Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 23. Part Two of 'A Sometime Fighter For The Disabled'.

    A Sometime Fighter For The Disabled: Part Two.


   By the time he was in his mid 20"s Ron Malevich was a progressive. He went to New Democratic meetings and listened to speeches by N.D.P. leaders like Tommy Douglas and David Lewis. Yet Toronto didn't turn him on. He still scuffled to survive and he tired of the summer heat and the snow in winter. Soon in the early 1970's he headed west to Vancouver and dropped in to see his family in what was now Thunder Bay.
     His father was now dead and his mother was looking a lot older. In Thunder Bay Ron got into a big argument with a conservative man. "You're an asshole," Malevich told the man who was working in Thunder Bay and owned a house there. Ron hugged his aging mother and then left to go back on the road. She died a few years later. Ron rarely saw the rest of his family again.
     In Vancouver, Ron met a man we'll call Derek who was drinking in a downtown tavern. Derek wore long hair, and was tall, thin and tough. "We're belong to a new group on the city's east side,"
 Derek told Malevich. "It's called the Vancouver Revolutionary Front." There were six members of the VRF. They planned to go to a rock concert, start a riot there which would trigger an uprising in the city. This Derek pointed out, would be a big step toward a revolution in B.C.and then in the rest of Canada.
    The riot started but the plan backfired. The harebrained scheme failed completely,
 as rock concert goers who didn't belong to the VRF fled the scene. Most members of the VRF  were arrested and then jailed. Yet Malevich wasn't nabbed by the police. He'd kept in the background and the police didn't touch him.
    After this escapade, Malevich didn't want anything to do with revolutionary politics. He joined the New Democratic Party. It was 1971 and the N.D.P. was on its way to winning the next provincial election. Yet no one knew this at the time. Ron ended up on the N.D.P.'s provincial council which was made up of all the regional N.D.P. representatives across B.C. There were also N.D.P. Members of the Legislative Assembly and N.D.P. Members of Parliament on the council. Alas, Ron drove some council members up the wall by phoning them up and talking for far too long.
     "Get rid of this guy," one of the N.D.P. Members of the Legislative Assembly demanded to several other council members. "He phones me up at all times and drives me crazy with his talking." Council members soon bounced Ron out of their meetings and the council. Still, after the N.D.P.'s victory in the 1972 provincial election, Ron got a disability allowance since his vision had worsened.
    Yet he had time on his hands. What should he do? then the answer came to him in the mid-1970's. He would wage struggles on behalf of the handicapped. And this is what he did.