Mary Kardash

Mary Kardash was a long-time Communist politician in the north end of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She was a member of Winnipeg school board in the 1970s and 1980s, having been elected as a Communist Party of Canada candidate. She had also been active in the Communist Party's predecessor, the Labour-Progressive Party. Her husband, William Kardash was also a Communist leader and represented the party in the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba from 1941 to 1958.

In the 1980s, Mary Kardash, who was herself of Ukrainian background and active in the Ukrainian community, courted controversy by questioning the generally accepted account of Ukrainian famine and opposing a proposal that the history of the famine be included in the educational curriculum. The Communist Party acknowledged that many Ukrainians died by famine in the early 1930s, but denied that Joseph Stalin's government was responsible for an act of genocide.

Kardash ran in north Winnipeg as a Communist candidate for the Manitoba legislature in the 1973 provincial election, and for the Canadian House of Commons in the 1974 federal election, but won only a few hundred votes in both attempts.

Her departure from the Winnipeg school board in the late 1980s ended several decades of Communist representation in the city.

Kardash died in the mid-1990s. The St. Cross Child Care Centre of Winnipeg was renamed the Mary Kardash Child Care Centre in her honour in 1995.

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Name	Kardash, Mary
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