Socialist Party of Canada (new)
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For the party that existed from 1904 to 1925, see Socialist Party of Canada.
The Socialist Party of Canada (British Columbia section) was founded in 1928 as the Independent Labour Party.
In 1932, the ILP attended the founding convention of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Changing its name to the SPC (BC), it was a cofounder of the BC Section of the CCF. It nominated Socialist Party candidates on a CCF platform in the 1933 BC election.
In 1935, the party fomally merged with the CCF, but a small group of members refused to join, and renamed themselves the Socialist Party of Canada. Many of these people had been members of the first Socialist Party of Canada.
This small rump never numbered more than a few dozen. It rejected both the Leninism of the Communist Party of Canada, and the evolutionary socialism of the CCF. The Socialist Party retained an anarchistic, impossibilistic form of Marxism that rejected any sort of agitation for reforms or putting forward of demands, either through election campaigns, protest, or trade unionism. It rejected any form of political activism as reformist.
Instead, the Socialist Party put forward a utopian view of a revolution which would one day happen spontaneously. In the mean time, the task of socialists was to study and spread the word. In this form, the Socialist Party of Canada still exists today with a handful of members, mostly in Vancouver and mostly of advanced age.
The organization ran candidates in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and again in the 1970s, but no longer does so, and has ceased to be a registered political party.
See also: List of political parties in Canada