Life in the Toronto Branch of the League for Socialist Action, 1961-1977
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“LET’S RENT A TRAIN!” is an unprecedented, 93-minute historical film documenting the rise and fall of a revolutionary political group whose youthful members waged campaigns that profoundly altered Canada’s political landscape.
During the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, as members of the League for Socialist Action (LSA), several hundred highly disciplined activists led Canada’s antiwar movement against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, and exposed Ottawa’s financial and diplomatic complicity with the Pentagon.
The LSA played a key role in the abortion rights struggle which won victory for Dr. Henry Morgentaler when he was jailed for defying the law, and eventually won repeal of Canada’s abortion law.
As New Democratic Party members, the LSA championed “Win the NDP to socialism!” and became a militant “thorn-in-the-side” of the NDP, even as the party leadership planned to remove the word “socialism” from its charter (which it did in 1985).
The LSA struggled against the ravages of capitalism, the reformism, Stalinism, and Maoism of other left currents, and confronted the fascist Western Guard. Correctly labelled Trotskyists by both friend and foe, these militants challenged the myth of capitalist “Democracy” on many fronts, including these:
The LSA:
• ran socialist mayoralty candidates in major Canadian cities throughout the ‘60’s and 70’s.
• won the right to free speech in Toronto parks.
• founded Fair Play for Cuba to support the Cuban revolution.
• protested the misogyny of beauty pageants.
• exposed the inequities for women at the 1967 Royal Commission on the Status of Women.
• opposed Trudeau’s War Measures Act of 1970.
• supported Canada’s first gay rights demo in 1971.
• provided the main leaders of the 100,000 teachers in the Ontario 1973 mass walkout and strike, winning teachers (OSSTF) the right to strike.
Why did this dynamic group disappear?
“LET’S RENT A TRAIN!” reveals how the LSA collapsed over the issue of Canadian nationalism embraced by the NDP’s Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada a.k.a. the Waffle. Assailed by an ultra-left Sixties youth movement, and torn by internal debates regarding Canada’s status as “a U.S. colony,” the League’s several hundred members split into sectarian factions that presaged the decline of the Canadian Left for decades to come.
No other documentary film has ever described the power and the tragedy of the socialist movement so eloquently.
Who were these gutsy activists? The film’s sixty interviewees include:
• Don Tapscott (author, public intellectual, former Chancellor, Trent University) • Alice Klein (journalist, co-founder Toronto’s NOW magazine)
• Judy Rebick (author/broadcaster, abortion law repeal leader)
• Leo Panitch (author, Chair, Political Science, York University, co-editor Socialist Register)
• Lorna Grant (founding leader of Canada’s abortion law repeal movement) • Mitch Podolak (founder, Winnipeg Folk Festival, Order of Manitoba) • Ann Thomson (activist/author Winning Choice on Abortion)
• John Riddell (historian, author)
• Ian Angus (historian)
plus a provocative array of articulate revolutionary activists.
The film is written, produced, and directed by TV production veteran Douglas Williams (writer/director/winner of Jury Prize, Best Historical Documentary, for History Television’s “Hitler’s Canadians” 2008 Yorkton International Film Festival).
It features paintings by renowned artist Mike Alewitz, and a musical score by composer Sam Allison, multiple Juno Award nominee (as Lotus Wight).
“LET’S RENT A TRAIN!” is a production of the Revolutionary Socialist Video Project, for which Doug Williams conducted 90 interviews across Canada between 2015 and 2019. The film, the interviews (video and 5000 pages of transcripts), and other documents pertaining to the LSA/YS are housed in the digital facility of University of Toronto’s Media Commons.
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Short Synopsis
In the 1960s and ‘70s the League for Socialist Action – a militant group of several hundred Trotskyists – wages campaigns that alter the Canadian political landscape. “LET’S RENT A TRAIN!” reveals their fight for a socialist revolution in a conservative society.
