The 1944 Racial Discrimination Act was one of the first pieces of legislation in Canada solely aimed at combatting discrimination. The Act criminalized signs or publications that expressed racial or religious discrimination and was followed the same year by the Community Halls Act, which proscribed discrimination in halls that received public funds. The Racial Discrimination Act ushered in an era of anti-discrimination laws nationwide.

The 1951 Fair Employment Practices Act was an act of provincial legislation which criminalized employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or nationality. The Act is notable for its sweeping purview, which included both the public and private sectors, and the creation of a designated provincial commission to address complaints.

Similar to Ontario’s Act, these provincial acts were part of an era of anti-discrimination legislation nationwide. The Acts all had similar purviews, making discriminatory attitudes and actions illegal in both the public and private spheres, and establishing legal protocols for discriminatory behaviour.

The Acts listed out a series of laws that criminalized employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or nationality. Adopted at various times at a provincial level, the acts signaled the beginning of a new era of civil rights legislation. The various acts were also notable for being the first pieces of legislation to explicitly combat discrimination as their sole purpose.

Around this time, the 1953 Fair Employment Act, a piece of federal legislation, anchored this change as it criminalized employment discrimination for the civil service. The act was followed by several acts of provincial legislation soon after.

The 1955 West Indian Domestic Scheme was a targeted federal immigration program that created a direct path for women from the Caribbean to emigrate into Canada to work as domestic labourers. Throughout the course of the program, which ran until 1967 to meet Canada’s demand for domestic labour, over 3,000 women moved to Canada. The program became a unique opportunity for Black emigration to Canada during a time when discriminatory policies limited non-white immigration. Despite strengthening relations with Caribbean countries, many labourers were paid less than anticipated and were confronted with racism and discrimination while in Canada.

The original Ontario Human Rights Commission was established in 1959 as a way to raise awareness around a series of new anti-discrimination statutes that had come into effect in the years prior. In 1961, the purview of the Commission was expanded, with a new mission to prevent discrimination and advance human rights through administering the Ontario Human Rights Code. It has since become a pillar of Ontario’s human rights system alongside the Human Rights Tribunal and Human Rights Legal Support Centre.

1962 saw the revision of Canada’s immigration system. Ellen Fairclough, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, introduced a new system that replaced race or national origin with skill as a determining factor for admissibility. This change helped eliminate overt racial discrimination from Canadian immigration policy by specifying that non-sponsored immigrants (those moving to Canada without domestic connection or support from family or an employer) would be evaluated on skill rather than country of origin.

As part of the reforms, a points system was created for immigration. Instead of including race or national origin as qualifications or determining factors in immigration, the system used a different set of standards for evaluating potential immigrants. The system became based on selectors such as education, work experience, occupational demand in Canada, and personal characteristics. This helped create a fairer and less racialized selection process, which resulted in a significant increase of immigrants to Canada from developing nations. The creation of the points system, however, meant the cessation of immigration schemes such as the West Indian Domestic Scheme, and the creation of new temporary work permits.

 The 1951 UN Refugee Convention signaled a watershed moment in human rights worldwide, as the declaration defined the term “refugee” and established a legal responsibility for States to protect them. Later, a 1967 Protocol enforced the Convention, legally binding signatories to protect refugees and not return them to their home country (known as non-refoulment). Canada signed onto the Protocol in 1969, thus laying the groundwork for a new era in Canadian immigration policy and allowing Canada to position itself in the international community as a liberal, open country; an international beacon for the protection and enforcement of human rights.

In April of 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced the idea of “multiculturalism in a bilingual framework,” thus enshrining multiculturalism as an official Canadian policy. The idea was that the federal government (the bilingual framework) would support and encourage the growth of various ethnic, religious, and cultural communities within Canada. As a direct response to Lester B. Pearson’s 1963 declaration of biculturalism, which officially recognized the primacy of French and British culture, the new policy pushed Canada to become a more diverse society – as Trudeau puts it, “there are two official languages, there is no official culture.”

Following Trudeau’s announcement and years of policy-making, and official Federal Act promoting multiculturalism was later passed in 1988, promoting the implementation of multicultural policies and practices, as well as working to address barriers to equal opportunity and integration.

The 1970s saw a major shift in the federal government’s approach towards immigration as the government became more proactive towards handling immigration as a matter of national concern as immigration increased and decades old policies were revisited. No act was more influential in this change than the Immigration Act of 1976. The Immigration Act laid out fundamental objectives of Canadian immigration policy, created different classes of immigrants, defined refugees as a unique class of immigrants, and officially mandated the federal government with the responsibility of future immigration plans. A key feature of the Act was the recognition of refugees as a separate class of immigrants which reaffirmed Canada’s legal commitment to the UN directives regarding refugees. Additionally, as refugees had previously been accepted on an ad hoc basis, there was now a clearly defined path for their resettlement.

In 2002, the federal government under Jean Chretien signed the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act into effect, thus replacing the 1976 Immigration Act as the primary piece of legislation regulating immigration to Canada. The 2002 Act differed in several significant ways through the establishment of new guidelines for the goals of Canada’s immigration program. Although it provided clarity on admissibility of immigrants and expanded accessibility in some ways, the 2002 Act repealed the Geneva Convention’s definition of a refugee and made immigrating as a refugee more difficult through the repeal of an appeals board for refugees.