The Waffle is long dead and little remembered. Forty years ago, at the very tail-end of the fabulous decade known as the 60s -- if you missed it, too bad -- it burst on the scene as a radical grouping within the NDP with a Manifesto calling for an independent socialist Canada, no less, and did so to media attention the likes of which the left has yet to match.
The 60s were already in trouble, Richard Nixon having been elected president of the United States and leader of the free world in 1968. Here at home, by 1972 the NDP establishment, an alliance of party and trade union brass, was unwilling to tolerate the Waffle talk inside and outside the party.
