and writers". Buhay joined the CPC—or, rather, the Workers Party of Canada, essentially a CPC faction—in 1922, soon after it was founded in 1921. She had a "leadership position[]" in the Communist Party of Canada in the 1920s–30s, and was one of only three women (the others being Florence Custance and Annie Buller) to serve on the Central Committee of the CPC during that period. In the early 1920s, Buhay—along with Buller and several others—helped to found the Montreal Labour College, an institution similar to the Rand School which provided socialist education from a campus at 70 Jeanne Mance Street in Montreal's Ville-Marie neighbourhood. Buhay was active in The Worker, the CPC's official organ. She wrote numerous articles and sold subscriptions. In 1923, while on one of two trips she took across the nation for The Worker, Buhay organized a protest by the wives of coal miners on strike in Edmonton. In 1929, Buhay was arrested for vagrancy in downtown Toronto (at Queen and Soho) during a free speech demonstration. (Her conviction was later quashed.) The demonstration was one episode in a larger free speech movement by Communists in the late 1920s, particularly in Toronto, in the wake of Section 98's ban of sedition. Continuing the fight against Section 98, Buhay organized a rally—originally to be a debate against Raymond Morand, a member of the Bennett government, but Morand did not accept his invitation—against the measure in the early 1930s. In 1930, Buhay became the head of the CPC's Women's Department, in which capacity she led a Party trip to the Soviet Union. In the early 1930s, Buhay, along with a number of other CPC activists, was surveilled by the RCMP. On July 16, 1931, Buhay married Tom Ewen, described as a fellow member of the CPC's "elite", in Buffalo. The marriage was short-lived: they divorced within five years. Organizing in the "needle trades" The Canadian garment industry saw some of the country's heaviest union activity in the 1930s. During that period, Buhay served as a leader of the Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers. In 1931, she argued in The Worker that the CPC was not devoting sufficient resources to organizing women in the garment industry. Notes Bibliography 1896 births 1953 deaths Canadian women trade unionists Members of the Communist Party of Canada Jewish Canadian activists One Big Union (Canada) members British emigrants to Canada