[1] Evidently, she came from a family of leftists: she attended socialist Sunday school as a child, joined the Independent Labour Party with her brother when both were children, and studied Marx in her early years.
[10] From 1917 to 1919, Buhay joined the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in New York City as an organizer and was secretary of the Socialist Party of America.
[2][11] In any event, however, Buhay soon left New York—the late 1910s were the height of the First Red Scare and, as an associate of various radical organizations, she risked arrest.
[12] While the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) became a marginal force in Canadian politics by mid-century, in the 1920s and 1930s it exerted a significant influence in domains such as "workers' rights, freedom of speech, and social welfare programs".
[7] Toews notes that Buhay and Buller played quite varied roles in the CPC: "[t]hey travelled anywhere that the Party needed them, working as educators, union organizers, fund-raisers, administrators, leadership committee members, lecturers, and writers".
[14] She had a "leadership position[]" in the Communist Party of Canada in the 1920s–30s,[9] and was one of only three women (the others being Florence Custance and Annie Buller) to serve on the Central Committee of the CPC during that period.
)[21] The demonstration was one episode in a larger free speech movement by Communists in the late 1920s, particularly in Toronto, in the wake of Section 98's ban of sedition.