In March 1918, Alfred Puttee and members of the Winnipeg TLC created the first branch of the Dominion Labour Party in Canada. The Dominion Labour Party was an ideological successor to various other reformist labour groups in Winnipeg, but was more explicitly socialist and actively cooperated with members of the Social Democratic Party of Canada. The Winnipeg local included such figures as Harry Veitch , Fred Tipping and MLA Fred Dixon. In the years after its formation, the DLP would set up other branches in cities throughout the Canadian prairies. It never had a strong central organization, and was more of a network than a organized movement.

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 radicalized labour politics in Manitoba, and the DLP soon emerged as a much stronger force than the province's earlier labour parties had been. In the provincial election of 1920, the party formed an electoral alliance with the Socialist Party of Canada, the Social Democrats and a party representing returning ex-soldiers. Dixon easily topped the polled in Winnipeg, and eight other Labour MLAs were elected throughout the province (along with one Socialist and one Social Democrat).

Among the new Labour MLAs were William Ivens, then serving a prison sentence, and Albert E. Smith , who would later join the Communist Party of Canada. Strictly speaking, not all of these figures were elected as Dominion Labour Party candidates (Smith ran for the "Brandon Labour Party ", for instance), though the DLP provided the basic framework around which the campaign was based. Dixon was the unquestioned leader of the group in the legislature.

Late in 1920, the DLP split between followers of the American Federation of Labour and the One Big Union. When AFL supporters nominated an opponent of the General Strike as a DLP municipal candidate in Winnipeg, many others (including Dixon, who had previously been neutral) walked out and formed the rival Independent Labour Party.

The ILP would subsequently become the dominant leftist group in the Manitoba parliament. The DLP aligned itself with the new Canadian Labour Party, and soon ceased to exist in Manitoba (though it remained active in other provinces).

See also: Canadian political parties