In Canada, appeals by the judiciary to community standards and the public interest are the ultimate determinants of which forms of expression may legally be published, broadcast, or otherwise publicly disseminated."Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Fundamental Freedoms", Kristen Douglas and Mollie Dunsmuir, Current Issue Reviews 84-16E, 1998, Library of Parliament, Parliamentary Research Branch, Law and Government Division, Canada, ss. 2(d)-(e). Other public organisations with the authority to censor include some tribunals and courts under provincial human rights laws, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, along with self-policing associations of private corporations such as the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.
Over the 20th century, legal standards for censorship in Canada shifted from a "strong state-centred practice", intended to protect the community from perceived social degradation, to a more decentralised form of censorship often instigated by societal groups invoking the state to restrict the public expression of political and ideological opponents.Interpreting Censorship in Canada, Klaus Petersen and Allen C. Hutchinson, University of Toronto Press, 1999, 438 p., .
Visual arts
Corridart The demolition of the Corridart exhibit in Montreal by former mayor Jean Drapeau on the 13 June 1976, two days before the commencement of the Montreal Olympic Games, was considered an act of censorship by the artists involved and resulted in a lengthy court trial wherein the artistic and aesthetic merit of the project was questioned. The collaborative efforts of a significant portion of the Montreal arts community was ordered destroyed by the mayor and was done so by municipal workers with police escort. The 16 main installations and dozens of smaller installations were taken to a municipal impound lot, in some cases left outside to be destroyed by the elements. The actions of the mayor were condemned by the provincial cultural affairs minister, principally because the mayor lacked legal authority over the Olympics as a whole. Corridart was intended to showcase Canadian and Montreal arts to an international audience.
Mercer Union Art Gallery In 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that obscene pornography was not protected expression in R v Butler, arguing that while a direct causal link from obscenity to real world harm may be "difficult, if not impossible, to establish" it was reasonable to presume a causal link to "changes in attitudes and beliefs". In 1993, Prime Minister Kim Campbell's Progressive Conservatives made child pornography and its fictional works a crime, adopting Liberal Justice Minister Jean Chretien's proposal from 1982.
In December 1993, the Metropolitan Toronto Police's Morality Bureau raided the Mercer Union Gallery and confiscated fictional works consisting of five paintings and thirty-five drawings from Eli Langer's exhibit. The exhibit had been described by the Mercer Union as "sexual ambiguity that inadvertently addresses our cultural taboos" and some of the art depicted fictional children engaged in sexual acts. Langer was arrested and charged with the crime of making and distributing child pornography. Langer claimed to be surprised by the charges and that he did not know art could be illegal. The director of Mercer Union, Sharon Brooks, was also arrested and charged. All charges on these two individuals were later withdrawn but the artwork remained confiscated for years. The event drew controversy in several news outlets. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association condemned parliament for the fast speed in which the legislation was passed without amending it enough to account for adverse outcomes. Two years later, the artwork was returned to Langer after a judge ruled that his art did not meet the criteria of pornography.
Following the Supreme Court trial R v Sharpe in 2001, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin maintained that "Parliament was justified in concluding that visual works of the imagination would harm children". In 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chretien's Liberals criminalized online access to child pornography, including fictional art as well. In 2005, Gordon Chin was the first Canadian criminally convicted under this law for importing and possessing explicit cartoons depicting fictional children.
Kiss & Tell Collective In the 1980s and 1990s, Canada Customs censored various examples of queer art and literature, preventing it from entering the country. Canada's border officers censored the Vancouver-based lesbian art collective Kiss & Tell on four separate occasions. Despite their work being shown in a number of Canadian galleries, Kiss & Tell’s Drawing the Line photographs—which represented lesbian sexuality—as well as any magazines with articles about the exhibition, were confiscated at the border. In 1991, the U.S. magazine Libido ran an article with photos of the Kiss & Tell exhibition, causing it to be detained at the border. Images were sent to the magazine for layout, and those too, were detained. Similarly, the lesbian magazine Deneuve ran a review of the Drawing the Line exhibition with photos. The Vancouver-based queer bookstore Little Sister’s ordered copies of this magazine, which were denied entry to the country due to the nature of Kiss & Tell's imagery. Lastly, Kiss & Tell created a postcard book based on Drawing the Line, which was published in Canada and distributed by Inland in the U.S. These books were seized on their way to Edmonton. Despite having their work confiscated by Canada Customs, Kiss & Tell refused to stop their creative practice. In her testimony in the case, Kiss & Tell member Persimmon Blackbridge said: “We’ll continue to explore sexual representations…. We will continue to show our art internationally despite the fear of losing our work.”
"Will and Representation"
In 2006, Ryan McCourt was the first artist selected to display sculpture for one year outside Edmonton's Shaw Conference Centre. McCourt's exhibition, Will and Representation, was an installation of four large sculptures based on Ganesha,Avenue Edmonton: Top 40 Under 40 a deity from Hindu mythology. Ten months into the exhibition, then-Mayor of Edmonton Stephen Mandel ordered the works removed after reportedly receiving a 700-name petition complaining of the sculptures' "disrespectful" nudity.Edmonton Journal, "Scrap Sculptures, Mayor Says," September 19, 2007CTV News, September 19, 2007Global News, September 19, 2007"Art Scrap," CBC News, September 19, 2007The Globe and Mail, "Edmonton to Remove Statues After Hindu Protest," September 20, 2007Glenn Weiss, "The Role of Censorship In Public Art," Aesthetic Grounds, October 2, 2007 When asked for comment, McCourt stated that "Nudity seems like a rather quaint thing to get one's knickers in a bunch over, in the 21st century. Besides, there's lots of art that I don't like, I don't go around gathering signatures of people who agree with me, and try to force the art to come down. That would be truly offensive, especially in a democracy like Canada."Edmonton Journal, "Sculptor Finds Criticism "Rather Quaint," September 19, 2007
Broadly, the public reaction to Mandel's censorship decree was one of disapproval.Bruce Dunbar, "Mandel Oversteps Bounds," Edmonton Journal, September 23, 2007Donna McKinnon, "No Place For Censorship," Edmonton Journal, September 23, 2007"Venting," compiled by Terry McConnell, Edmonton Journal, September 25, 2007Joe Renaud, "Art's Message Isn't Always Pretty," Edmonton Journal, September 30, 2007Krishna Bagdiya, "Sculptures No Threat," Edmonton Journal, September 30, 2007 In an interview with the Edmonton Journal's Paula Simons, David Goa, religious scholar, cultural anthropologist, and director of the University of Alberta's Ronning Centre for Study of Religion and Public Life, states "In India, Lord Ganesha is on everything — playing cards, advertising signs, lotto tickets, even diapers, I suspect." Within the traditional Thirty-two forms of Ganesha in Hinduism, Ganesha is sometimes presented nude, in both infant (Bala Ganapati) and erotic (Uchchhishta Ganapati) forms. Simons concludes, "In his haste to appease a few protesters, the mayor, usually a champion of the arts, made a serious error in judgment. Instead of giving McCourt's divinely inspired statues the bum's rush, we should be celebrating this Canadian cross-pollination of cultures and aesthetic forms". The Globe and Mails columnist Margaret Wente agreed with Simons: "The mayor, of course, was quite wrong. Mr. McCourt's sculptures did not insult the Hindu community. They insulted a small but vocal conservative religious group that is about as representative of Hindus as Hassidic Jews are of Jews.... There's a big difference between respecting different cultures and caving in to illiberalism and superstition."Margaret Wente, "Why Are We So Afraid To Offend?," The Globe and Mail, September 29, 2007
Despite such negative responses in the media to visual art censorship in Canada, in 2014 the Edmonton Arts Council subsequently refused a donation of one of McCourt's sculptures, Destroyer of Obstacles, evidently because the sculpture had genitalia "beneath its clothes".PZ Myers, "Reaching For a Reasonable Justification for Censorship," Pharyngula, April 24, 2015 After meeting with seven Hindu community group representative to seek out their opinion of the donation, the Edmonton Arts Council received a response that McCourt's sculpture was "an offense to their religion" and that the ban enacted by Mayor Mandel should remain in place.Edmonton Arts Council - Briefing Note, June 12, 2014 As a result of this consultation, "the Public Art Committee unanimously voted to decline acceptance of the gift, as the artwork did not meet "community or civic suitability" criteria." In McCourt's view, "It is not the purpose of a city's public art collection to placate special interests," he says. "I want Edmonton to build the best civic art collection that we can get, never mind the politics, the religion, etc. of the artists making the work."
Under the War Measures Act, the Canadian government imposed strict censorship of news related to World War I. 250 publications and periodicals, including many from the United States, were banned in the country. The censorship was expanded in 1918 in response to the Bolshevik success in the Russian Revolution and fears that Communism would spread to the rest of the world.
In 1937, under Maurice Duplessis, Quebec's Union Nationale government passed the Act to protect the Province Against Communistic Propaganda (commonly known as the "Padlock Law"), which banned the printing, publishing or distributing of "any newspaper, periodical, pamphlet, circular, document or writing, propagating Communism or Bolshevism". The law was struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada as an attempt to legislate criminal law ultra vires of the provincial legislature in the 1957 Switzman v Elbling decision.
In 1949, spearheaded by the campaigning of MP Davie Fulton, crime comics were banned in Canada in Bill 10 of the 21st Canadian Parliament's 1st session (informally known as the Fulton Bill).
In 1955, the importation of American The Atom Spy Hoax was deemed seditious as it questioned the Canadian government's handling of the Igor Gouzenko affair.
Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v Canada