The Canadian Union of Fascists was a fascist political party based in the city of Toronto in the 1930s with its western Canadian office in Regina, Saskatchewan.
The party was founded in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the summer of 1934 as the British Empire Union of Fascists by Canadian supporters of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists after BUF member Hubert Cox visited the city in June 1934, claiming to be Mosley's representative. The first leader was Howard Simpkin, a former lieutenant to Canadian Nationalist Party leader William Whittaker who led a group of people breaking away from the CNP, objecting to the party's racialism, declaring that "anti-semitism was a symptom of Germany not of Fascism", and advocated a more economic-oriented program instead built around the fascist economic policies of Mussolini's Italy such as corporatism. The new party attracted around 200 people to its inaugural meeting on June 28, 1934, to hear Cox and Simpkin address the crowd. It soon changed its name to the Canadian Union of Fascists (or Canadian Union) and within a year had branches in Transcona, Manitoba, Toronto and Woodstock, Ontario, Regina, Saskatchewan, and Vancouver. It was also known as the Canadian Fascist Party.
In Toronto a young high school student Charles "Chuck" Crate joined the party after contacting the British Union of Fascists and being put in touch with CUF. He became the Toronto branch director and soon began recruiting members at York Memorial Collegiate Institute and elsewhere in Toronto. Crate edited the party's newspaper, The Thunderbolt, in Toronto and soon displaced Simpkin as party leader.
The party had a hard time attracting supporters because most Canadians who supported fascism leaned towards the racist brand espoused by Adrien Arcand and others. He admitted the CUF was affiliated with Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Crate also claimed that under the "corporate state", "married women will be compelled to retire from industry. Competition between men and women in industry will be done away with." The party, while claiming not to oppose people on "racial" or "religious grounds", advocated a "more selective immigration policy".
In 1937, Crate's CUF formed an alliance with John Ross Taylor's National Christian Party. The NCP had been founded by Taylor in alliance with Adrien Arcand's Parti national social chrétien. However, Taylor broke with Arcand over religious differences and Taylor's National Christian Party formed an alliance with the CUF with Crate being cross-appointed as the NCF's secretary. By 1938, Taylor had dissolved the NCF into the CUF, becoming the CUF's secretary and organizer. While the National Unity Party was a merger of Arcand's Parti national social chrétien and the Canadian National Party, the Canadian Union of Fascists did not join the new party.
The CUF was banned on June 4, 1940, under the Defence of Canada Regulations and formally dissolved itself, telling its members to obey the law but to work for a negotiated peace. Crate escaped a treason charge but remained active in Winnipeg, publishing Thunderbolt from there until his arrest in 1942 for publishing subversive literature. He ended up in the Royal Canadian Navy at the end of the war.