As of August 2024:

Zhyttia I Slovo will no longer be hosted by SFU Library.

Between 1891 and 1914, approximately 170,000 Ukrainians, many agricultural workers, arrived in Canada. While those immigrants that settled in rural areas turned to religious organizations for a sense of community, secular, socialist groups developed among those Ukrainian immigrants that settled in the large urban centres, such as Winnipeg, Edmonton and Saskatoon. In 1918, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC) was founded as the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) in Winnipeg. The ULFTA joined the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party of Canada and several left-leaning cultural and community groups on a national scale; in 1928, there were a total of 167 ULFTA branches in Canada. In addition to organizing cultural, educational and social activities, the association provided a medical insurance program to its members. Due to its association with the Communist Party of Canada, the ULFTA was outlawed by the Canadian government in 1940. In 1942, after the Soviet Union became allied with the West in the Second World War, the ULFTA was re-established as the AUUC.

In November 1965, the AUUC began publication of the weekly Ukrainian-language newspaper Zhyttia i Slovo (Life and Word) in Toronto. The newspaper was formed by the merger of the Ukraïns'ke slovo (Ukrainian Word, Winnipeg) and the AUUC’s pro-Soviet Ukraïns'ke zhyttia (Ukrainian Life, Toronto), which had been published since 1941. Zhyttia i Slovo was published until December 1991, when it merged with the Ukrainian Canadian, an English language newspaper that had also been published in Toronto by the AUUC since 1947. The result of the merger was the weekly Ukrainsko-kanads'kyi visnyk (Ukrainian Canadian Herald), published in English and Ukrainian. The entire run of Zhyttia i Slovo, 1965 to 1991, has been digitized and is made available here.

Contributed by Multicultural History Society of Ontario.