Ross Dowson

Ross Jewitt Dowson (September 4, 1917 – February 17, 2002) was a Canadian Trotskyist political figure and perennial candidate.

Dowson was born on September 4, 1917, the third of seven children in a working-class family in Weston, Ontario, then a suburb of Toronto. His father was a printer, an atheist, and an anarchist and his mother was a stenographer.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Dowson's older brother, Murray, joined the Workers' Party of Canada, a Trotskyist organisation, while a student at York Memorial Collegiate Institute and brought Ross along to meetings. The pair set up the York Memorial High School Spartacus Club. The younger 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. Harry Kopyto, a long-time friend and follower of Dowson, told the Globe and Mail that Dowson "got his politics from the hungry thirties, seeing working-class people share what they had while the upper class kept what they had to themselves... "He believed in the social ownership and democratic control of the wealth of society."

As an entryist, Dowson joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Youth Movement (CCYM), the youth wing of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, in 1938 and but was expelled due to his political activities.

The Canadian Trotskyist movement collapsed at the beginning of World War II. Leaders such as Jack MacDonald and Maurice Spector had already left due to factional disputes and disagreements and the leader at the time the war broke out, Earle Birney, dropped out to focus on being a poet and because he disagreed with the Trotskyist position on the war. The movement suffered a further blow when the Socialist Workers League (as the Workers party was now called) was declared illegal under the Defence of Canada Regulations.

Ross and Murray Dowson remained with the group as it went underground. Dowson joined the Canadian Army in 1942 and rose to the rank of second lieutenant. He 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. Dowson was discharged from the army in December 1944.

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

Dowson ran for mayor of Toronto nine times in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He campaigned openly as a Trotskyist under the slogan “Vote Dowson, Vote for a Labor Mayor, Vote for the Trotskyist Candidate” and garnered 11% of the vote in the 1948 mayoral election and over 20% of the vote in 1949.