William Krehm

[3] While Ida remained in Chicago, ultimately marrying musician and industrialist Joseph Pick, and becoming a pianist and conductor of international renown,[3][7] William Krehm moved to New York City where he worked selling hats.

[12][3] He visited Barcelona for five days in September before returning to Belgium, and went back to Spain the following month, after the conference,[11][12] becoming one of 1,600 Canadians who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

Krehm left in late 1936 to attend a conference of left-wing groups in Paris and then went to London where he met Charles Donnelly, spending Christmas with him.

[12] However, he decided to return to Spain on his own and joined the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) as a propagandist, translator and journalist, and as such would occasionally visit the front lines,[3] and was one of the last survivors of that conflict.

[12] In June 1937,[3] after the POUM was outlawed by the Spanish Republic at the instigation of the Communist Party, the house in which Krehm was staying was raided by Spanish secret police and he and his comrades were detained with Krehm under suspicion of being a spy[3][12] He spent three months in jail[6] and was released after a hunger strike,[5] driven by police to the French border, and expelled from Spain in August 1937,[3] arriving in Halifax at the end of November.

[5][12] Krehm resumed his leadership of the Canadian section of the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party which was, for a time, larger and more active than the official Trotskyist group it had split from.

[13] The CNP and Arcand's group held a final joint rally on July 4, 1938 at Massey Hall in Toronto in order to launch a new organization, the National Unity Party of Canada.

[16] Finding that the Trotskyist movement had dwindling support, and increasingly disillusioned by revolutionary politics following his experiences in Spain, Krehm moved to Mexico, arriving with only $270 in his pocket,[5] in the hopes of working as a foreign correspondent.

[3] When World War II broke out he wanted to return to Canada to enlist in the military but couldn't when he found he was not allowed to cross the border into the United States.

[6][5][3] With the emergence of the Cold War, Krehm was fired by Time in 1947 after writing several articles[5] and a book critical of American intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean.

[3] Unemployed, Krehm returned to Canada in 1948 with his wife and worked as a music critic for The Globe and Mail and CBC Radio,[3] appearing on CJBC Views The Shows in the mid-1950s.

[3] Finding it difficult to sustain enough employment to support his family, which had grown with the birth of a second son, Jonathan,[3] Krehm decided to start his own business as a home builder and property developer in the mid-1950s.

[5] In 2011, Krehm was the co-plaintiff in a suit by COMER against the Bank of Canada in an attempt to compel it to provide debt-free support for public projects undertaken by federal, provincial and city governments.

The lawsuit also alleged that the federal government had ceded its sovereign ability to conduct independent monetary policy to "secret" deliberations and private foreign bankers.