George Hewison was born on 1944 and is a Canadian folk singer, trade unionist and former politician.
19 Facts About George Hewison
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George Hewison was formerly a long-time member of the Communist Party of Canada and served as the party's general secretary from 1988 to 1992.
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George Hewison was a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation but became disillusioned with the CCF during the Cold War.
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George Hewison joined the Labor-Progressive Party in 1953 after CCF leaders supported a raid by Hal Banks and the Seafarers International Union against Hewison's union, the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union.
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George Hewison grew up in Campbell River, British Columbia, selling the party press and joined the Communist Party and the fishermen's union at the age of 17.
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George Hewison grew up in a musical family before television and made his first public performance when his voice changed from soprano to bass in 1960.
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In 1965 he became a full-time organizer for his union and in 1973, George Hewison was elected business agent for the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union in British Columbia, and became the union's secretary-treasurer in 1977, remaining in the position until 1985 when he left the union to move to Toronto to become the labour secretary on the Communist Party's Central Executive Committee.
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George Hewison headed many lobbies to the provincial and nation's capital.
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George Hewison succeeded William Kashtan as general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada in 1988 at a time when the Communist world was being convulsed by Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union.
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George Hewison was leader of the Canadian party when the USSR and the Soviet bloc collapsed.
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George Hewison was unanimously re-elected leader at the party's next convention in 1992 which produced a new manifesto called "Communists and the New Decade" and the slogan "Its a good time to be a communist".
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The leadership led by George Hewison argued the Party was in financial crisis.
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Today, George Hewison continues to play a role in the labour and progressive movements for which he was a part for half a century.
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George Hewison was recently honoured as a "Pioneer of Labour" by the Peterborough and District Labour Council.
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George Hewison has continued to link music with labour and social activism and is the founder and lead singer of the "Rank n File Band", created by the Canadian Auto Workers union.
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George Hewison has produced five albums over a fifty years span, and has written scores of songs for, and performed at, conventions of virtually every major labour organization in the country.
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George Hewison has toured extensively and most recently performed at the Illawarra Folk Festival in Australia and the Mariposa Folk Festival and Miners Memorial weekend in Canada as well at Joe Hill's birthplace in Gavle in Sweden.
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George Hewison has performed and recorded with "Joe Hill" composer, Earl Robinson.
19.
George Hewison continues to study contemporary capitalism and conducts classes in political economy, blogging on his website.