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From 1928 to the mid-1930s supporters of Leon Trotsky such as Maurice Spector and Jack MacDonald were expelled from the Communist Party and formed Trotskyist groups, first the Communist League of America then under various other names.
The Communist Party opposed Canada's entry into World War 2 until the collapse of the Hitler Stalin pact.
They elected their first MP, Dorise Nielson in 1940 under the popular front Progressive Unity label. The party was banned in 1941 and henceforth ran candidates as the Labour Progressive Party until 1959 electing several representatives provincially and municipally and Fred Rose federally.
Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech exposing the crimes of Josef Stalin as well as that year's Soviet invasion of Hungary, shook the faith of many Communists around the world and resulted in many, perhaps most, members of the Canadian party leaving including a number of prominent party members. Many ex-Communists joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and its successor the NDP and even the Liberals. The USSR's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia caused more people to leave the Canadian Communist Party.
In common with most communist parties it went through a crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequently split. The pro-reform majority left electoral politics and became a non-profit educational foundation allowing the old-line minority to take the Communist Party name.
The party was deregistered and its assets seized by Elections Canada when it failed to run more than thirty candidate in the 1993 general election but the party launched a legal challenge and was successfully able to reverse this move and have the threshold for party status lowered.
The CPC publishes a fortnightly newspaper called The People's Voice.
The Communist Party is one of two Communist parties in Canada, the other is the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist, founded in 1961 as the Internationalists, an anti-revisionist Maoist party rejecting the reforms of Nikita Khrushchev and today functions as a Stalinist party.
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