Gordon Massie

Who is Gordon Massie?

Gordon F. Massie was a Canadian politician and political activist.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland and raised in the Gorbals district there, he was a machinist by trade. Massie become active with the trade union movement at age seventeen, becoming a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. He immigrated to Canada and becamean active member of the United Auto Workers while working with De Havilland on aircraft construction.

Massie joined the Communist Party of Canada and became a full-time employee for the party in Toronto in the early 1970s, serving as circulation manager for the Canadian Tribune and sitting on the party's Central Committee.

In 1979, he moved west and led the Communist Party of Saskatchewan for three years before returning to Ontario and becoming leader of the Communist Party of Ontario in the mid-1980s, during the provincial elections of 1985 and 1987. Massie stepped down as leader in 1988.

He campaigned as a Communist candidate for the Canadian House of Commons many times but never came close to being elected. In different electoral cycles, he listed his occupation as "political organizer", "functionary" and "publishers representative". Massie resigned from the Communist Party after its 1988 convention due to his opposition to the leadership of George Hewison. Following the split in the party in which the Hewison-led majority liquidated the organization and a minority faction took the Communist Party name, Massie briefly joined the reconstituted party but left soon after to become a hospital worker and ultimately a chief steward in the Service Employees International Union.