Between May 23 and 25, 1921, local communists and socialists held clandestine meetings in a barn behind a farmhouse (owned by Elizabeth Farley) at 257 Metcalf Street, then in the outskirts of Guelph, Ontario.

His report states that delegates attended from "Winnipeg, Vancouver, Hamilton, Toronto, Montreal, Sudbury and Regina" and that Soviet Russia had offered to provide funding for the group.

In addition to Guelph resident Fred Farley, a member of the United Communist Party of America, the attendees named in the RCMP report included Thomas J.

The first members felt inspired by the Russian Revolution, and radicalized by the negative aftermath of World War I and the fight to improve living standards and labour rights, including the experience of the Winnipeg General Strike.

The party's first actions included establishing a youth organization, the Young Communist League of Canada (YCL), and solidarity efforts with the Soviet Union.

[8] The Secretary of the Women's Bureau and later, general editor of the Woman Worker (1926–1929) Florence Custance was only saved from expulsion from the Party due to her untimely death in 1929.

[9] Her feminism and advocacy of birth control, for example, were well known to the mainstream press,[10] but her radical contemporaries questioned her political sympathies and gave her few chances to shine.

Further, eight party members were arrested, including Buck and Tom McEwen, under Section 98 of Canada's Criminal Code, which outlawed advocacy of force or violence to bring about political change.

The party and the Workers' Unity League (WUL) launched a campaign calling for their release and presented a petition with 450,000 signatures to Prime Minister R. B. Bennett in November 1933.

Among the poor and unemployed, communists organized groups like the left-wing Workers Sports Association, one of the few ways that working-class youth had access to recreational programmes.

Solidarity efforts for the Spanish Civil War and many labour and social struggles during the Depression resulted in much cooperation between members of the CPC and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).

With Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the party argued that the nature of the war had changed to a genuine anti-fascist struggle.

Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech criticizing the rule of Joseph Stalin and the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary shook the faith of many communists around the world.

The protracted ideological and political crisis created much confusion and disorientation within the ranks of the Party, and paralysed both its independent and united front work for over two years.

An orthodox minority in the central committee, led by Miguel Figueroa, Elizabeth Rowley and former leader William Kashtan, resisted this effort.

The Hewison group moved on August 27, 1991, to expel eleven of the key leaders of the opposition, including Rowley, Emil Bjarnason, and former central organizer John Bizzell.

The vast majority of local clubs and committees of the CPC opposed the expulsions, and called instead for an extraordinary convention of the party to resolve the deepening crisis in a democratic manner.

Since most of the old party's assets were now the property of the Hewison-led Cecil Ross Society, the CPC convention decided to launch a new newspaper, the People's Voice, to replace the old Canadian Tribune.

The Cecil-Ross Society ended publication of the Canadian Tribune and attempted to launch a new broad-left magazine, New Times which failed after a few issues and then Ginger which was only published twice.

According to a Toronto Star article the assembly drew 65 delegates most of whom were from Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec with a few from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Nova Scotia.

The Quebec district fought hard battles against the Duplessis regime, which made the party illegal using the Padlock Law, and to organize the unorganized.

The election of Fred Rose in Cartier was a major boost to the Quebec communists and reflected the support of the CPC among working-class people in the city.

The PCQ emerged as a "distinct entity" of the CPC, with shared membership and, at the same time, full control over its policies and administration including its own constitution.

The PCQ helped re-launch Montreal's mass May Day demonstrations and advanced many unique policies including the idea of a federated party of labour, which proved its prescience with the formation of Québec solidaire.

By the 1980s, the CPC and PCQ were calling for "a new, democratic constitutional arrangement based on the equal and voluntary union of Aboriginal peoples, Québec, and English-speaking Canada" replacing the Senate with a house of nations.

A few years later the party helped bring together different tendencies in the left to form the Union of Progressive Forces (UFP) which became Québec solidaire.

Although his Quebec nationalist point of view held a slim majority at the PCQ's convention of April 2005, the delegate selection process was highly disputed.

The PCQ-PCC then held a new convention which resulted in the revival of the French-language communist periodical Clarté, the opening of a new office and reading room, the launch of a new website, and the party's reaffiliation with Quebec Solidaire.

The Russian Farmer-Worker Clubs were formed in the early 1930s but closed by the government under the Defence of Canada Regulations at the outbreak of World War II.

The Society of Capartho-Russian Canadians re-formed and, in 1950, acquired a hall at 280 Queen Street West in Toronto which it continues to operate into the twenty-first century.