This book is a partial history of the pro-communist Ukrainian left in Canada, the so-called Labour Temple movement. It focuses on women and youth, and it uses some of the ideological framework of contemporary feminism.

The book argues that, while the movement was “progressive” and “leftist,” it nonetheless was subject to many of the same ideas and practices that long oppressed women and children throughout Canadian society. In other words, the politics were “progressive” and male-oriented, while the perogies were made solely by the women. In general, the author argues that the movement, which was founded in the wake of the revolutions of 1917 to 1921 in eastern Europe, especially Russia, was strong and growing through the 1920s and 1930s, it suffered a brief setback from 1939 to 1941 (when the USSR and Nazi Germany were collaborating with each other to start the Second World War), but quickly rebounded thereafter (when the USSR and the western Powers suddenly became unexpected allies), only to suffer a precipitous decline during the Cold War, especially after Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and the 1968 Prague spring and subsequent Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Thus even before the general collapse of communism in eastern Europe, the movement became a mere shadow of its former self. As to the question of women's rights, these grew while the men were either incarcerated or at war, but were substantially reversed afterwards.

All of this is not entirely new. It is generally agreed that at its height in the 1930s and 1940s, the movement, which remained ideologically pro-communist throughout, never exceeded about ten percent of the Ukrainian Canadian population, which was fairly well-concentrated on the prairies of western Canada. Nevertheless, Labour Temple members were quite committed to their organizations, which successfully united a kind of Ukrainian cultural nationalism with pro-communist politics. At times, the leadership even stressed its Ukrainian national, linguistic, and cultural commitments to the great chagrin of the predominant English Canadian leadership of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) and its ideological masters in Moscow. At the same time, those Labour Temple leaders strove to maintain good relations with the political and cultural leaders of the Ukrainian SSR and often knew more about the realities of the national policies of the Soviet Union than did most of the CPC leadership or rank and file. To the best of its very limited abilities, the Canadian organization quietly resisted the centralizing and Russifying processes recurrently emanating from Moscow, while always officially sticking to the party line on any given question. It was well-known in both Kiev and in Moscow, as well as in Canada, that Ukrainian culture was important to these “progressive” Ukrainian Canadians (as the author continuously calls them) or “pro-communist” Ukrainian Canadians (as they are better known in Canadian historiography). Alhough the author does not discuss it, major Labour Temple leaders like Peter Krawchuk and John Weir, for example, would carefully but tirelessly promote the cult of the national poet, Taras Shevchenko, while simultaneously sticking to the party line and criticizing anti-communist Ukrainians in the west, whom they without distinction labelled “nationalists.” Rhonda Hinther also does not distinguish between, for example, the hard-core “integral” nationalists of major anti-communist organizations like the Canadian League for the Liberation of Ukraine (Banderites), and the softer, more democratically-oriented elements of the anti-Communist opposition in Canada, which at times included democratic socialists of various stripes.

Although sometimes the Labour Temple movement did make itself felt in Canadian society as a whole (especially during the latter half of the Second World War, when by 1944 a democratic socialist government was even elected to power in the Province of Saskatchewan, where Canadian “ethnics” then made up about half of the population), it was the other ninety per cent of the Ukrainian Canadian population that was most influential and most successful in Canadian politics. Those groups attained great influence during the 1960s–70s, when they led the charge in Canadian society to get the federal government to adopt an official policy of “multiculturalism,” a principle that was integrated into the 1982 Canadian Constitution, and was thereafter briefly imitated in several other countries. But Rhonda Hinther's book is a warm testimonial to how the heirs of the pro-communist minority now feel about themselves and their historical place within left-wing Canadian politics.