The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 led to the creation of several notably abusive federal laws restricting civil liberties. Section 41 (enacted in June 1919) of the Immigration Act allowed officials to deport any alien or Canadian citizen not born in Canada for advocating the overthrow of the government by force. Hundreds of trade unions and communists were eventually deported. In 1931-32 alone, deportations peaked at 7,034. With a population of 2,307,525 in 1931, 23 per cent of the population was in danger of being deported under the provisions of the Immigration Act. In addition, Canada was the only democracy in the world, following the creation of Section 98 of the Criminal Code after the strike, to ban the Communist Party. The legislation included the general provision that

 Any association...whose professed purpose...is to bring about any governmental, industrial or economic change within Canada by use of force, violence or physical injury to person or property, or by threats of such injury, or which teaches, advocates, advises or defends the use of force, violence, terrorism, or physical injury to person or property...in order to accomplish such change, or for any other purpose, or which shall by any means persecute or pursue such purpose...or shall so teach, advocate, advise or defend, shall be an unlawful association.

Section 98 characterized a member of an unlawful association as someone who had attended meetings, spoken out in favour or distributed literature for the organization. Property belonging to the association could be seized by police without a warrant and forfeited to the Crown, and any person claiming to be a representative of the unlawful association was guilty by association. Three prosecutions emerged from Section 98 before its repeal in 1936, the most famous being the trials of eight members of the Communist Party of Canada in 1931. In R v. Buck the Ontario Court of Appeal held that the provisions of Section 98 were broad enough to include members of the Communist Party under the definition of unlawful association.

Further Reading

• Thomas R. Berger, Fragile Freedoms: Human Rights and Dissent in Canada, 2nd ed. Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1982.
• Greg Kealey, “State Repression of Labour and the Left in Canada, 1914-20: The Impact of the First World War,” Canadian Historical Review (Vol.73, No.3, 1992): 281-314.
• Ross Lambertson, Repression and Resistance: Canadian Human Rights Activists, 1930-1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).