Annie Buller

Annie Buller addressing a crowd before the Estevan Riot

Annie Buller (9 December 1895 - 19 January 1973) was a union organizer and manager of multiple Communist Party of Canada (CPC) publications.

Buller was born in the Ukraine and emigrated to Montreal with her parents in the early 1900s. She became politically active in socialist politics during World War I and studied Marxist thought at the Rand School of Social Science in New York. On her return to Montreal, Buller, Becky Buhay (1896 -1953), Bella Gauld (1878 – 1961) and others founded the Montreal Labour College.

Throughout the 1920s Buller worked as a union organizer and traveled extensively throughout Canada organizing the needle trades and supporting miners and steel workers. In 1931 she led a general strike for better wages and working conditions for dressmakers in Toronto.

Following the 1931 Estevan Coal Miners Strike, Buller was convicted of inciting a riot. After an unsuccessful appeal in 1933, she spent a year in the North Battleford Prison. During the crackdown of Communist Party members that took place in the early part of World War II, Buller was arrested and jailed in Portage La Prairie from 1940 to 1942. Her husband Harry Guralnick (d. 1972) was also interned at that time.

Buller ran for public office several times. In 1932 she ran for a Toronto City Council position as a Workers United Front candidate. She ran as a Labour Progressive candidate in St. Paul's in 1952 and in Spadina Ward in 1957.

After World War II Annie Buller continued to be involved in CPC activities such as the campaigns to roll back prices organized by National Women's Commission and the Housewives' Association.

She traveled to the USSR with Guralnick in 1955 and remained active in the CPC until her retirement from her publication responsibilities in the late 1950s.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • Louise Watson, She Never was Afraid: The Biography of Annie Buller (1976) ISBN 0919396-31-3.
  • Sangster, Joan. Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920-1950.
  • Annie Buller at CanadianEncyclopedia.ca.
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