Victoria’s Read

Annie Buller was an important figure in the development of the militant, radical wing of the Canadian labour movement and the Communist Party of Canada.  Annie Buller was born in Montreal in 1896 to a working class family. At age 13, she went to work in a tobacco factory, 12 hours a day and six days a week. While still a teenager she joined the Socialist Youth Movement.

During World War I, Annie Buller enrolled in the Rand School of Social Science in New York where she developed an interest in and sympathy for the Russian Revolution and trade union organizing. Upon returning to Montreal, she set up the Montreal Labour College with a small circle of like-minded friends. The College started in 1920 and operated for a number of years.

Annie Buller was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Canada. In 1929 the Communist Party set up the Workers’ Unity League (WUL) as a trade union central.

In the summer of 1931 wage cuts, unsafe working conditions and squalid company housing caused the coal miners of southeastern Saskatchewan to approach the WUL affiliate, the Mine Workers Union of Canada (MWUC). The mine owners refused to negotiate, forcing a strike.

On September 27, 1931, Annie spoke to a mass meeting of union miners, family members and supporters in Bienfait. Two days later, during a peaceful motorcade through Estevan, the municipal police and RCMP provoked a confrontation with the strikers and shot three of the picketing miners dead. Annie Buller was arrested for inciting a riot, unlawful assembly and rioting.  February 1932, she was tried and convicted. She was sentenced to one year of hard labour at the Battleford Jail and a $500 fine; she served the sentence in solitary confinement.

Annie Buller worked with organizations for the unemployed during the 1930s and campaigned against fascism in the 1940s. She also devoted considerable time to left-wing and labour publications such as The Worker and The Tribune. In 1955 she visited the USSR with her husband, Harry Guralnick. In the 1960s she was active in opposition to the Vietnam war.

Annie Buller died on January 19, 1973.

esask.uregina.ca