile as a study of success. The CCF/NDP failed during the 1950s,
he says (quite justifiably), because (i) the Frost government co-opted
the CCF’s agenda and invested heavily in Ontario’s infrastructure;
(ii) the province was prosperous; and (iii) at that point in the Cold
War there was a phobia about leftist politicians, democratic or
otherwise. For the party to have survived was no mean achievement.

Given that so little of consequence—other than survival—happened
within the party during the 1950s, Azoulay tells his story with
surprising verve. The manuscript began as a Ph.D. thesis, but it is
lively and easy to read. Pictures and tables add to the book’s
attractiveness.