Mel Watkins, 87, was the compassionate heart of the Canadian left for more than a half-century

One of Canada's strongest progressive voices has been silenced.

Mel Watkins, a political economist who helped shape left-wing discourse in this country for more than five decades, died this past week at the age of 87, his family confirmed. Politicians, union leaders and economists remembered Watkins as "a great intellectual leader," "passionate" and "funny."

While he was most widely known for co-authoring the nationalist Waffle Manifesto, which led to a schism in the federal New Democratic Party in the early 1970s, he also worked with the Dene Nation to fight the construction of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline - themes that echo today in Wet'suwet'en protests against the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

He was, says daughter Emily Watkins, politically minded until the end.

"He always stayed engaged with the burning issues of the day. He'd watch a lot of CNN, sometimes to his detriment. I'm going to miss being able to discuss things with him, because he'd always have something thoughtful to say."

She added that her father was a voracious reader for as long as she could remember.

"He'd read six hours a day when I was growing up. It must've been a book a day. E-readers came along at just the right time for him, because his vision in one eye wasn't so good these last few years. My mother was trying to count how many books he had on his e-reader - it was probably in the thousands."

Born to Wilmot and Sadie Watkins on a farm near Parry Sound in 1932, his intense passion for political debate and engagement never stopped him from listening to other perspectives, or from having a sense of humanity and humour, said former Ontario NDP premier and ex-federal Liberal leader Bob Rae.

"He was never cantankerous. He wasn't a narrowly partisan guy. He had things that he cared deeply about, like Canada's more compassionate sense of the world," said Rae, who was Watkins' student at the University of Toronto in 1966. "I remember him being very passionate, funny and always very approachable and open to discussion, even with somebody who didn't necessarily share his perspective."

That openness to other ideas didn't mean Watkins would let people off the hook when he disagreed, Rae noted with a wry chuckle. That includes the time Rae instituted unpaid furloughs for civil servants during his time as premier. Rae Days, as they were known, weren't exactly popular with the left-wing world.

"He didn't like some of the things I did, like the social contract. He let me know about it, but he never allowed a political difference of opinion to get in the way of having very open and candid conversations," said Rae.

Jim Stanford, former chief economist of the Canadian Auto Workers and Unifor, said Watkins personified the "organic intellectual."

"He always combined his scholarship with his activism. He pushed the frontiers of our understanding of how Canada's economy worked, but always with the goal of making it stronger and fairer," said Stanford.

Former federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who was at the 1969 convention where Watkins and a group of left-wing activists unveiled the Waffle Manifesto, said the two parts of the party had far more in common than either side admitted at the time.

"If you look at the heart of what was passed at that 1969 convention and compare it to the Waffle Manifesto, most of the ideas were actually very similar," said Broadbent, adding Canada has "lost a great intellectual leader of the democratic socialist left."

Nevertheless, the Waffle adherents were tossed out of the party three years later after refusing to disband. Some stayed away while others, including Watkins, eventually came back. He ran unsuccessfully as a federal NDP candidate in 1997 and 2000.

The economic nationalist ideals at the heart of the Waffle Manifesto also informed Watkins' strong opposition to free trade deals - the USMCA and its predecessors, including the Canada-U.S. agreement signed by Brian Mulroney. Time has proven Watkins correct, says Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, Canada's largest private sector union.

"He fought like hell against the original free trade agreement and NAFTA, because he argued that workers would get screwed and that the only ones who would benefit would be corporations, and he was right," said Dias. "When the right was saying, 'Everything will be great,' he was telling everyone what a disaster it would be."

Watkins is survived by his wife Kelly Crichton, daughter Emily, sons Matt and Ken, stepson Paul and several grandchildren.

Josh Rubin is a Toronto-based business reporter. Follow him on Twitter: @starbeer