[1] Wallace enjoyed a limited reputation in Canadian literature, but he had a direct influence on better known poets with strong political views, such as Dorothy Livesay and Milton Acorn.
After remarrying, his father moved the family to Nova Scotia, where they lived in Truro, North Sydney, and Halifax.
[2] Wallace was active in Halifax in the Young Men's Liberal Club, but by 1920 he had resigned to join the local Independent Labour Party.
In the provincial election that year, he received 3,409 votes and finished in tenth place as one of the four Labour candidates in the four-member Halifax constituency.
[3] Following 1940, when Mackenzie King invoked the War Measures Act, making Communist activities effectively illegal, more than 100 leftists were arrested and placed in internment camps.
He must live and work with the masses if he is to be a poet at allAfter his time in prison, Wallace released his first volume of poetry, Night Is Ended (1942), which included personal and political poems, some of them written during his internment in Hull.
Wallace then trained to support the war effort by working as a lathe operator at Ferranti Electric in Toronto, where he helped organize a union.
During this time he also published a small collection, All My Brothers (1953), which the critic Northrop Frye said was "sometimes laboured" and "sometimes also clear and precise" and "demonstrated the sheer intensity of the Marxist view of the capitalist world."
[2] In early 1957, Wallace traveled to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and spent ten months there.
[1] In 1981, Progress Books prepared a selected edition of his works, titled Joe Wallace Poems.
"[5] One early poem, "The Voice of the Worker", is set to music and performed by folklorist Richard MacKinnon on the CD "Songs of Steel, Coal and Protest.