Revolutionary Workers Party (Canada)

The International Left Opposition (Trotskyist) of Canada, the Workers Party of Canada, Socialist Policy Group, Socialist Workers League, Revolutionary Workers Party, The Club, the Socialist Education League and Socialist Information Centre, and the League for Socialist Action were successive Trotskyist organisations in Canada.

The Canadian Trotskyist movement originated in the late 1920s as the left faction within the Communist Party of Canada. Maurice Spector, editor of the Communist Party newspaper The Worker, had been a Canadian delegate to the 1928 Comintern Congress in Moscow when he and American James Cannon inadvertently came across the suppressed platform of Trotsky's Left Opposition. Spector was won over to Trotsky's position and returned to Canada determined to build support for Trotsky in the party. He and his supporters were expelled 1928 and, with American Trotskyists, formed the Communist League of America and then a Canadian section called the International Left Opposition (Trotskyist) of Canada in 1932. Jack MacDonald, the expelled National Secretary of the Communist Party, joined. The Canadian Trotskyist movement went through a number of splits and reincarnations through the 1930s.

In 1934, most of the Montreal branch and about half a dozen members of the Toronto branch, led by William Krehm, left to form the Canadian section of the Organizing Committee for a Revolutionary Workers Party led by B. J. Field who had led a split from the Communist League of America. The Fieldite group, under Krehm's leadership in Canada, published Workers Voice and was, for a time, more active than the Trotskyists but faded away by the outbreak of World War II.

In 1934, the ILO, led by MacDonald and Spector, abandoned its attempts to reform the Communist Party of Canada and became the Workers Party of Canada, which published a monthly newspaper, The Vanguard. It became a fortnightly paper in 1935. The Workers Party also published a twice-monthly Ukrainian newspaper, Labor News, and a youth magazine called first October Youth and then Young Militant.

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