In 1964 the Progressive Conservative government of Ontario introduced one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in the province’s history. In response to concerns raised by the Police Commission about the level of organized crime in Ontario, Attorney General Frank Cass sought to provide it with special powers to detain and interrogate suspected members of criminal associations. If enacted, Bill 99 would have allowed the provincial Police Commission to arrest and detain individuals without notifying their next of kin, to refuse them access to legal counsel, and to jail them for eight days if they refused to testify before the commission. Bail and the right to appeal would be withheld. Should witnesses continue to frustrate the commission they could be held in jail almost indefinitely for eight-day periods, and they should also subject to a $2000 fine and a year in jail if they revealed information presented before the commission. Liberal opposition leader Farquhar Oliver wanted the government to retract the bill or call an immediate election. In Ottawa, J.W. Pickersgill suggested that the bill made Quebec’s Padlock Act look like the Bill of Rights. Soon thereafter the bill was retracted, the attorney general was replaced, and a royal commission on civil rights was enacted.

Ontario’s Bill 99 was the birth mother of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), which was incorporated in 1964. Initially, the CCLA was a national association in name only. Its precursor was the Association for Civil Liberties, which was led by Irving Himel, Jewish lawyer. Himel had envisioned the Association for Civil Liberties as a national rights association, although the organization spent most of its time working to secure anti-discrimination legislation in Ontario. In the wake of Bill 99 Himel called together a group of well-known Toronto personalities to form a rejuvenated rights association. Among the leadership of the new association were writers Pierre Berton and June Callwood as well as lawyers and law professors Bora Laskin, Mark MacGuigan, and Harry Arthurs. Its honorary president was former lieutenant-governor Keiller Mackay, at one time a Supreme Court of Ontario judge famous for having struck down restrictive covenants in Re Drummond Wren in 1945.

The CCLA soon established itself as one of the most active rights associations in Canada. In 1968 it secured a major grant from the Ford Foundation to study due process in lower courts across the country, and the resulting report, which guided the CCLA ’s national advocacy program for years, highlighted such problems as the lack of legal counsel available to people under arrest and long trial delays. Two years later the ccla distinguished itself, as did the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, as one of the few groups in English Canada to criticize the invocation of the War Measures Act in October 1970, and months later the CCLA successfully lobbied the federal government not to implement peacetime emergency legislation.

In 1977 the federal government created a royal commission to investigate allegations that the RCMP had raided the offices of the Parti Québécois in order to copy membership lists and were illegally opening mail at the offices of Canada Post. During the commission’s investigation the CCLA was one of the most vocal non-governmental organizations calling on the government to prosecute offending officers. Perhaps the CCLA’s most enduring effect within the rights movement came with the hearings of the Special Joint Committee on the Constitution in 1980-1. When the minister of justice, Jean Chrétien, introduced his revisions to the government’s proposal for a charter of rights and freedoms in 1981, the CCLA received extensive credit for having influenced most of the revisions. In fact, with the exception of the Canadian Bar Association, the CCLA’s recommendations received more attention in Chrétien’s report than did those of any other organization.

The following excerpt is from: Jeremy Patrick, "Civil Liberties Advocacy Organizations in Canada: A Survey and Critique" (February 13, 2007). bepress Legal Series. Working Paper 2007.

CCLA has scored some notable victories. It was responsible for significant revisions to the Charter’s legal rights sections, helped convince the Supreme Court of Canada to allow more interventions from public interest groups, and succeeded in a campaign to remove religious exercises from Ontario’s public schools. In terms of topical focus, the CCLA has a long and distinguished history in two main areas: freedom of speech and law enforcement/national security. This focus can be traced in part to the fact that CCLA has had the same leadership in General Counsel Alan Borovoy since 1966. The organization has been involved as an intervener in most of the major Supreme Court of Canada cases concerning topics such as censorship, hate speech, postering, and defamation. Each time, it has taken a strong and classical civil libertarian defence of freedom of speech. In this area, CCLA has not shied away from controversy. It was the only one of the ten interveners in R. v. Keegstra to argue that Canada’s prohibition on hate speech should be declared unconstitutional. Similarly, much like the ACLU’s defence of the Nazis in the Skokie case, CCLA risked the wrath of many of its supporters by successfully arguing that a provision of the Criminal Code used against famed Holocaust-denier Ernest Zundel should be struck down under the Charter’s guarantee of freedom of expression. More recently it stepped into the glare of controversy by arguing that the child pornography laws used to prosecute Robert Sharpe were excessively overbroad and unconstitutional.

Apart from freedom of speech and law enforcement/national security, CCLA has a
decidedly mixed record in addressing other civil liberties issues. For example, the organization rarely if ever becomes involved in issues such as physical disability (including HIV/AIDS discrimination), mental health, corrections, gay and lesbian equality, and more. No doubt the idiosyncratic focus reflects the iron hand with which CCLA’s General Counsel leads the organization. In 1995 the organization invited an external review, which surveyed Board members, staff, and donors. It concluded that “there is also a very real concern that ‘there is no organization’—just Alan Borovoy and his interests, his point of view.