Labour-Progressive Party (Canada)
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The Labour-Progressive Party was a Communist party in Canada.
When the Communist Party of Canada was banned in 1941, it refounded itself as the Labour-Progressive Party. The LPP only ever elected one Member of Parliament under its own banner, Fred Rose, who was elected in a 1943 by-election in Montreal and sat in the House of Commons. In 1947, he was charged and convicted for spying for the Soviet Union, and was expelled from the House of Commons.
Dorise Nielson was elected to the House of Commons in 1940 from Saskatchewan as a Progressive Unity MP, but was defeated in 1945 when she ran for re-election as an LPP candidate.
In Ontario, 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.
The Manitoba party had amongst its leading members Jacob Penner who was a popular aldermen in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as well as W. A. Kardash who was a Manitoba MLA.
The party also ran candidates in Quebec general elections from 1944 to 1956 as the Parti ouvrier-progressiste.
The leader of the party was Tim Buck. Other prominent members were Margaret Fairley and Stanley Ryerson.
The LPP faced repression during the Cold War as anti-Communist sentiment increased in Canada, 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 have a handful of elected members in provincial legislatures and city councils across Canada well into the 1950s. An almost fatal blow for the party was the crisis that enveloped it following Khrushchev's Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU and the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, the first event shattered the faith many LPP members had in the Soviet Union and Stalin while the second caused many to doubt that the USSR had truly changed. Aggravated as well by revelations of widespread anti-Semitism 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 ultimately leaving with the remaining party being a remnant of what it once had been.
The LPP last ran a candidate in 1959. 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.
See also: List of political parties in Canada