Thomas Phillips Thompson (25 November 1843 – 20 May 1933) was an English-born journalist and humorist who was active in the early socialist movement in Canada.

[2] In 1867 he became a police reporter for the Toronto Daily Telegraph, owned by the conservative John Ross Robertson.

[4] Around 1870 he began working for the Toronto Mail, where he wrote a weekly political column under the pseudonym "Jimuel Briggs".

[6] As time went by Thompson became more pessimistic and demanding, calling for a complete overhaul of the social system, which he expected to come about through violent revolution.

[7] Thompson returned to Toronto in 1879 and found work with the Mail, a Liberal-Conservative newspaper, then moved to George Brown's Globe, the organ of the Liberal party.

[4] In 1881 The Globe sent him to Ireland as a special correspondent to cover the land campaign of Charles Stewart Parnell.

[2] In Ireland, seeing the desperate poverty of the tenant farmers and listening to Parnell making the case for "home rule", he became radicalized.

This is evident in his last dispatch to the Globe from Ireland, in which he wrote, "And so, in spite of blunders, and crimes, and defeats - in spite of the greed and self-seeking and the ambitions of the demagogues - through bloodshed, and tears, and suffering, the cause of the people will prevail by slow degrees, and the accumulated and buttressed wrongs of centuries be overthrown."

In the 1890s he spent a year in France, England and Scotland with his family, sending reports to the Globe and the Mail that called for radical reform to a system in which the idle rich lived off the toil of the workers.

[11] Thompson's radical views and his drift toward outright socialism made it hard for him to get regular work with the mainstream newspapers in Canada.

[12] In the later 1890s and in the early 1900s Thompson was employed by different provincial government departments as a writer, and also wrote for the legislature.

[15] The Ontario wing of the CSL was organized by George Weston Wrigley and Thompson, both former Knights of Labor, in an effort to pull together the reform forces that had become fragmented after the Patrons of Industry were defeated in the 1896 federal election.