Prof. John Conway died in Regina on March 4 surrounded by family after a brief hospitalization. He was 81.Courtesy of family
John Conway stood against the social structures that disadvantage the poor and working classes, called upon the oppressed to demand better for themselves and their families, and fought for quality education, which he deemed to be a great leveller.
“Where is the alternative systemic vision,” Prof. Conway wrote in the socialist journal The Bullet in 2016. Where is “a world beyond capitalism with economic security and a guaranteed future, a world we can embrace and ask our children to embrace, a world we can realize through our democratic collective action?”
Prof. Conway was, in the words of his son Aidan, an “unrepentant socialist.” For nearly four decades, he taught sociology at the University of Regina and, for much of that time, served as the head of his department.
He was a major voice within Saskatchewan’s Waffle movement, a radical left-wing of the NDP. And he challenged others, especially the many students who took his introduction to sociology courses, to think differently about the world as it had been presented to them.
Prof. Conway died in Regina on March 4 surrounded by family after a brief hospitalization. He was 81.
“My dad knew exactly who he was and where he stood on issues,” says Meara Conway, who is an NDP Member of the Saskatchewan legislature and the youngest of Prof. Conway’s four children. “His analysis was always razor sharp but he was also singularly persuasive. He was able to reach so many different kinds of people due to the soft and thoughtful way that he expressed himself.”
John Frederick Conway was one of six children born into a poor working-class family in Moose Jaw on Nov. 19, 1943. His father, Fred, had been brought to Canada from Britain as a Barnardo boy – one of tens of thousands of poor children who were sent to this country from Britain to work as labourers and farm hands.
“I think [his later views were founded on] seeing the way social relations limited so many people’s opportunities, including those of his own family. … He was trying to make sense of how people’s lives are shaped by structures outside of their control.”
In the late 1960s, Conway moved to British Columbia to complete a PhD in sociology at Simon Fraser University.Courtesy of family
As a child, he came down with rheumatic fever and was quarantined in a hospital by a public health doctor who recognized the threat posed by the illness. The experience “started his commitment to things like universal health care and anti-privatization in health and education,” says his partner, Sally Mahood, a retired Regina physician. “He knew all his life that his access to good education and access to universal health care and the support of that public health doctor had been crucial, and he never forgot that.”
After being named valedictorian of his high school, he was offered a scholarship at the Royal Roads Military College in Victoria. But military life was not a good fit for a left-wing radical, so he returned to Moose Jaw, where his mother, Mary, refinanced the modest family home to pay for his undergraduate work in psychology at the University of Saskatchewan.
Dr. Mahood and Prof. Conway were a couple for more than 50 years. They connected while travelling in the same progressive political and social circles. She recalls him in his younger years empathizing with the life stories of convicts who were housed at the Prince Albert penitentiary when he worked there as a psychologist intern, and fighting for the rights of members of the Carry The Kettle Nakoda Nation while teaching literacy on the reserve.
In the late 1960s, he moved to British Columbia to complete a PhD in sociology at Simon Fraser University. There he joined other like-minded students who had formed a New Leftist organization called Students for a Democratic University (SDU). The SDU waged a fight against the university’s admissions process which, in 1969, evolved into a strike by students and faculty.
That same year, he ran for the leadership of the British Columbia New Democrats. He was defeated by Thomas Berger, who went on to lead a royal commission into the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. Running second in that race was Dave Barrett who became B.C.’s first NDP premier.
While completing his doctoral research, Prof. Conway moved back to Saskatchewan and began teaching at the University of Regina, where he became a professor of sociology and continued his involvement in politics. The Waffle, a militant caucus within the NDP, had formed in 1969 and issued a manifesto for an independent socialist Canada. Prof. Conway was a supporter.
Don Mitchell, who was a public-school friend of Prof. Conway and shared his left-leaning politics, says the Waffle in Saskatchewan continued long after it disintegrated on the national level. When there was a campaign to lead the provincial NDP in 1970, the movement decided to put up its own candidate. Prof. Conway “was one of the people we were interested in trying to run for the leadership, but he was still finishing off his PhD thesis,” Mr. Mitchell says. “So, I ended up taking on that role.”
After Mr. Mitchell was defeated, the Waffle worked independently of the NDP for several years and Prof. Conway was one of its leaders. At the same time, he was making a name for himself on campus as a lecturer who guided his students to think critically and independently.
Aidan Conway recalls being a high school student and sneaking into his dad’s lecture hall. “I was kind of blown away by his command of the room and the way he coaxed people to think differently and again, not in a doctrinaire way.”
As a researcher, Prof. Conway wrote four books on disparate subjects. The West is a history of Western Canada in Confederation. The Canadian Family in Crisis sought to understand the drastic transformation of the traditional nuclear family and articulate progressive public policy responses. Debts to Pay is an attempt to understand the relationship between French and English Canada. And The Prairie Populist: George Hara Williams and the Untold Story of the CCF is a political biography of the important leader of the farmers’ movement and CCF in Saskatchewan in the 1930s and 1940s.
Prof. Conway co-hosted a CBC radio show in the mid-80s in Saskatchewan called Counterpoint, which offered views counter to the status quo. He was a prolific contributor to local and national publications. And he was elected to the public school board in Regina, a position he held for nearly two decades.
“That came from his determination that education should be accessible to kids like him,” Dr. Mahood says. “He had wonderful teachers that allowed him to get educated, and it was his education that allowed him to broaden his horizons and access new opportunities.”
Prof. Conway also served as an intervenor in a case brought to the Supreme Court in 1991 to challenge the redistribution of riding boundaries in Saskatchewan, which he believed diffused the voice of urban voters. He was on the losing side of that fight. But “took on these issues in a very determined way,” Dr. Mahood says, “and he had a lot of support from people who quietly agreed with him.”
Prof. Conway retired from teaching at the University of Regina when he was in his mid-70s.
His children remember him as being a doting father who did the lion’s share of the domestic chores, including getting food on the table every night for a dinner at which political issues would be discussed.
Barb Byers, a past president of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, met Prof. Conway when he was her sociology professor and she later became one of his close friends. “I think his biggest contribution to his students, to his friends, to his family, was his unfailing belief in being a socialist and challenging himself,” Ms. Byers says. “Long after the Waffle was over, he followed through on his commitments around social justice issues and public policy, especially in education.”
Dr. Mahood says Prof. Conway fought important battles, “but always with a cool head and some wit. He never forgot where he came from, his working-class roots, and I think he was true to them to the very last.”
He leaves Dr. Mahood; their four children, Liam, Aidan, Kieran and Meara; their grandchildren, Finn, Lena, Malcolm, Neve, Emile, Arlo, Llewelyn and Eamon; and his siblings, Dan and Sandra.
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