League For Socialist Action (Canada) - Revolutionary Workers Party

Revolutionary Workers Party

The SWL was forced underground due to the implementation of the War Measures Act during World War II and their anti-war polemics which resulted in the group's publication being banned. The day after war was declared in 1939, SWL member Frank Watson became the first person arrested under the Defence of Canada Regulations when he denounced the war at a street corner meeting at Bloor and Brunswick in Toronto. Birney dropped out by 1942, according to Dowson because of his support for the war, and the group became inactive. It was relaunched in 1946 as the Revolutionary Workers Party (RWP), Canadian Section of the Fourth International, under the leadership of Ross Dowson. The foundations of the party had been laid two years earlier, in 1944, when Canadian supporters of the Fourth International met in Montreal for their first national convention. Dowson ran for mayor of Toronto as an open Trotskyist at the end of the war and won over 20% of the vote.

In 1952, the RWP ceased its public activities, including the publication of Labour Challenge, and its members began to practice entrism in the CCF. The next year, the section split reflecting the international split in the Fourth International between the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI). The majority of the RWP, including Ross Dowson, backed James P. Cannon and the International Committee, while a minority, including Dowson's brother Murray and his brother-in-law Joe Rosenthal (who had left the Canadian section to form the Committee for the Socialist Regroupment of Canada in sympathy with Bert Cochran's split from the American SWP), sided with Pablo and the International Secretariat.

Members of the former RWP (whose National Committee did not dissolve and whose branches continued to hold meetings) had difficulty working within the CCF. Dowson's application for CCF membership was rejected while other ex-RWP members and their sympathisers found themselves facing persecution within the CCF.

In 1955, following the expulsion of 15 supporters from the CCF, the Toronto group reconstituted itself as the Socialist Education League (SEL), pledging itself to support the election of the CCF and with the goal of supporting the growth of the CCF's left wing. To this end, they resumed publication of a regular periodical, Workers Vanguard. Meanwhile the Vancouver branch, which had developed some disagreements with its Toronto co-thinkers, became an independent organization, the Socialist Information Centre (SIC).