Ross Jewitt Dowson (September 4, 1917 – February 17, 2002) was a Canadian Trotskyist political figure and perennial candidate.

[2] In the midst of the Great Depression, Dowson's older brother, Murray, joined the Workers' Party of Canada, a Trotskyist organization, while a student at York Memorial Collegiate Institute and brought Ross along to meetings.

[3] The younger Dowson joined the party and declared to his mother at the age of 17 that he intended to spend his life as a professional revolutionary.

Its members joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) as an entrist faction known internally as "The Club" but continued to operate the Toronto Labor Bookstore on Yonge Street, run by Dowson, where they would also hold meetings and organize their activities.

"[13] Running under the "Labour" label, Dowson received only 266 votes in a two-way race against External Affairs minister Sidney Earle Smith.

[16] By 1961, Dowson and his Trotskyist group had returned to an entrism policy towards social democracy and joined the New Democratic Party (NDP) at its founding.

In that year, the Trotskyist movement relaunched itself as the "League for Socialist Action" (LSA), with branches in Toronto and Vancouver and Dowson as national secretary.

[2][4] In the late 1960s, Canadian Marxist academics, under the influence of the then-predominant dependency theory, tended to view Canada as an economic colony of the United States.

Dowson moved towards a position that held that Canadian nationalism was progressive against American imperialism, a view that put him in the minority in the LSA.

By 1989, it had been reduced to a small group of friends around Dowson when he suffered a devastating stroke that left him unable to speak or write for the rest of his life.

In 1980, Attorney-General of Ontario Roy McMurtry intervened to quash attempts by Dowson and Riddell to lay charges against the RCMP on the basis that such a prosecution was not in the public interest and had no chance of success.

[9][1] Dowson was a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal and not accepted socially and concealed his sexual orientation through a celibate lifestyle.