Socialist Party of Canada (new)

For the party that existed from 1904 to 1925, see Socialist Party of Canada.

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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 and, changing it's name to the SPC (BC) was a cofounder of the BC Section of the CCF running Socialist Party candidates on a CCF platform in the 1933 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 numbering more than a few dozen rejected both the Leninism of the Communist Party and the evolutionary socialism of the CCF and clung to 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 or any form of political activism as reformist. Instead they 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, 40s and 50s and again in the 1970s but no longer does so and has ceased to be a registered political party.