The following is a brief overview of the history of Canada's second generation of rights associations (1960s to 1980s).

The rights revolution entered a new phase in the 1960s with the rise of an expansive grass-roots human right movement.  It is fair to say that by this time Canadians participated in social movements to a degree never before seen in history.  Social movement activism defined the sixties and seventies.  Gay men in Vancouver and Toronto met in their homes to form the country’s first gay rights groups and organize the first gay pride parades; women came together in community centres to develop a program of action to raise awareness of such issues as abortion and equal pay; students congregated outside classrooms in universities to organize campus demonstrations to demand a say in the governance of the university; and in Vancouver, men and women concerned about the impact of nuclear testing on the environment united to form what would become one of the most recognized advocacy groups in the world.   

More importantly, people began to organize at unprecedented levels.  New student groups exploded on to the scene, led by the Combined University Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Student Union for Peace Action, the Union général des étudiants québécois and the Company of Young Canadians.  Feminist organizations proliferated, including the formation of a new and powerful advocacy group at the national level: the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.  In British Columbia, feminists could boast of the existence of more than a hundred groups by 1974 (there were only 2 in the late 1960s).  The country’s first organizations representing homosexuals appeared in Vancouver in 1964 (Association for Social Knowledge) and Toronto in 1969 (University of Toronto Homophile Association).  Aboriginals were also highly active in mobilizing locally and at the national level.  Between 1960 and 1969 four national Aboriginal associations and thirty-three separate provincial organizations were born.  By the mid-1980s, the federal Secretary of State was providing funding to more than 3500 community groups across the country.  Prisoners’ rights groups became increasingly vocal and organized; the Quebec Prisoners’ Rights Committee, one of the most prominent in the country, sought the abolition of all prisons.  Greenpeace was founded in Vancouver in 1971. Children’s rights, animal rights, advocates for peace and official language groups are just a few other examples of the many social movement organizations active across Canada.  All these movements embraced the language of rights.  Canada’s rights revolution had finally come of age.

Once again, developments at home mirrored international trends.  By 1996, there were no less than 295 registered human rights groups worldwide, almost half of which were formed since the late seventies.  Amnesty international was founded in 1961 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.  Human Rights Watch began to monitor compliance with the Helsinki Accords in 1978, a landmark achievement in which the Soviet Union, for the first time in history, agreed to a series of human rights principles in a treaty (the Soviets abstained from the vote on the UDHR).  The United Nations human rights regime also matured during this period.  The United Nations’ Human Rights Committee and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination were established to enforce the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. An Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights was instituted following the ratification of the American Convention on Human Rights in 1978.  The European Convention of Human Rights came into effect in 1953, but it was not until the early 1970s that the institutions it created, particularly the Court, began to play an important role in the implementation of the Convention. 

It was a period of intense legal reform in Canada. Privacy Acts were introduced in most jurisdictions by the 1980s; they protected individuals from such actions as unnecessary police wiretaps or insurance companies disclosing information on their clients.  Linguistic rights were given added protection with the passage of the Official Languages Act in 1969.  Children were recognized as having their own rights as well.  Quebec’s Youth Protection Act of 1977, for instance, guaranteed youths the right to be consulted when changing foster care and to consult a lawyer before judicial proceedings. At the same time, the Ontario Child Welfare Act of 1978 protected the privacy of adopted children.  The remaining restrictions on women serving on juries were removed in the 1980s as were requirements for women to leave the civil service after they were married (this requirement remained on the statute books in Newfoundland until the late 1980s).  Mental patients also became rights-bearing citizens; in some jurisdictions, they were included in minimum wage laws and greater restrictions were placed on forcible confinement.  The first major land-claims treaty was signed in 1975 between the Quebec government and the James Bay Cree to develop hydro-power. Meanwhile, revisions to the Indian Act allowed female Aboriginals to retain their status after marrying a non-Aboriginal man.  And prisoners were granted the vote in Quebec in 1979.