We present a timeline of Canada’s secular and humanist heritage.

• 1981

  Mouvement laïque québécois (MLQ) was incorporated as a non-profit organization to defend and promote freedom of conscience, separation of church and state and secularization of public institutions in Québec. including the secularisation of public school curriculum.

• 1982

  The Constitution Act, 1982 sets out the basic principles of democratic governance in Canada. The Constitution patriated Canada’s sovereignty from the United Kingdom and included a bijural system wich required respect for the common law as well as Quebec’s civil law.

  The Constitution included the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

• 1982

  Dying with Dignity Canada was incorporated as a registered charity. The legal entity was an extension of grassroots activism led by Marilynne Seguin.

• 1985

  John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was named Humanist of the Year in 1985 by the American Humanist Association.

• 1985

  Robert Buckman (1948 – 2011) moved to Canada.  In 1994 he was named Canada’s Humanist of the Year. He was a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000. He was president of the Humanist Association of Canada and chair of the Advisory Board on Bioethics of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. His main popular work in humanism was Can We Be Good Without God? Biology, Behaviour and the Need to Believe. He was a founding member of the Centre for Inquiry Canada and President of Humanist Canada from 1999 to 2004.

• 1987

  Mouvement Laique Quebec collaborated with senator Jacques Hébert to prevent the adoption of a private bill that would have enabled Opus Dei, a Catholic lay organization, to bypass Canadian fiscal law as a religious institution.

• 1987

  Mouvement Laique Quebec petitioned the Federal Department of Justice to withdraw Bibles from courts, so that solemn affirmations would be recognized as valid.

• 1987

  Margaret Atwood was named Humanist of the Year in 1987 by the American Humanist Association. Atwood is a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism.

• 1988

  The case of R. v Morgentaler was heard by the Supreme Court of Canada. The court found that the Criminal Code provision on abortion violated a woman’s right to “life, liberty and security of the person” guaranteed under Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Chief Justice Brian Dickson wrote: “Forcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction to carry a foetus [sic] to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with a woman’s body and thus a violation of her security of the person,” and declared that hospital review committees and systems were “manifestly unfair.”

• 1989

  The case of Tremblay v Daigle found that only a person had constitutional rights which began at the time of live birth. The Court also decided that the father of a fetus has no proprietary interest in a fetus; he may not obtain an injunction to prevent a woman from exercising her right of choice to have an abortion.

• 1992

  The Society of Freethinkers (SOFREE) was incorporated as a registered charity with activities focused in the area of Kitchener, Waterloo and Guelph (Ontario).

• 1994

  Marilynne Seguin published A Gentle Death following a thirty-year career as a registered nurse in a healthcare system that strove to prolong life at all costs and often in opposition to the expressed preferences of its patients.

• 1999

  Canadian Humanist Publications released The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? by Ottawa author Earl Doherty. The book asserted that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and that no single identifiable person named Jesus lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition.

• 1999

  The United Nations Human Rights Committee indicated that the provision of funding to Catholic school systems while simultaneously denying it to all other religious groups in Canada is discriminatory.

The timeline is currently under construction. Think we’re missing something? Let us know!

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