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The range of beliefs among those who call themselves conservatives in Canada is wide. Some, like the policy analysts of the Fraser Institute or like Stephen HARPER, the leader of the CANADIAN ALLIANCE, believe in a policy agenda of lower taxes, greater deregulation and increased privatization.

 That workers should have political representatives of their own class has been a recurrent theme in Canadian labour history, but no one organization has provided a permanent home for this idea. Many union leaders have preferred to advance their cause through established political parties.

Agricultural exhibitions probably began as bazaars or fairs.

Evangelical Christian Church, often called the Christian Church (Christian Disciples), is a denomination stemming from the early 19th century Restoration Movement led by Barton Warren Stone and Walter Scott of Kentucky, Thomas and Alexander Campbell of Virginia, and once in Canada, Baptists in Nova Scotia.

The Civic Holiday is a holiday observed in most provinces and territories on the first Monday of August.

Organized crime is when a group of three or more people commit crimes to make money. Such crimes include gambling; prostitution; pornography; drug trafficking; insurance and construction fraud; illegal bankruptcy; motor vehicle theft; computer crime; and counterfeiting. The widespread nature of organized crime first came to light in the 1960s. Some criminal groups are based on ethnicity. Others are formed within certain industries. New laws were made in the early 2000s to address organized crime in Canada.

This article is a plain-language summary of organized crime in Canada. If you are interested in reading about this topic in more depth, please see our full-length entry: Organized Crime in Canada.

Prostitution is the practice of exchanging sexual services for money, or for other needs. Although prostitution itself has never been a crime in Canada, communicating and other activities relating to the exchange have been prohibited.

Cannabis, also known as marijuana (among countless other names), is a psychoactive intoxicant that was banned in Canada from 1923 until medical cannabis became legal in 2001. The consumption and sale of recreational cannabis was legalized and regulated on 17 October 2018, after Parliament passed Bill C-45, the Cannabis Act. Legalization was supported by a majority of Canadians, despite concerns about the drug’s addictiveness and health effects, especially among young people.

Working-class history is the story of the changing conditions and actions of all working people. Most adult Canadians today earn their living in the form of wages and salaries and thus share the conditions of dependent employment associated with the definition of "working class."

On 9 February 2018, Gerald Stanley, a white farmer in rural Saskatchewan, was acquitted of murder and manslaughter in the killing of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man. The acquittal caused great controversy but was not appealed by prosecutors. However, it led the Justin Trudeau government to abolish peremptory challenges, which allowed Stanley’s legal team to keep five Indigenous people off the all-white jury that acquitted him. In 2021, an investigation conducted by a civilian watchdog concluded that that the RCMP was insensitive and racially discriminatory toward Boushie’s mother, and that the police mishandled witnesses and evidence. A Globe and Mail investigation also found that the RCMP “destroyed records of police communications from the night Colten Boushie died.”

In 1980, Canada's fifth-largest Christian denomination, numbering approximately 716,000 persons, of whom 302,736 were members of congregations.

At an event in Williams Lake, British Columbia, in May 2013, the orange shirt was presented as a symbol of Indigenous peoples’ suffering caused by residential schools, which operated from the 1830s to the 1990s. The event led to the annual 30 September Orange Shirt Day as a means of remembrance, teaching and healing. In June 2021, the federal government declared 30 September a national statutory holiday to coincide with Orange Shirt Day. (See also Reconciliation in Canada.)

The Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes (CHL) was an all-Black men’s hockey league. It was organized by Black Baptists and Black intellectuals and was founded in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1895. It was defunct during and after the First World War, reformed in 1921 and then fell apart during the Depression in the 1930s. Play was known to be fast, physical and innovative. The league was designed to attract young Black men to Sunday worship with the promise of a hockey game between rival churches after the services. Later, with the influence of the Black Nationalism Movement — and with rising interest in the sport of hockey — the league came to be seen as a potential driving force for the equality of Black Canadians. Canada Post issued a commemorative stamp in honour of the league in January 2020.

The Canadian Prairies were peopled in six great waves of migration, spanning from prehistory to the present. The migration from Asia, about 13,300 years ago, produced an Indigenous population of 20,000 to 50,000 by about 1640. Between 1640 and 1840, several thousand European and Canadian fur traders arrived, followed by several hundred British immigrants. They created dozens of small outposts and a settlement in the Red River Colony, where the Métis became the largest part of the population. The third wave, from the 1840s to the 1890s, consisted mainly but not solely of Canadians of British heritage. The fourth and by far the largest wave was drawn from many nations, mostly European. It occurred from 1897 to 1929, with a pause (1914–22) during and after the First World War. The fifth wave, drawn from other Canadian provinces and from Europe and elsewhere, commenced in the late 1940s. It lasted through the 1960s. The sixth wave, beginning in the 1970s, drew especially upon peoples of the southern hemisphere. It has continued, with fluctuations, to the present. Throughout the last century, the region has also steadily lost residents, as a result of migration to other parts of Canada, to the United States, and elsewhere.

Overdoses from a class of painkiller drugs called opioids are claiming the lives of thousands of Canadians from all walks of life. The death count is the result of an escalating public health crisis: an epidemic of opioid addiction. The crisis is made deadlier by an influx of illicit fentanyl and chemically similar drugs, but it can be traced to the medical over-prescribing of opioids, including oxycodone, fentanyl and morphine.

Birth control means the deliberate prevention of conception and pregnancy. The birth control methods used in Canada range from the simplest (like abstinence) to the most complex (like male or female surgical sterilization). (See also History of Birth Control in Canada.)

Orthodox Church, also commonly known as the Eastern, Greek or Byzantine Church, a family of Christian churches historically found in eastern Europe, the Near East, Africa and Asia (see CHRISTIANITY).