Canadian Forum

The Canadian Forum originated at the University of Toronto as the offshoot of a tiny magazine, The Rebel. Its first editorial board intended the new publication to be what its name suggested — a forum of political and cultural ideas. From the start, the Forum was avowedly nationalist and progressive, and usually on the left of the spectrum on political and cultural questions. In the 1990s it was avowedly nationalist, strongly feminist, and in favour of labour and the welfare state.

 The Canadian Forum gave ample space to poetry, fiction and the best work of Canadian artists. The Forum supported the Group of Seven painters. Some of Canada's finest writers, including A.J.M. Smith, Irving Layton, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney and Margaret Atwood, published their work in its pages. On the political front, the Forum provided a home for Frank Underhill's mordant wit and slashing prose all through the 1930s and 1940s, for Abe Rotstein and Mel Watkins, the leading economic nationalists of the 1960s, and for such well-known and committed intellectuals as Frank Scott, Eugene Forsey and Ramsay Cook.

The Forum was co-operatively owned for most of its history, but for a time in the 1920s and 1930s it was operated by the publisher J.M. Dent and Sons, by Liberals, by Graham Spry and by the League for Social Reconstruction. In the 1990s, the journal was owned by publisher James Lorimer and Co. Its editors included Northrop Frye, Milton Wilson, Rotstein, Michael Cross, Duncan Cameron, Julie Beddoes and Robert Chodos.