Search for ""

The 1992 killing of nine underground miners in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, was one of Canada's worst mass murders.

That stately building at the northwest corner of Hastings and Granville is known as the Sinclair Centre today. It houses federal offices, upscale clothing shops and a small mall. It was once Vancouver’s main Post Office, the site of “Bloody Sunday,” a violent Depression-era clash between police and unemployed workers.

A statue of Edward Cornwallis, the colonial founder of Halifax, was erected in the city’s downtown in 1931 as a celebration of British settlement. It later became an object of controversy in the midst of a growing public debate about Cornwallis’s treatment of the Mi’kmaq people.

Bloody Sunday was a violent confrontation between protesters and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Vancouver police in Vancouver on Sunday 19 June 1938.

The Ipperwash Crisis took place in 1995 on land in and around Ontario’s Ipperwash Provincial Park, which was claimed by the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation. The underlying cause of the crisis was the appropriation of the Stoney Point Reserve in 1942 by the federal government for use as a military camp. After repeated requests for the land to be returned, members of the Stony Point First Nation occupied the camp in 1993 and in 1995. On 4 September 1995 protesters also occupied Ipperwash Provincial Park nearby. Tension between the protesters and the OPP increased, resulting in a confrontation on 6 September 1995 during which Dudley George, an Ojibwa protestor, was killed.

Political violence refers to the use of physical force to achieve or prevent political or economic change. In this specific sense, Canada (as compared to the US) has been a "peaceable kingdom." There has been no bloody revolution or massive civil war and very little of the "lawless West.

R v. Bedard (1971) challenged section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act, which concerns the rights of Status Indian women in Canada. The appellant in the case, Yvonne Bedard, took the federal government to court after losing her rights as a Status Indian because of her marriage to a Non-Status man. In 1973, before the Supreme Court of Canada, the Bedard case merged with AG v. Lavell, another case concerning gender discrimination (see Status of Women) in the Indian Act. Although Bedard ultimately lost her reinstatement claims, her case inspired future legal battles regarding women’s rights and the Indian Act, including Lovelace v. Canada (1981) (see Sandra Lovelace Nicholas) and the Descheneaux case (2015).

​Women’s movements (or, feminist movements) of the 19th and early-20th century — often referred to as first-wave feminism — included campaigns in support of temperance, women’s suffrage, pacifism, as well as labour and health rights.

​The first Bread and Roses March, an initiative of the Fédération des femmes du Québec, began on 26 May 1995.

Nègres blancs d'Amérique (1968), a Marxist analysis of Québec history and a program for the future, was written under the guise of autobiography by Pierre Vallières while he was confined in a Manhattan jail for FLQ activities.

Political activism among Indigenous people in Canada since the late 19th century has largely reflected attempts to organize political associations beyond the band level to pursue common interests. In the wake of persistent criticism of the federal government’s proposed “White Paper” policy (1969), major Indigenous organizations, most notably the Assembly of First Nations, gained political recognition and became established players on the national scene. These organizations were joined in 2012 by the national movement Idle No More.

This article describes Indigenous political organization as it relates to Canadian federal, provincial or territorial political bodies, not the political structures of specific Indigenous communities, which often predate interaction with Europeans and subsequent colonial infrastructure.