The Labor-Progressive Party (french: Parti ouvrier-progressiste) was the legal

front Front may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''The Front'' (1943 film), a 1943 Soviet drama film * '' The Front'', 1976 film Music *The Front (band), an American rock band signed to Columbia Records and active in the 1980s and e ...

of the Communist Party of Canada from 1943 to 1959.

Origins and initial success

In the 1940 federal election, the Communist Party led a popular front in several constituencies in

Saskatchewan Saskatchewan ( ; ) is a province in western Canada, bordered on the west by Alberta, on the north by the Northwest Territories, on the east by Manitoba, to the northeast by Nunavut, and on the south by the U.S. states of Montana and North ...

and

Alberta Alberta ( ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is part of Western Canada and is one of the three prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to the west, Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Ter ...

under the name Unity, United Progressive or United Reform and elected two MPs, one of whom, Dorise Nielsen, was secretly a member of the Communist Party. After the Communist Party of Canada was banned in 1940, under the wartime '' Defence of Canada Regulations'', it established the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP) as a front organization in 1943 after the release of Communist Party leaders from internment. Nielsen declared her affiliation to the LPP when it was founded in August 1943. She was defeated in the 1945 election when she ran for re-election as an LPP candidate. Only one LPP

Member of Parliament A member of parliament (MP) is the representative in parliament of the people who live in their electoral district. In many countries with Bicameralism, bicameral parliaments, this term refers only to members of the lower house since upper house ...

(MP) was elected to the

House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...

under that banner, Fred Rose, who was elected in a 1943 by-election in

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple- ...

, sitting with Nielsen. Rose was re-elected in 1945. In 1947, he was charged and convicted for spying for the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

, and was expelled from the House of Commons. The leader of the party was Tim Buck. Other prominent members were

Margaret Fairley Margaret Adele Fairley born Margaret Adele Keeling (1885–1968) was a British-born Canadian writer, educator, and political activist. From 1936 until her death, she was a member of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). She was deported from the USA ...

, Stewart Smith, Stanley Ryerson and Sam Carr.

Provincial campaigns

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central C ...

, two LPP members, A. A. MacLeod and J. B. Salsberg, sat in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1943 to 1951 and 1955 respectively. The LPP also jointly nominated several Liberal-Labour candidates with the Ontario Liberal Party. Alexander Parent, who was also president of UAW Local 195, was elected as the Liberal-Labour MPP for Essex North in 1945. In January 1946, Parent announced he was breaking with the "reactionary" Liberals and sat the remainder of his term in the legislature as a Labour representative while voting with LPP MPPs MacLeod and Salsberg. He did not run for re-election in 1948. The Manitoba party had amongst its leading members Jacob Penner who was a popular aldermen in

Winnipeg Winnipeg () is the capital and largest city of the province of Manitoba in Canada. It is centred on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, near the longitudinal centre of North America. , Winnipeg had a city population of 749 ...

, Manitoba, as well as Bill Kardash who was a

Manitoba , image_map = Manitoba in Canada 2.svg , map_alt = Map showing Manitoba's location in the centre of Southern Canada , Label_map = yes , coordinates = , capital = Win ...

Member of the Legislative Assembly A member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) is a representative elected by the voters of a constituency to a legislative assembly. Most often, the term refers to a subnational assembly such as that of a state, province, or territory of a country. S ...

. The party also ran candidates in Quebec general elections from 1944 to 1956 as the '' Parti ouvrier-progressiste''.

Municipal strength

The LPP had strong pockets of support in working-class neighbourhoods of Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg as well as in the Crowsnest Pass mining region of

and British Columbia

elected a number of its members to local city councils and school boards. In Winnipeg, Jacob Penner was a long-time member of the city council while

Joe Zuken Joseph Zuken (December 12, 1912 – March 24, 1986) was a popular Communist politician in Winnipeg and the longest serving elected Communist party politician in North America. He served on the Winnipeg city council from 1961 to 1983. Joe Zuken ...

sat on the school board. In Toronto, Charles Simms and Norman Freed served as aldermen while Smith was elected to the city's powerful Board of Control. From 1944 to 1947, Helen Anderson Coulson sat on Hamilton's City Council as an Alderman (from 1944–1946) and, after the 1946 municipal election, as a member of the city's highest decision making body, the Board of Control. She played a significant role in the Stelco Strike of 1946, and paid for her stances in the 1947 election, being shut out of the 4-person body after receiving the second highest number of votes in 1946. She would unsuccessfully seek election numerous times over the next decade, most prominently opposing Mayor Lloyd Jackson in 1950. Dr. Harry Paikin was elected a school trustee on the Hamilton Board of Education in 1944 and remained in office for three decades, until his death in 1985, including ten years as chair.

World War II

Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Canadian Communist Party reversed its earlier position urging Canadian neutrality in

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

and instead urged full support for the Soviet, not Canadian, war effort. The party formed the " Tim Buck Plebiscite Committees" urging support for conscription in the 1942 referendum. After the vote the committees were renamed the Dominion Communist – Labour Total War Committee and were the main public face of the Communist Party, and became the main wartime activity of the Labor-Progressive Party, helping it raise its profile and encouraging the federal government to release Communist leaders who had been detained early in the war.

Cold War

The LPP faced repression during the Cold War as

anti-Communist Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and th ...

sentiment increased in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tota ...

, particularly after the revelations of Igor Gouzenko following his defection from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. Gouzenko's revelations led to the downfall of Fred Rose. Nevertheless, the party continued to elect a handful of members to provincial legislatures, city councils and school boards across Canada well into the 1950s.

1956–1957 crisis

An almost fatal blow for the party was the crisis that enveloped it following

Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev ...

's Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, the first event shattered the faith many LPP members had in the Soviet Union and

Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secreta ...

while the second caused many to doubt that the USSR had truly changed. Aggravated as well by revelations of widespread antisemitism in the Soviet Union (a serious blow to Jewish members of the LPP such as Salsberg and Robert Laxer), the party underwent a serious split with more than half of its membership including many in the leadership, including Salsberg, Stewart Smith, Harry Binder, Sam Lipshitz and other prominent LPP leaders, ultimately leaving with the remaining party being a remnant of what it once had been. The United Jewish Peoples' Order, which had been one of the largest organizations allied with the LPP, broke with the party in December 1956 as a result of Salsberg's revelations after his fact-finding mission to the USSR to investigate reports of systemic

antisemitism Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

and repression of Jewish culture.Gerald Tulchinsky
Family Quarrel: Joe Salsberg, the 'Jewish' Question, and Canadian Communism
Labour/Le Travail, 56 (Fall 2005)

Decline

The LPP last ran a federal candidate in a December 1958 by-election and ran nine candidates in the 1959 Ontario election. Shortly thereafter, it renamed itself the Communist Party of Canada once again. The LPP had a youth wing, the National Federation of Labour Youth which had formerly been known as the Young Communist League. The NFLY was renamed the Socialist Youth League of Canada in the 1950s but became defunct later in the decade due to internal party turmoil.

References

{{Ontario provincial political parties Defunct political parties in Canada Communist Party of Canada mass organizations Federal political parties in Canada Labour parties in Canada Political parties established in 1943 Political parties disestablished in 1959 Defunct provincial political parties in Ontario Provincial political parties in Manitoba 1943 establishments in Manitoba 1959 disestablishments in Canada