The Western Clarion was a newspaper launched in January 1903 that became the official organ of the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC).

In 1902 Richard Parmater Pettipiece, who had been publishing the Lardeau Eagle, a miners' journal that supported the Socialist League, bought an interest in George Weston Wrigley's Citizen and Country.

McKenzie said, only partly in jest, "since Marx died nobody was capable of throwing light on [economic] matters except the editor of the Clarion, whoever we may happen to be.

"[9] By 1910 the SPC was losing control of locals on the prairies, where eastern European immigrants resented the dominance of English speakers.

The Social Democratic Party (SDP) began to be organized to represent these groups and the moderate British socialists.

[12] In March 1913 J. H. Burrough, editor of the Clarion, wrote that the SPC as a whole was suffering from "the general malady of ‘laisser faire'".

[13] Bertha Merrill Burns, a supporter of feminism, prohibition and socialism, was the first woman to serve on the executive of the SPBC.

[16] McKenzie said the "average woman may desire a hat or a husband of some other trifle, but it cannot truthfully be said she is pining away for lack of a vote.

"[16] The Western Clarion said, "Capitalism has torn women from the home, thrust her into the economic field in competition with the opposite sex, grinds her life into profits and ultimately forces her to sell her body in order to live.

Capitalism today is fast destroying the home, the palace, that we are told woman should exclusively occupy as her position in society."

[23] In March 1916 Jack Kavanagh wrote, One of the most cherished delusions held by the workers resident in the British Empire, and one that is being rudely shattered, is that of the "right of free speech."

As a matter of fact, this "right" disappears with alarming rapidity whenever free speech is contrary to the interests of the master class, whose interests are, at the present time, sheltered from the bitter winds of adverse criticism by the mantle of patriotism, which has always been in favor as a refuge by every pirate who desired his operations to remain unquestioned…the fact that a few millions of slaves are killed, disabled, or driven insane is but a side issue.

[33] In the early 1920s the Western Clarion often discussed the weakness and lack of organization of the working classes of Canada and America.

In 1924 John Amos (Jack) McDonald wrote from San Francisco expressed dismay that the Western Clarion no longer spoke for a revolutionary party, and just published a collection of views.

[32] Pritchard blamed the death of the paper on the reactionary and conservative mood of the day as exemplified by Benito Mussolini, the Palmer Raids, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion.