19 Facts About Ross Dowson

Ross Jewitt Dowson was a Canadian Trotskyist political figure and perennial candidate.

Ross Dowson's father was a printer, an atheist, and an anarchist and his mother was a stenographer.

The younger Ross 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.

Ross and Murray Dowson remained with the group as it went underground.

Ross Dowson joined the Canadian Army in 1942 and rose to the rank of second lieutenant.

Ross Dowson recruited two other soldiers to the Trotskyist movement and organized a successful strike for better pay by soldiers who had been assigned to lay and tamp train tracks in southern Ontario.

Ross Dowson was elected secretary of the Socialist Workers League in October 1944, and reorganized the movement, founding the Revolutionary Workers Party with Ross Dowson as national secretary and editor of its newspaper Labour Challenge.

Ross Dowson ran for mayor of Toronto nine times in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

Ross Dowson ran for the House of Commons of Canada on two occasions.

Ross Dowson was editor of the LSA's newspaper, which was first called Vanguard and later Labour Challenge.

Ross Dowson helped shape the national movement in Canada against the Vietnam War, devising the slogan "End Canada's Complicity in the War in Vietnam".

In 1963, Ross Dowson played a role in the reunification of the Fourth International when he was sent to Europe with Joseph Hansen to help negotiate a settlement between the American and Canadian groups on one side and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International led by Ernest Mandel following the ouster of Pablo earlier in the decade.

Ross Dowson was influenced by this analysis, which influenced the Waffle movement in the NDP.

Ross Dowson moved towards a position that held that Canadian nationalism was progressive against American imperialism, a view that put him in the minority in the LSA.

Ross Dowson's faction was defeated at the LSA's 1973 convention and, in early 1974, he and about 20 supporters left the LSA and the United Secretariat of the Fourth International to form the Socialist League.

The Supreme Court of Canada overturned McMurtry's decision in 1983 allowing Ross Dowson to commence a private prosecution but in 1985, the charges were dismissed by lower courts.

However, Ross Dowson testified and provided evidence before two royal commissions investigating RCMP wrongdoings, including the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP, that were instrumental in the eventual replacement of the RCMP's security service with a new agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Professionally, Ross Dowson was a machinist as a youth and later a lithographer and printer by training, but spent almost his entire working life as a full-time paid staffer for the organization, for many years living in the organization's bookstore.

Ross Dowson suffered a stroke in 1989 which left him paralyzed and almost unable to communicate for the rest of his life.