- Miguel Figueroa
Miguel Figueroa (born 1953) has been the leader of the Communist Party of Canada since 1992.
- Tim Buck
Timothy (Tim) Buck was a long-time leader of the Communist Party of Canada (known from the 1940s until the late 1950s as the Labour Progressive Party). Together with Ernst Thälmann of Germany, Maurice Thorez of France, Palmiro Togliatti of Italy, Earl Browder of the United States, and Harry Pollitt of Britain, Buck was one of the top leaders of the Stalin-era international Communist organization.
- Hardial Bains
Hardial Bains (August 15, 1939 - August 24, 1997) was the founder and leader of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) until his death. Born in India into a communist family in the Punjab, Bains became a member of the youth wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI). He was dismayed by the revisionism of Nikita Khrushchev following the death of Stalin, and he broke with the CPI when it supported Khrushchev's criticisms of Stalin.
- Sandra L. Smith
Sandra L. Smith is the leader of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) (aka the "Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada") and the widow of the party's founder and long-time leader, Hardial Bains. Smith was elected leader at the 7th Congress of CPC(M-L) in 1998. Unusual among political party leaders, Smith does not run as a candidate in elections contested by the party.
- Norman Bethune
Dr. Henry Norman Bethune, MD (March 3, 1890 - November 12, 1939) was a Canadian physician, medical innovator, a member of the Communist Party of Canada, and humanitarian. In Chinese, he is known as "Bai Qiu-en" ([[:zh:白求恩
- Elizabeth Rowley
Elizabeth (Liz) Rowley is a politician and political activist in Ontario, Canada. She is the current leader of the Communist Party of Ontario and a leading member of the Communist Party of Canada, and has campaigned for office many times at both the federal and provincial levels. She attended university in Alberta and was active with the Young Communist League of Canada. She subsequently moved to Ontario, and worked as a typesetter apprentice and secretary.
- Fred Rose
Fred Rose (born Fred Rosenberg) (December 7 1907 - March 16 1983) was a Communist politician and trade union organizer in Canada. He was born in Lublin in what is now Poland, and emigrated to Canada as a child in 1916. He became involved with the Young Communist League of Canada, and then joined the Communist Party of Canada while working in a factory. However, he is best known as the only Member of the Canadian Parliament ever convicted of spying for a foreign country.
- David Lethbridge
David Lethbridge is a professor, anti-racist activist and research director of the Bethune Institute for Anti-Fascist Studies and director of the Salmon Arm Coalition Against Racism. Lethbridge teaches psychology at Okanagan College in Salmon Arm, British Columbia. He lists his research interests as "the application of Marxist Theory and Existential Theory to human personality. Psychobiography and psychohistory.
- Maurice Spector
Maurice Spector (1898 - August 1, 1968) was the Chairman of the Communist Party of Canada for much of the 1920s and an early follower of Leon Trotsky after his split from the Communist International. Spector was influenced by Trotsky's work 'The Bolsheviki and World Peace' which was published in the Toronto Mail and Empire in January 1918, …
- Naomi Rankin
Naomi Rankin is the current leader of the Communist Party of Alberta in Alberta, Canada. She has been leader of the Communist Party since 1992 and has run in every provincial and federal election in Alberta since 1982, for the Communist Party (Alberta) or the Communist Party of Canada. She is one of Alberta's most well known perennial election losers, and has run in most of Edmonton's ridings.
- William Kashtan
William Kashtan (1909-1993) became general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada in January 1965, several months following the death of Leslie Morris. The delay in his assuming the position was due to the opposition of Tim Buck to his appointment. Kashtan never succeeded in winning election to the Canadian House of Commons, and retired in 1988.
- Sam Carr
Sam Carr was the national organizer for the Communist Party of Canada and, its successor, the Labour-Progressive Party in the 1930s and 1940s. After a cypher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, defected to Canada, Carr was revealed as a spy for the Soviet Union. He was charged with espionage for having obtained secrets about the atomic bomb and handing them over to Moscow. He was imprisoned for seven years along with Fred Rose who was, …
- Jacob Penner
Jacob Penner (August 12, 1880 - August 28, 1965) was a popular socialist politician in Canada. Penner was born and raised in a Mennonite family in Russia and emigrated to Winnipeg in 1902. A Marxist, he helped found the Social Democratic Party of Canada and was an opponent of conscription during the Conscription crisis of 1917 and was an organiser of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919.
- Stewart Smith
Stewart Smith was a long-time leading member of the Communist Party of Canada. He also served on Toronto City Council for a period in the 1940s. Smith was the son of Reverend A. E. Smith, a social gospel minister who became a leading figure in the Communist Party. Stewart Smith was one of the leaders of the Stalinist faction, led by Tim Buck, that took over the party in 1929.
- Leslie Morris
Leslie Tim Morris (1904 - 1964) was a Welsh-Canadian politician, journalist and long time member of the Communist Party of Canada and, its front group, the Labour Progressive Party. Morris was born in the United Kingdom to a Welsh working class family. He and his family immigrated to Canada in 1910. Morris returned to the UK in 1917 and lived in Wales and England while working in the steel, coal mining and railway industries.
- Jack MacDonald
Jack MacDonald (nicknamed "Moscow Jack" Macdonald" in the 1920s) born in Falkirk, Scotland, was a founding member of the Communist Party of Canada and one of its leaders. He was party Chairman from 1921 to 1923, and National Secretary from 1923 to 1929. MacDonald supported the expulsion of Maurice Spector for Trotskyism in 1928.
- Rolf Gerstenberger
Rolf Gerstenberger is president of the United Steelworkers Local 1005 at Stelco's Hilton Works in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is also a prominent member of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). He was also a candidate for the Canadian House of Commons in the 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections, running in Hamilton East and Hamilton Mountain, respectively. Gerstenberger first came to Canada from the United States in the late 1960s.
- David Lewis
David Lewis (born Losz), CC, MA (June 23, or October 1909 -May 23, 1981) was a Russian-born Canadian labour lawyer and social democratic politician. He was national secretary of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) from 1936 to 1950, and was one of the key architects of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961. He was the NDP's national leader from 1971 to 1975. His politics were heavily influenced by the Jewish Labour Bund and because of that, …
- J. B. Salsberg
Joseph Baruch (J. B.) Salsberg (1903-1998) was a Canadian politician, long time Communist and activist in the Jewish community.
- Jack Kavanagh
Jack Kavanagh was a leader of the Socialist Party of Canada from 1908 to 1921 and was a founding member of the Communist Party of Canada. He moved to Australia in 1925, and was a central leader of the Communist Party of Australia until 1930, when the Stalinist Comintern removed him from the leadership. He was expelled from the party in January 1931, readmitted, and then expelled a second time in 1934 after being accused of Trotskyism.
- Annie Buller
Annie Buller was a union organizer and manager of multiple Communist Party of Canada (CPC) publications. Buller was born in the Ukraine and emigrated to Montreal with her parents in the early 1900s. She became politically active in socialist politics during World War I and studied Marxist thought at the Rand School of Social Sciences in New York. On her return to Montreal, Buller, Becky Buhay (1896 -1953), …
- Hassan Husseini
Hassan Husseini is a politician and political activist in Ontario, Canada. He is a prominent member of the Communist Party of Canada - Ontario, and led the party in the 1999 provincial election. Originally from Lebanon, Husseini moved to Canada at a young age. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Political Science from the University of Ottawa in the early 1990s, and became an organizer for the Communist Party in the same period.
- William Moriarty
William (Bill) Moriarty (born in London, United Kingdom 1890 - April 14 1936) was a Canadian Communist and Right Oppositionist. Moriarty was born in England and became a trade unionist working as a tin minder in Cornwall, a railway worker and then a miner in Wales. He moved to Canada in 1912 and worked first as a harvest worker.
- A. A. MacLeod
Albert Alexander MacLeod, widely known as A.A. MacLeod and familiarly as "Alex", was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Canada and its front group the Labour Progressive Party. In the mid-1930s, he was leader of the "Canadian League Against War and Fascism", a popular front group founded by the party. The league recruited members for the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, …
- Dorise Nielsen
Dorise Winifred Webber Nielsen (July 30 1902 - December 9 1980) was a Canadian politician and teacher. She was the first member of the Communist Party of Canada to be elected to the Canadian House of Commons and the third woman. She won a seat in the 1940 federal election representing North Battleford, Saskatchewan, on the "United Progressive" label, beating the Liberal candidate in a two-way race.
- James Simpson
James "Jimmy" Simpson (1873-1938) was a Canadian trade unionist, printer, journalist and left wing politician in Toronto, Ontario. He was a long time member of Toronto's city council and served as Mayor of Toronto in 1935, the first member of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation to serve in that capacity. In 1892, Simpson was one of 27 members of the Typographical Union on strike against the "Toronto News".
- Robert S. Kenny
Robert ("Bert") S. Kenny (1905-1993) was a member of the Communist Party of Canada, and an avid collector of books, documents, and other materials pertaining to the radical and labour movements, particularly in Canada. Kenny was born of Irish descent in Lindsay, Ontario. He graduated in Toronto from Riverdale Collegiate Institute. Kenny began to collect materials on radicalism in the thirties.
- Roland Penner
Roland Penner (born July 30, 1924) is Dean of Law at the University of Manitoba and a former politician and Manitoba Cabinet minister. Penner was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the son of Winnipeg alderman Jacob Penner (d. 1965). He served in Europe during World War II in the Canadian artillery, and was educated at the University of Manitoba (receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949 and an LL.B. in 1961) and in London, England.
- André Parizeau
André Parizeau is a politician in the Canadian province of Québec. Until 2005, he was the leader of the Communist Party of Québec. Following a split in the PCQ, he now leads one of two groups claiming to represent the party. The Communist Party of Canada does not recognize the legality of Parizeau's group, and has expelled him from the party. The split followed a lengthy dispute between Parizeau and the Central Executive Committee of the CPC.
- George Hewison
George Hewison (born 1944) is a former long-time member of the Communist Party of Canada, trade unionist and folk singer. A second-generation member of the party, Hewison grew up selling the party press and joined the party at the age of 17. His father "Red Jack" Hewison, …
- Lorne Gershuny
Lorne Gershuny is a Canadian lawyer and political activist. An active member of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) (CPC-ML), Gershuny was the party's candidate in Parkdale--High Park in the 2000 federal election receiving 122 votes. He was also the CPC-ML standard-bearer in the same riding in the 2004 federal election, garnering 130 votes, & in the 2006 federal election, garnering 133 votes.
- Dan Goldstick
Dan (Danny) Goldstick is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada, and member of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Canada for whom he has been a frequent candidate at the federal and provincial level. Goldstick is also active in the Council of Canadians, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the National Anti-Poverty Organization. His work in philosophy centres on topics in metaphysics and epistemology.
- Harry Rankin
Harry Rankin (May 8, 1920 - February 26, 2002) was a Vancouver lawyer and socialist alderman on city council. Rankin was born in Vancouver to a secular Jewish family which had immigrated from the Ukraine. His father was a factory worker and his mother was a working class woman who had grown up in Glasgow's Jewish community. Rankin dropped out of school at the age of 14 to work in a bakery.
- Robert Laxer
Robert M. Laxer (1915-1998) was a Canadian psychologist, professor, author, and political activist. Laxer was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1915 and graduated from McGill University with a B.A. in 1936 and an M.A. in 1939. Laxer joined the Communist Party of Canada during the Great Depression. He worked as a freelance journalist until 1941 when he joined the Canadian Army and served during World War II. Upon returning to Canada in 1947, …
- Joseph Zuken
Joseph (Joe) Zuken (1912 - 1986) was a popular Communist politician in Winnipeg and the longest serving elected Communist party politician in North America. Joe Zuken's family immigrated to Canada from the Ukraine when he was still an infant. Raised in a secular Jewish environment in Winnipeg's working class North End he was educated at a secular Yiddish school in a socialist environment.
- Sidney Green
Sidney Green (August 1, 1929-) is a politician in Manitoba, Canada. He twice ran for the leadership of the New Democratic Party of Manitoba, served in the cabinet of Premier Edward Schreyer, and later formed the Progressive Party of Manitoba. Green was born into a Jewish family in the mostly working-class north end of Winnipeg, Manitoba. He graduated from the University of Manitoba's Law School, and subsequently worked as a labour lawyer.
- A. A. Heaps
Abraham Albert Heaps (December 24 1885 - April 4 1954) was a Canadian politician and labour leader. Born in England, Heaps immigrated to Canada and worked in Winnipeg as an upholsterer. He was one of the leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 and was elected to Winnipeg's city council as a Labour alderman. He ran for the Canadian House of Commons as a Labour candidate in 1923 in the riding of Winnipeg North but was defeated.
- Paul Sidon
Paul Sidon was a Communist politician in Manitoba, Canada. In January 2004, he challenged Darrell Rankin for the leadership of the Communist Party of Canada - Manitoba. Sidon works as an overhead door mechanic in the Transcona region of Winnipeg, and is also a foreign-languages student. He has been involved in politics since 1996. In 1999, he became a member of Manitoba's Cuba Solidarity Committee but no longer a member.
- W. A. Kardash
William A. (Bill) Kardash (b. June 10, 1912 in Hafford, Saskatchewan, d. January 17, 1997) was a politician and member of the Manitoba legislature. Kardash was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, having fought with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. He was a member of the Communist Party of Canada and, after 1943 the Labour Progressive Party which was the legal front of the Communist Party after it was banned. Kardash became the first leader of the Manitoba LPP in 1943, …
- William Cecil Ross
William Cecil Ross (May 11, 1911-June 4, 1998) was a politician in Manitoba, Canada, and the leader of that province's Communist Party from 1948 until his retirement in 1981. Ross was raised in a secular Jewish family that moved from the Ukraine to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1917. He was originally named Cecil Zuken, but legally changed his name in 1936 (in part to protect his family from anti-Communist harassment). His brother Joseph Zuken also became a Communist politician, …