The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist–Leninist) (abbr. CPC(M-L)) is a Canadian federal political party founded by Hardial Bains in 1970. The CPC(M-L) has been registered with Elections Canada as the Marxist–Leninist Party of Canada (MLPC) since 1974 as the party is prohibited from using the Communist Party name in Canadian elections to avoid confusion among voters. The party developed separately and independently from the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), originating among students and intellectuals in Canada during the 1960s. After a period of alignment with Maoism and China, the CPC(M-L) pursued a Hoxhaist, pro-Albanian line until the early 1990s. At present, the party directs most of its public support to Cuba and North Korea.
For most of its history, the CPC(M-L) was led by its founder Hardial Bains. After his death, his widow Sandra L. Smith became First Secretary. Elections Canada lists Anna Di Carlo as head of the electorally registered organization. None of the party's candidates has been elected. Since the 1970s, it has had a larger electoral campaign presence than the CPC. It ran its largest number of candidates in 1980 when it nominated 177 candidates, contesting 63 percent of the country's electoral districts.
It publishes an online newspaper named The Marxist–Leninist Monthly.
Origins
The CPC(M-L) developed from a progression of student-based organizations during the 1960s. It was created primarily as a result of the efforts of Indo-Canadian Marxist student activist Hardial Bains, who was the founder and national leader of the CPC(M-L) until his death in 1997. The CPC(M-L) was not created from a split from the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). The party emerged during a period of growing student and youth activism. At this time the CPC was still struggling to break out of isolation it faced during the Cold War, and from a major rupture in the international communist movement between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, the latter of which the CPC had traditionally supported.
Hardial Bains and the Sino-Soviet split
Bains came from Mahilpur in Hoshiarpur District of Punjab, India. His family were members or supporters of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and he joined its youth wing. The CPI that Bains knew as a teenager was a mass and militant party. Operating underground for part of the 1950s, the CPI won back its legality in time for the general elections of 1957, where it emerged as the largest opposition party in the country and held state government in Kerala. By this time, however, a young Bains had apparently quit the CPI in protest of its acceptance of Nikita Khrushchev's criticisms of Joseph Stalin. Bains, according to the CPC(M-L)'s official biography, immigrated to Canada from India two years later in 1959 at age nineteen. In Vancouver, he pursued post-graduate studies at the University of British Columbia from 1960 to 1965, in bacteriology.
During this time the international communist movement went through a major internal crisis and upheaval with the Sino-Soviet split. Developing from 1960 on, sharp polemics over revolutionary strategy were exchanged between the two countries. Then, in 1962 the Sino-Indian War broke out and the CPI was again repressed by the Indian government. Over differences in attitude to the war, the CPI fractured and Bains' parents joined the pro-China Communist Party of India (Marxist).
In Canada, the Sino-Soviet split was less sharply divisive than demoralizing for the communists. In the ensuing fifteen years, the CPC had lost all of its limited gains in parliament under the pressure of the Cold War, and communist MP Fred Rose was jailed for sedition. Anti-communism in the labour movement resulted in the expulsion of all communist-led unions from the house of labour, and communists in general were treated as traitors. Following the 1956 revelations by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev ("On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences") about the crimes of Joseph Stalin, the CPC suffered many resignations, and its youth organization, the National Federation of Labour Youth, fell apart briefly. By the time it was reorganized as the Socialist Youth League in the late 1950s, the CPC had lost much of its prior visibility on university campuses—including the University of British Columbia (UBC).