Rebecca Buhay (February 11, 1896December 16, 1953), known as Becky Buhay, was a Canadian labour activist and union organizer. She was a leader of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), among many other left-wing organizations. Early life (1896–1917) Buhay's family were originally from London's East End. Evidently, she came from a family of leftists: she attended socialist Sunday school as a child, joined the Independent Labour Party with her brother when both were children, and studied Marx in her early years. Buhay's family came to Canada from England in 1912 or 1913, and settled in Montreal. In Montreal, Buhay worked at Rice Studios, a photography firm which later gained local fame for the hockey photography of James Rice, its proprietor. The first leftist organization Buhay joined in Montreal was the Socialist Party of Canada, but she left when it became clear to her that the Party was more interested in ideological debates than political action. Thereafter, she joined the Social Democratic Party of Canada. Buhay was Jewish, although Toews describes her connections to the Jewish community as "quite tenuous". New York (1917–19) From 1917 to 1919, Buhay joined the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in New York City as an organizer and was secretary of the Socialist Party of America. She is sometimes held to have attended at the Rand School of Social Science, a New York socialist educational institution, but this is disputed. In any event, however, Buhay soon left New York—the late 1910s were the height of the First Red Scare and, as an associate of various radical organizations, she risked arrest. Upon her return to Montreal in 1919, in the wake of the Winnipeg general strike, Buhay served as an official of the One Big Union. She was elected an organizer at the Montreal local's first meeting, and later served as vice president. Communist Party of Canada While the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) became a marginal force in Canadian politics by mid-century, in the 1920s and 1930s it exerted a significant influence in domains such as "workers' rights, freedom of speech, and social welfare programs". Reiter has described Buhay as, along with Annie Buller, one of the "most prominent Communists in the late 1920s and 1930s". Toews notes that Buhay and Buller played quite varied roles in the CPC: "[t]hey travelled anywhere that the Party needed them, working as educators, union organizers, fund-raisers, administrators, leadership committee members, lecturers,