Tim Buck

Timothy (Tim) Buck (January 6, 1891-March 11, 1973) was a long-time leader of the Communist Party of Canada (known from the 1940s until the late 1950s as the Labour Progressive Party). A machinist, Buck was born in Beccles, England and emigrated to Canada in 1910 reputedly because it was cheaper to book steamship passage to Canada than to Australia. He became involved in the labour movement and radical working class politics in Toronto. In 1921, he participated in the founding convention of the Communist Party of Canada. Not initially a leading member of the party, Buck came to prominence as a supporter of Joseph Stalin, and became General Secretary in 1929 after the old party leadership had been purged for supporting Trotsky and others had been removed for supporting Bukharin. Buck remained General Secretary until 1964, and was an unquestioning supporter of the Soviet line throughout his tenure.

Tim Buck (centre) during an election campaign

With the onset of the Great Depression, the Conservative government of R.B. Bennett became increasingly worried about left wing activity and agitation. On August 11, 1931, the Communist Party offices in Toronto were raided, and Buck and several of his colleagues were arrested and charged with sedition. Buck was tried in November, convicted of sedition and sentenced to hard labour.

He was imprisoned from 1932 to 1934 in Kingston Penitentiary where he was the target of an apparent assassination attempt during a prison riot. While Buck was sitting in his cell listening to the melee outside, eight shots were fired into his cell via a window, narrowly missing the prisoner. In late 1933, Minister of Justice Hugh Guthrie admitted in the Canadian House of Commons that shots had been deliberately fired into Buck's cell, but "just to frighten him." A widespread civil rights campaign ultimately secured Buck's release. His extensive testimony before the Archambault Commission contributed to the reform of prisons in Canada. As a result, Buck was hailed a heroic champion of civil liberties

Buck ran for a seat in the House of Commons on six occasions. He won 25% of the vote, placing third, when he ran in Winnipeg North in the 1935 federal election. He lost to Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) candidate A.A. Heaps. He won 26% of the vote when he ran in the Toronto riding of Trinity in the 1945 election, and 21% in the 1949 election, finishing ahead of the CCF on both occasions. In the 1953 election, he won only 8.7% of the vote and then just 3.7% of the vote when he stood one last time in the 1958 election.

Buck retired as general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada in 1962, but remained in the largely ceremonial position of party chairman until his death in 1973. There was controversy within the party when a posthumous version of his memoirs was published in 1977 by NC Press based on interviews conducted for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1965. In Yours in the Struggle: Reminiscences of Tim Buck, the former party leader criticized Nikita Khrushchev and was somewhat defensive of Stalin.

External links

*Tim Buck, Too by Morris Wolfe on Tim Buck's 1931 trial.
*Tim Buck Internet Archive
*Yours in the Struggle: Reminiscences of Tim Buck book review by Ian Angus.
*"Audacity, audacity, still more audacity": Tim Buck, the Party, and the People, 1932-1939 by John Manley