The Strangest Dream: Canadian Communists, the Spy Trials, and the Cold War

Raymond B. Blake is director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount
Allison University and the author of Canadians at Last: Canada
Integrates Newfoundland as a Province.

The Communist experiments throughout the world have been discredited.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire marked
the end of the Communist states in Eastern Europe. Even the People’s
Republic of China is slowly moving toward a market economy. The
Communists were never numerous in Canada and they were able to elect
only one member to the House of Commons. Yet Merrily Weisbord believes
that the Communist and other left-wing forces played an important role
in Canada and were responsible, in part, for social welfare, minimum
wages, and unemployment insurance. The Communist legacy, she maintains,
is important for contemporary survival.

The Strangest Dream examines the rise and fall of the Communist Party
in Canada from the Depression of the 1930s to Khrushchev’s revelations
about the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. In this
anecdotal history, Weisbord explores the humanistic ideals of her
Communist parents and their Communist friends, investigates their
enthusiasm for the cause, and recounts the experience of Communists in
Canada with specific reference to Montreal. Many of the subjects of her
study saw communism as a way to fight fascism and the rise of
anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany throughout the 1930s. Despite the
election of Fred Rose to Parliament, the Canadian Communist Party was
eventually destroyed by internal conflicts over Fred Rose’s 1946
conviction for spying, the bitter conflict between French- and
English-speaking sections of the party, and the atrocities and
anti-Semitism of Stalin.

This is an interesting account of some of the individuals involved with
the Communist Party of Canada, but most readers will probably not be
convinced that the Communists are an important part of the Canadian
left.