| “ | The silence of Canadian officials, their refusal to answer questions...reveals the attitude of Canadian officials on books...if they will ban my book without a hearing, if they will uphold officials who will ban Balzac, Trotsky, Joyce, Lawrence and others, they will be likely to ban still further books. | ” |
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—James T. Farrell, whose 1946 book Bernard Clare was banned |
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.
One of the most famous ongoing censorship controversies in Canada has been the dispute between Canada Customs and GLBT retail bookstores such as Little Sister's in Vancouver and Glad Day in Toronto. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Canada Customs frequently stopped material being shipped to the two stores on the grounds of "obscenity" Both stores frequently had to resort to the legal system to challenge the confiscation of their property.
In 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Canada Customs did not have the authority to make its own judgments about the permissibility of material being shipped to the stores but was permitted to confiscate only material that had specifically been ruled by the courts to constitute an offence under the Criminal Code of Canada.
Canadians can be disciplined by their employers for writing letters to newspapers. Christine St-Pierre, a television reporter covering federal politics for Radio-Canada, was suspended in September 2006 for writing a letter in support of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Similarly, the courts have upheld professional sanctions against teachers and school counsellors for writing letters to newspapers that are found to be discriminatory, limiting their freedom of expression and religion on the basis of maintaining "a school system that is free from bias, prejudice and intolerance." (See related articles, Chris Kempling and Status of religious freedom in Canada).
Read more about this topic: Censorship In Canada
Famous quotes containing the word print:
“It will be the mistake of your life if you go into print in your own defence [sic]. Your denial will reach a new set of people and start them to talking, while the ones who read the original charges will never see the refutation of them.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“We that write & print have all our books predestinated—& and for me, I shall write such things as the Great Publisher of Mankind ordained ages before he published “The World”Mthis planet, I mean—not the Literary Globe.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)