Labour candidates and parties in Canada
Open-knowledge reference entry
Canada's political labour movement gradually grew from running independent labour-oriented local candidates (usually unsuccessfully), to founding provincial labour parties or socialist-inclined labour parties such as BC's Nationalist Party and the Socialist Party of Canada, finally to a couple nation-wide parties expressing positions positive toward labour interests.
During that process, from the 1870s until the 1960s various groups in Canada nominated candidates under the label Labour Party or Independent Labour Party, Dominion Labor Party, or other variations. These were usually local or provincial groups backed by a local labour council made up of many union locals in a particular city, or provincial union federations, or individual trade unions. There was an attempt to create a national Canadian Labour Party in the late 1910s and in the 1920s, but these were only partly successful.
The Communist Party of Canada (CPC), formed in 1921, fulfilled some of labour's political yearnings from coast to coast, and then the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) – Worker Farmer Socialist was formed in 1932. With organic ties to the organized labour movement, this was a labour party by definition. Prior to the CCFs formation in 1932, the Socialist Party of Canada was strong in British Columbia and in Alberta before World War I, while the Dominion Labour Party and the Canadian Labour Party were strong in Alberta through the 1920s and 1930s, and the Independent Labour Party led by J. S. Woodsworth was strong in Manitoba in the 1920s and 1930s.
An Edmonton-based Independent Labour Party ran candidates in the 1921 Alberta general election. It was independent in the sense that it was separate from the Edmonton Labour Council, which was dominated by international craft unions. Later, many of its proponents joined the Communist Party.
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