I met the husband of Alberta’s minister of the status of women back when the NDP were in power.

He and his wife were anarcho communists. When they campaigned for Notley, they tried to simultaneously distribute communist literature (they had a free bookshelf, and had books on communism within it). Apparently Notley personally told them they had to remove it.

So there definitively was at least one communist in their ranks, and the leadership knew it.