Browse "Protests and Strikes"

A move by a small-town council to block a popular mayor from being re-elected backfires spectacularly

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).

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

British Columbia Woodworkers' Strike, 15 May - 20 June 1946, the first strike of BC District 1 of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) after coast-wide bargaining rights were won in 1943.

As recently as late November, Russian Defence Minister Pavel Grachev boasted that it would take a single parachute regiment only two hours to subdue unrest in the breakaway southern republic of Chechnya.

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.

​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.

Coal miners at Bienfait, Saskatchewan, had joined the militant Mine Workers' Union of Canada in 1931. In September of that year they went on strike to win recognition of their union as a prelude to pressing demands for a restoration of wages cut by the local coal operators.

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

It was 8:45 a.m. on sept. 18, 1992, when the rail car transporting the replacement workers hit the trip wire, setting off an explosion so powerful that it drove bits of their flesh and bone deep into the hard rock ceiling.

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.

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.

Labour mediation embraces a variety of processes for resolving disputes between employers and trade unions in the organized sector of the labour market.

The Miramichi Lumber Strike began 20 August 1937 when 1500 millworkers and longshoremen along the Miramichi River in northern New Brunswick struck 14 lumber firms for increased wages, shorter working hours and union recognition.

In February and March 1849 when the LaFontaine-Baldwin ministry passed the Rebellion Losses Bill, the opposition violently denounced the Act.

On 10 March 1957, the 1,000 workers of Gaspé Copper Mines in Murdochville, Québec, struck for the right to unionize. The conflict lasted 7 months and ended in defeat for the miners. Moreover, a 15-year judicial battle finally awarded the company $1.5 million in damages from the United Steelworkers of America ("Métallos" in Québec).

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.

The New Left was an international political movement of the 1960s, mainly of youth and students, which originated in the "Ban the Bomb" movement of the late 1950s.

The Newfoundland Loggers' Strike began 31 December 1958 when hundreds of loggers employed by Anglo-Newfoundland Development Co at Grand Falls struck for wage increases and for improvements in living conditions at wood camps.