Book Launch: The Left in Power

You are cordially invited to the launch of Steven High’s The Left in Power: Bob Rae’s NDP and the Working Class. At the end of the 20th century, as social democratic parties around the world struggled to produce a coherent response to the end of the post-war boom, many pivoted towards neoliberalism. Based on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, The Left in Power examines the response of the political Left in Ontario in the 1990s.

This may be Steven’s most personal work to date (though he would quick to point out that this is “no political memoir”!). He joined the NDP at age sixteen in 1984, was elected president of the national party’s youth wing a few months before the Ontario NDP victory in 1990, and spent three years criss-crossing the country, organizing youth from Newfoundland to northern British Columbia. This study arose from his interest in exploring the apparent failure of the centre-left to respond to the industrial crisis and its betrayal of working-class communities.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of a work that that Edward Dunsworth (Department of History, McGill University) has called “[e]ssential reading for anyone interested in bringing about a very different version of the Left in power.” The launch will take place on Friday, February 7, from 1 to 3 p.m. in the Sunroom of COHDS (LB-1019). Light refreshments will be served.