The following is a brief overview of the history of Canada's earliest rights associations.

The history of Canada's first generation rights movement begins soon after the First World War and one of the most significant incidents in Canadian history...

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, a massive work stoppage laden with revolutionary and socialist rhetoric, encouraged the birth of radical post-war legislation with severe consequences for many Canadians. As will also be seen in the Australian case, the federal power over immigration was used to deport political radicals. Specifically, 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. Trade unions and communists by the hundreds were deported through this legislation. 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. To complement the new immigration laws was one of the most draconian pieces of law ever passed in Canadian history. Section 98 of the Criminal Code was added following the strike and made Canada the world’s only democracy banning 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.

The trial of the eight CPC leaders represented the high point of activity for theCanadian Labour Defense League, a communist-led organization dedicated to the defense of individual rights. Members of the CLDL raised $160 000 in bail money for the accused, organized rallies and demonstrations, and put together a massive petition with over 459 000 signatures calling for the repeal of Section 98. However, unlike those civil liberties groups which emerged in Canada and Australia in the 1930s with the mandate to defend the rights of all people irrespective of class, relation, gender, or race, the efforts of the CLDL were limited to defending "only workers and those on the political left; it did not pretend to follow the dictum of making no distinctions about whose liberties it defended."

Section 98 was repealed by the federal government in the thirties, and replaced with a broader sedition clause in the Criminal Code, as was the case in Australia with the War Reparations Act in 1920. In the province of Québec, however, the repeal of Section 98 was greeted with trepidation. Soon after the elimination of Section 98, the Communist Party of Canada began distributing leaflets outside the provincial legislature to the ire of the Premier and Attorney General, Maurice Duplessis. Duplessis, the autocratic Premier of Quebec who claimed that the Bible was sufficient protection for human rights, waged a virtual war against unpopular minorities during his reign from the thirties to the fifties.  Communists were easy targets and Duplessis responded to the elimination of Section 97 with his own legislation, commonly referred to as the Padlock Act. The Padlock Act (as it became known for the practice of closing down a building by placing a padlock on the front door) banned any use of a premises or the publication of material advocating communism. The legislation allowed the Attorney General to confiscate property and close down the premises where communist groups were active. The broad scope of the legislation allowed it to be used against a variety of unpopular minority groups in the predominantly catholic french-speaking province, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jewish groups.  The law, passed in the 1930s, became a rallying point for civil libertarians who considered it the most offensive piece of legislation violating individual rights in a generation. The law was so vague that it was used against unionists, Jews, Witnesses and people on the political Left.  Victims could only appeal to the Attorney-General who, conveniently, was Duplessis .  The law was defeated in the Supreme Court of Canada in 1957.

A collection of civil liberties associations, the first in Canadian history, emerged in the 1930s and by the 1940s played a key role in campaigning for the implementation of human rights legislation. In reaction to the passing of Quebec’s Padlock Act, rights associations appeared in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Vancouver. These associations referred to themselves as branches of the Canadian Civil Liberties Union (CCLU), and, although national in name, they were autonomous organizations with few links to each other. Members of the CCLU were not the first civil liberties activists in Canada; however, as in the case of the Canadian Labour Defence League, previous civil liberties organizations had partisan affiliations. The Canadian Labour Defence League was affiliated with the Communist Party of Canada and was exclusively concerned with the defence of the rights of the working class. The first generation of rights associations were dedicated solely to the preservation of rights irrespective of class, beliefs, or background. Rights associations during this period were fervently non-partisan and were solely concerned with the defence of traditional British liberties against state abuse. Larry Hannant has characterized the CCLU as the first attempt to form an organization focused on “political rights considered universal within liberal democratic societies: freedom of speech, association, and worship, the right to a fair and impartial trial, and equality before the law, among others.”