Barry Weisleder

Barry Weisleder is a socialist activist and has been involved in various radical organizations since the 1960s.
He is the current co-chair of the New Democratic Party Socialist Caucus. The Socialist Caucus has the goal of pushing the NDP toward socialist positions and away from liberal and centrist politics, particularly the "Third Way" promoted by some moderates in the 1990s. He has been active in the trade union movement, founding and leading for about 20 years the Occasional Teachers Bargaining Unit of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) until he was suspended by the union over allegations of misconduct which Weisleder's supporters assert were groundless and used as a pretext to remove him for political reasons.
Weisleder also founded and leads the Trotskyist group Socialist Action. Socialist Action was formed after Weisleder and his supporters were expelled from Socialist Challenge in the 1990s in a dispute over democratic centralism.
In the late 60s and early 70s he founded and led the League for Student Democracy (known by the acronym LSD)which organized protests in schools primarily in the Toronto suburb of North York. That organization played an important role in the creation of Free Schools across the Toronto area. Later in the 1970s he was a member of the Revolutionary Marxist Group and later the Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue Ouvrière Révolutionnaire until the group split in a political dispute. Weisleder is a proponent of revolutionary socialism and Trotskyism.
In the 1990s he served on the Executive Board of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union until a government-ordered reorganization of collective bargaining in education shifted Weisleder's local to the OSSTF.

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