1960s
By 1961, Dowson and his Trotskyist group had returned to an entrism policy towards social democracy and joined the New Democratic Party at its founding. In that year, the Trotskyist movement relaunched itself as the "League for Socialist Action", with branches in Toronto and Vancouver and Dowson as national secretary.
As well as being national secretary of first the RWP and then the LSA, Dowson was also editor of the group's newspaper, which was first called Vanguard and later Labour Challenge. The LSA grew during the student radicalization of the late 1960s, bringing youth into the movement.
In 1964, the LSA developed a Quebec counterpart, the Ligue Socialiste Ouvriere.
In the late 1960s, Canadian Marxist academics, under the influence of the then-predominant dependency theory, tended to view Canada as an economic colony of the United States. Dowson was influenced by this analysis, which also influenced the Waffle movement in the NDP. 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.
Read more about this topic: Ross Dowson