In 1962, after a string of terrorist attacks by a radical fringe group of Doukhobours called the Sons of Freedom, the government of British Columbia took the extraordinary step of arresting the group’s Fraternal Council and charging them with conspiracy to intimidate Parliament and the provincial legislature. It was clearly an excessive charge against a small group of religious extremists, and inspired a small group of activists in Vancouver to organize the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. It was the first civil liberties group to emerge in Canada since the decline of the Association for Civil Liberties and League for Democratic Rights in the fifties. The BCCLA’s first president was a Vancouver Anglican minister, Philip Hewett, who was later replaced by James Foulks, the founding head of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of British.

In the first two decades since the group’s inception, the BCCLA proved to be one of the most dynamic rights associations in the country. Between 1968 and 1973 the association fought a string of battles against censorship in Vancouver, including attempts by the city licensing inspector to shut down various local theatre productions and attacks on the Georgia Straight (a popular alternative paper founded in 1967) for obscenity. It successfully lobbied Vancouver City Council to limit the licensing inspector’s powers and, in several Georgia Straight obscenity cases, provided legal counsel and experts to testify on the literary merit of the paper’s work. In 1971, when police on horseback caused a riot by storming a crowd of youths in Gastown who were protesting drug laws, the bccla took centre stage in defending the rights of the protestors against police abuse. Years later, in 1979, the association succeeded in convincing a provincial Supreme Court judge to strike down the provincial Heroin Treatment Act, which was designed to forcibly detain drug addicts and to compel them to seek treatment. The court decision provided an important moral victory for civil libertarians opposed to the state’s forcing individuals to be treated for addiction. Although the decision was overturned in the Supreme Court of Canada, the case reflected the rising prominence of the BCCLA and its ability to mobilize sufficient resources for a court case of national importance.

The BCCLA is still active today and is the oldest rights association in Canada.

Further Reading

• Dominique Clément, “An Exercise in Futility? Regionalism, State Funding and Ideology as Obstacles to the Formation of a National Social Movement Organization in Canada," BC Studies (Summer 2005, No. 146): 63-91.

Archives

• British Columbia Civil Liberties Association papers are available at the Simon Fraser Rare Books and Special Collections Division