On November 8, 1946, Halifax businesswoman Viola Desmond's car broke down in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. While she waited for repairs, she went to see a film at the Roseland Theatre and sat in the main-floor seats. The theatre kept those seats for white customers and expected Black patrons to sit in the balcony. When she refused to move, she was dragged out by police, jailed overnight and convicted of evading the one-cent difference in amusement tax between a balcony and a main-floor ticket. Her refusal, nine years before Rosa Parks's in Alabama, became one of the best-known acts of resistance in Canadian history. Between 1945 and 1982, women and Black Canadians, often working through their own organizations, pushed Canada to live up to its claims of equality. This lesson looks at what they changed, and what did not change.
Women's lives: what changed and what stayed the same
After 1945, many women who had worked in war industries were laid off or pressured to return home so that returning veterans could have jobs, and the federal public service did not hire or keep married women in most permanent jobs until it dropped this "marriage bar" in 1955. Advertising, television and magazines celebrated the suburban homemaker. Yet women's paid work kept rising: in 1951 roughly a quarter of women aged 15 and over were in the labour force, and by 1981 about half were. Women worked mostly in lower-paid "pink-collar" jobs such as clerical work, sales, nursing and teaching, and earned much less than men on average.
| Development | Date | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Equal pay laws | Ontario 1951 (the first in Canada); federal law 1956 | Required equal pay for the same work, but did not cover the many jobs where women and men did different work, so pay gaps remained |
| Ellen Fairclough | June 1957 | Became the first woman appointed to the federal cabinet |
| The birth control pill | Sold in Canada from the early 1960s | Gave many women more control over the timing and size of their families; the birth rate fell sharply after the mid-1960s |
| Divorce Act | 1968 | Created one national divorce law with wider grounds, including marriage breakdown; divorce rates rose |
| Criminal Law Amendment Act (Bill C-150) | Passed in 1969 | Made selling and advertising contraceptives legal; allowed abortion when a hospital committee of doctors decided a pregnancy endangered the woman's life or health; and decriminalized private sexual acts between consenting adults aged 21 and over, including gay men. Supporters saw it as taking the state out of private life; opponents objected on moral grounds |
| Royal Commission on the Status of Women | Created 1967; report tabled December 7, 1970 | Chaired by journalist Florence Bird after pressure from women's groups led by Laura Sabia; its 167 recommendations included equal pay for work of equal value, maternity leave, a national daycare program and ending discrimination against First Nations women in the Indian Act |
| National Action Committee on the Status of Women | Formed 1971–72 | A national umbrella group that pressed governments to act on the commission's recommendations |
| The Murdoch case | 1973 | The Supreme Court ruled that Irene Murdoch, an Alberta ranch wife who had done heavy ranch work through 25 years of marriage, had no right to a share of the ranch after her marriage broke down. Public outrage pushed provinces to reform family property laws in the late 1970s |
Black Canadians resist anti-Black racism
Black communities had lived in Canada for centuries, especially in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and southwestern Ontario, but in 1945 they faced segregation that was often not written into law yet was widely enforced: separate schools in parts of Nova Scotia and Ontario, theatres and restaurants that refused service, landlords who would not rent, and employers who would hire Black men only as railway porters or labourers. The courts had offered little help: in Christie v. York (decided in December 1939) the Supreme Court of Canada had upheld a Montreal tavern's right to refuse to serve a Black customer, Fred Christie. Black Canadians resisted through community organizations, churches, newspapers, unions, the courts and politics.
| Who | When | What they did and what changed |
|---|---|---|
| Viola Desmond, supported by the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (founded 1945) and Carrie Best's newspaper The Clarion | 1946–1947 | Desmond challenged her conviction in court; she lost on a technicality, but the case exposed segregation and energized activists. Nova Scotia granted her a rare posthumous free pardon in April 2010, and she appeared on the ten-dollar note that entered circulation in November 2018 |
| The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, with leaders such as Stanley Grizzle | Canadian locals formed around 1939–1942; first contract with the CPR in 1945 | Black porters, often the only railway jobs open to Black men, won better pay and hours through their union. In the 1950s and 1960s porters used new fair employment laws to challenge being kept out of better-paid jobs such as conductor. Grizzle later became a citizenship judge |
| Activists across Ontario, including Black, Jewish and labour groups | 1944–1962 | Pushed Ontario to pass the Racial Discrimination Act (1944, banning discriminatory signs), the Fair Employment Practices Act (1951) and the Fair Accommodation Practices Act (1954). Hugh Burnett and the National Unity Association tested the 1954 law against restaurants in Dresden, Ontario. These laws were combined into the Ontario Human Rights Code, the first in Canada, in force June 15, 1962 |
| Donald Moore and the Negro Citizenship Association | 1954 | Led a delegation to Ottawa protesting immigration rules that kept out most Caribbean immigrants; racial criteria were largely removed from the regulations in 1962 |
| Kay Livingstone | 1951–1973 | Led the Canadian Negro Women's Association, founded in 1951, and organized the first National Congress of Black Women in 1973 |
Destroyed communities: Africville and Hogan's Alley
Africville, on the shore of the Bedford Basin in Halifax, was a Black community founded in the mid-1800s. Its residents paid taxes, yet the city never provided running water, sewers or paved roads, and placed a prison, an infectious diseases hospital and the city dump nearby. In the 1960s Halifax decided to clear the area in the name of "urban renewal". Between 1964 and 1970, about 400 residents in roughly 80 families were moved out, many with little compensation and some in city dump trucks; the Seaview church at the heart of the community was demolished at night in 1967. Former residents and their descendants, organized in the Africville Genealogy Society, kept the community's memory alive. Africville was designated a National Historic Site in 1996, and on February 24, 2010, the mayor of Halifax apologized. In Vancouver, the Black community of Hogan's Alley was largely displaced when the Georgia Viaduct was built through the neighbourhood in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Political firsts and new voices
- Leonard Braithwaite (1963) became the first Black member of the Ontario legislature.
- Lincoln Alexander (June 25, 1968) won Hamilton West to become the first Black Member of Parliament; in 1979 he became the first Black federal cabinet minister, and in 1985 Lieutenant Governor of Ontario.
- Rosemary Brown (August 30, 1972), elected in Vancouver-Burrard, became the first Black woman elected to a provincial legislature in Canada; in 1975 she finished second in the race to lead the federal NDP.
- The Sir George Williams affair (1969): in 1968 Caribbean students at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in Montreal complained that a professor graded Black students unfairly. Frustrated with how the complaint was handled, students and supporters occupied the computer centre from January 29, 1969. On February 11, when police moved in, a fire broke out (how it started is still disputed), the centre was badly damaged and 97 people were arrested. The events drew attention to racism on Canadian campuses and spurred Black organizing in Montreal and beyond; Concordia formally apologized in 2022.