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The guide acknowledges wartime injustices: internment of people classified as enemy aliens during the First World War, and the forced relocation and dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Ethan Sahagun · Photo licence: CC BY 4.0 · Credit & contextCanadian voting rights expanded unevenly. Women’s federal franchise changed in 1918, racial exclusions affecting Asian Canadians were removed from the federal franchise in 1948, and First Nations people gained the federal vote without having to give up status in 1960.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Ethan Sahagun · Photo licence: CC BY 4.0 · Credit & contextThe Charter protects conscience and religion; thought, belief, opinion and expression; peaceful assembly; and association. It also protects equality and mobility rights, with different provisions applying to everyone, citizens or permanent residents.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Ethan Sahagun · Photo licence: CC BY 4.0 · Credit & contextDiscover Canada connects Canadian freedoms with Magna Carta of 1215 and the common-law tradition. The Canadian Bill of Rights dates from 1960; the Charter became part of the Constitution in 1982.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Ethan Sahagun · Photo licence: CC BY 4.0 · Credit & context
For more than 40 years Marie Lacoste-Gérin-Lajoie worked to improve the lives of women in Quebec. In 1907 she co-founded the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, an important French-Canadian feminist association, which she led from 1913 to 1933 while writing for its review La Bonne Parole. She campaigned for women’s suffrage, access to higher education and, through the 1931 Civil Code reform, the rights of married women.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Thornton and Lucie Blackburn fled slavery in Kentucky and were arrested in Detroit in 1833; riots over their capture let them escape to Upper Canada, whose government twice refused their extradition. Settling in Toronto by 1834, they founded the city’s first cab company and worked for abolition and their community.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Loozrboy from Toronto, Canada · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
John Diefenbaker, a charismatic orator raised in Saskatchewan, was a defence lawyer and MP for some 40 years and Canada’s 13th prime minister from 1957 to 1963. He revived the Progressive Conservative Party, winning a landslide in 1958, and his government extended social programs, promoted Northern development and championed human rights at home and abroad.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Gar Lunney · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Helena Gutteridge, a feminist reformer who had campaigned for the vote in Britain, came to Vancouver in 1911 and brought wage-earning women into Canada’s mostly middle-class suffrage movement. She helped organize women workers through the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, and in 1937 became the first woman elected to Vancouver City Council, helping lay the foundations of social housing in British Columbia.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Matthews, James Skitt, Major · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Between the world wars, Idola Saint-Jean was a dominant figure in the fight for women’s right to vote and for reform of the Civil Code in Quebec. Despite strong opposition from the government, the clergy and many suffragists, she practised a “shock feminism” demanding equal rights for women, and as an educator and journalist she also championed social justice and women workers.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: A.J. Rice, Laprés & Lavergne · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
For more than 30 years, Edith Jessie Archibald (1854–1936) championed women’s right to vote in Nova Scotia, achieved on 26 April 1918. As president of the Maritime Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Halifax Local Council of Women, she also worked to improve health and education services.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
In 1848, refugees from American slavery built the Nazrey African Methodist Episcopal Church by hand to serve Amherstburg’s growing Black community. The stone chapel is perhaps the building type most representative of Underground Railroad communities, and it is associated with Bishop Willis Nazrey, first leader of the British Methodist Episcopal Church, a wholly Canadian denomination founded by Underground Railroad refugees.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
The Chinese Immigration Act (Chinese Exclusion Act), which took effect on 1 July 1923, imposed discriminatory restrictions on Chinese immigration and replaced the head tax. All Chinese people in Canada, including those born here, had to register or risk fines, detention or deportation. Chinese Canadians challenged the law until its repeal in 1947.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Kyle Lawrence · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
George Brown (1818–1880) founded the influential newspaper The Globe in 1844 and became a leading reformer and head of the “Clear Grit” party. In 1864 he was a key figure in the Great Coalition that made Confederation possible, and he co-founded the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Hunter & Co. · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
Emancipation Day celebrations mark 1 August 1834, when British legislation abolishing slavery took effect in what is now Canada. Nineteenth-century celebrations in what are now Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and British Columbia became an annual tradition that strengthened Black communities and supported the struggle for equality.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Spudgun67 · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Harriet Tubman (c. 1822–1913), who escaped slavery in Maryland, was the most famous “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, leading many people on dangerous journeys to freedom in Canada and helping them settle. She became the public face of the Underground Railroad in British North America, drawing attention and funding to the abolition movement.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Gr82c · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
Richard Pierpoint (c. 1744–c. 1838), born in Bundu in present-day Senegal, was captured and sold into slavery in the Thirteen Colonies around 1760. He fought as a free man with Butler’s Rangers in the American Revolution, settled in Niagara, and during the War of 1812 contributed to the creation of the Colored Corps; afterward he asked for passage to West Africa but was given land in Upper Canada instead.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Chris Woodrich · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
John P. Humphrey (1905–1995), a McGill law professor, was the first director of the United Nations Human Rights Division from 1946 to 1966. The 48-article “Secretariat Outline” he prepared with his staff for the UN Human Rights Commission laid the foundations for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: FDR Presidential Library & Museum · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
Denied university entry in Canada because she was a woman, Emily Stowe (1831–1903) studied medicine in New York City and in 1867 opened the first private medical practice in Canada run by a woman doctor, in Toronto. She led the drive to found Woman’s Medical College in 1883 and, through the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association, kept suffrage in the public eye.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
In Klippert v. the Queen (1967), Everett Klippert appealed his indefinite imprisonment as a dangerous sexual offender for gross indecency, under a Criminal Code that made sex between men illegal. The Supreme Court ruled against him, but the case exposed legal discrimination against gay men and contributed to the partial decriminalization of same-gender sexual acts in 1969.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Wladyslaw · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
After escaping slavery in Kentucky to Upper Canada, Reverend Josiah Henson (1789–1883) became an Underground Railroad conductor and abolitionist, founded the Black settlement of Dawn and established the British American Institute school. Harriet Beecher Stowe said his 1849 memoirs supplied ideas and incidents for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, raising awareness of Canada as a haven from slavery.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: NearEMPTiness · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Upper Canada’s 1793 Act against slavery, passed under Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, prohibited the importation of enslaved people. It did not free people already enslaved, but provided that children subsequently born to enslaved mothers would become free at age 25. Slavery in Upper Canada ended in 1834.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: User:Saforrest · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
Mary Two-Axe Earley (1911–1996), a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman born in Kahnawà:ke, campaigned against the sex discrimination in section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act, which stripped First Nations women of status if they married non-status men. After the Act was changed in 1985, she was the first person to regain her status.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Red Castle · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, opened in 2014. It describes itself as the first museum solely dedicated to the evolution, celebration and future of human rights.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Quintin Soloviev · Photo licence: CC BY 4.0 · Credit & context
In 1946, Viola Desmond, a successful Nova Scotia businesswoman, refused to leave a whites-only area of a movie theatre; her court case inspired the pursuit of racial equality across Canada. In 2018 she appeared on Canada’s first vertical bank note, the $10 note.
Contributor: Citizen.ca
Photo: Colin Stepney · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context