The Canadian Context

Features of the Canadian social and political environment have boosted activist effectiveness, but it was not always so. In the late 1940s, regular attendance at religious services was much higher than the average in the industrialized world, and within the political arena there were basically no voices calling for reform in moral policies shaped by conservative religious values (Noll, 2007). Starting in the 1960s, rapid secularization set in, much in line with developments through much of Western Europe. Weekly attendance at religious services eventually declined to less than 15%, and among francophone Catholics to less than 10%. Evangelical Protestants, most often in the vanguard of antigay protests, have been a visible presence in Canadian political life, but they are much less influential than their American cousins, constituting less than 10% of the overall population (Malloy, 2011).

Canadian immigration patterns since the 1960s might have refueled religious conservatism, as most newcomers come from parts of the world where traditionalist gender and sexual norms still hold sway, but this seems not to have slowed the overall popular shift toward pro-LGBT beliefs. Moral conservatism is not disproportionately strong in many immigrant communities, and among those in which it is pronounced it has not translated into significant shifts toward conservative political parties (Cochrane, 2013; Rayside, Sabin, & Thomas, 2017).¹

In fact, large-scale and broadly accepted immigration to Canada has helped cement the idea of diversity into the Canadian political identity structure, though not always in Quebec. It became possible, in such an environment, to treat the inclusion of sexual minorities as part of a larger pattern of inclusiveness. At times this has led Canadians to believe that their society is more accepting than it is, though this in turn has helped delegitimize explicitly homophobic political discourse.

LGBT activists have benefited from a comparatively supportive labor movement, which was a significant player in launching expensive court challenges (Adam, 1999; Hunt, 1999). Individual unions, mostly in the public sector, began supporting lesbian and gay claims in the 1980s, and in the next decade a good part of the overall labor movement was assertively backing the LGBT cause and soon taking on issues of gender identity as well as sexual orientation. Canadian unions have been more influential and generally less socially conservative than their American counterparts and not as bound to traditional (and masculinist) working-class culture as many of their powerful European counterparts.

The presence of social democratic parties relatively open to the influence of social movement activism from the 1960s on has also helped. The New Democratic Party (NDP) has been an influential player in several provinces, and although never a serious contender for power at the federal level, it has prodded governments in progressive policy directions. The NDP was not immediately a forceful LGBT ally, but it has almost invariably been the first party to become so whenever LGBT issues have been raised. In Quebec the Parti Québécois has at times played a similar role.

Another factor that opened up significant opportunities for LGBT activists was the 1982 constitutional entrenchment of a newly drafted Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Smith, 2008). It did not explicitly include sexual minorities, but its crucial equality rights clauses (Section 15) were sufficiently open-ended that the courts would later rule that it effectively did prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and, eventually, gender identity.

Activist work has also been facilitated by two features of Canadian law. First, the fact that there is only a single criminal code meant that when partial decriminalization was secured in 1969, it applied across the country. (Discriminatory elements remained, for example, in a higher age of consent for homosexual activity, though most of these were struck down by court rulings in later decades.) Second, over the postwar period, common law and legislation moved incrementally toward significant formal recognition of cohabiting heterosexual relationships.² This is important because much of what same-sex couples sought in the formal recognition of their relationships and of their rights to parent could be secured by challenging discriminatory treatment in comparison to unmarried straight couples. This effectively postponed engagement with the politically and religiously loaded question of marriage—an issue that also had much potential for broadening anti-gay mobilization and dividing the LGBT movement.

If activists have benefitted from these factors, they have also faced challenges in acquiring the resources essential for stable growth. AIDS-related groups have had access to state funding, and that has been especially important for those groups that have mobilized in ethnocultural minorities and Indigenous communities. Major events like Pride and film festivals ultimately secured project-specific funding from all levels of government. But stable organizational funding for broad-gauged advocacy is much less available, with Quebec a partial exception, so that political organizing has depended to an extraordinary degree on volunteer labor. This has prevented the kind of institutionalization that in other countries has enabled the creation of capacity for routine intervention in mainstream politics.

Much of what activists have championed has required mobilizing in 10 quite distinctive provincial arenas, 3 territories, and at the federal level. The comparative decentralization of the Canadian federation gives regional governments jurisdiction over many areas related to sexuality and gender, with local governments also playing important roles. This has provided opportunities for early political gains in parts of the country where favorable opportunities have presented themselves. For example, if a left or center-left provincial party wins office, significant access may open up to LGBT activists. If they then succeed in convincing a government to introduce inclusive legislation, the power that Canadian party discipline vests in government leaders can greatly increase the chances of passage.

On the other hand, governments led by parties antithetical to LGBT rights can lock out social movement activists, who then have almost no recourse other than courts. And the regional fissures in Canada, particularly with respect to Quebec, impede movement solidarity across provincial and territorial lines. Gains in one provincial jurisdiction have provided leverage to activists elsewhere, but regionalism is a sufficiently strong force that advocates have at times been unaware of important developments in other places.

The overall impact of these contextual factors is an LGBT movement that has often been only moderately resourced and very fragmented, making any account of its emergence and evolution a complex one. It is also a movement that has been skillful at taking advantage of political and constitutional opportunities, and able to mobilize substantial community energy at moments of crisis.

The Early Decades

Canadian cities did not see the kind of early waves of sexual minority advocacy that we find in Germany and parts of Europe in the early 20th century and in the United States during the decade and a half after World War II. During the interwar period there was also little evidence of the kind of bar scene with strong lesbian or gay clientele that emerged in other countries. There was a brief exception to comparative invisibility in Montreal after World War I, when two anglophone women in Montreal established Les Mouches Fantastiques, an underground magazine that provided an outlet for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction during its two years of existence.

World War II was a modest turning point in Canada, though less important than in several European and American cities. There were opportunities for same-sex activity in the military units sent overseas in that conflict, contributing to the formation of social networks after the war (Jackson, 2004). Bars and other meeting spaces emerged more visibly in Montreal and Toronto, among them working-class bars drawing a lesbian crowd (Chamberland, 1993, 1996; Chenier, 2004; Demczuk & Remiggi, 1998). These were frequently subject to police harassment, and Canada experienced a version of the McCarthyite attack on homosexuality as damaging to societal morals and a threat to national security (Kinsman & Gentile, 2011). However, such attacks highlighted the existence of sexual diversity, and of the places where “deviants” would meet, even if they suppressed activism.

The early and middle 1960s produced a wave of political mobilization across a number of social movements in Canada, as they also did elsewhere in the world. Gay and lesbian activism, however, would emerge only slowly and sporadically. In 1964, Vancouver activists established the Association for Social Knowledge (ASK), providing social support and political advocacy over the next five years (McLeod, 1996, 2003). Also in 1964, the magazine Gay began publishing in Toronto, and during its brief existence it developed a substantial North American audience. Religious reformism calling for change in theological response to sexual diversity was spreading during this time, exemplified in the 1965 formation of the Canadian Council on Religion and the Homosexual.

Cultural production featuring positive portrayals of sexual difference was proliferating, including novels by Jane Rule and Marie-Claire Blais and the plays of Michel Tremblay. And by this time, geographic clusters of commercial establishments—bars in particular—were forming in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver (Warner, 2002, pp. 52–53). This helped broaden a sense of identity even among those who would never enter such places, laying the groundwork for expanded activism.

1969–1975: Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism

Much changed after 1969. One reason was the passage of federal legislation partially decriminalizing homosexuality and abortion, modeled on British legislation already enacted (Adam, 1987; Kinsman, 1996). Whatever the limitations in the legislation, and however determined police forces were to continue treating homosexuals as criminal, this eased the formation of advocacy groups. The second factor making this year a turning point was the dramatic surge of radical activism in the United States and Europe following New York’s Stonewall riots in June.

Later that year, the University of Toronto Homophile Association became the first enduring group informed by “gay liberation”(Warner, 2002).³ Within two years, similar groups formed on campuses and in cities across the country, including Vancouver, Saskatoon, London, Ottawa, Hamilton, Halifax, Winnipeg, and Montreal. The character of gay liberation was not much different from that of the United States and those parts of Europe where it had emerged, though with a smaller-scale surge of activist energy than in major cities elsewhere.

It is common to describe the Canadian LGBT movement in this period as torn between radical liberationism and equality-seeking assimilationism, but the reality on the ground is more complex. The most committed of the former came to recognize that highly public campaigns asserting the legitimacy of rights claims had the potential of mobilizing a broad constituency, creating a profile in the media and within the general public. Even those most skeptical of the impact of change in formal law realized the broader sociopolitical impact that such campaigns could have.

As in other countries, radical liberationism represented a wide range of analytical approaches. Many activists sought the sexual liberation of everyone and rejected the notion of a categorical distinction between gay and straight (Knegt, 2011; Warner, 2002). But as Tim McCaskell puts it, there were, from the outset, “down-to-earth” activists who focused on building the political strength and cultural vitality of distinguishable gay and lesbian constituencies (McCaskell, 2016, p. 456). There were also significant differences of view between those who rejected mainstream political channels as incapable of delivering transformative change, and others who campaigned for civil rights very much within existing legal and political frameworks. Feminism was an important analytical framework for most lesbians in the movement, but also for many men, while others argued that feminist advocacy was entirely distinct from and at times antithetical to gay liberation.

One illustration of heterogeneity, even among those fully informed by radical approaches, was the first protest march on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in 1971, an early milestone of the newly energized movement, organized largely by self-identified adherents to gay liberation. The political agenda articulated in that march included calls for the abolition of the gross indecency law, so often used by police to raid community institutions or entrap individuals, but also demands for an end to discrimination in respect to criminal justice, immigration, and employment in general, including the Armed Forces and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Adam, 1999; Knegt, 2011, pp. 34–35). In 1975, the Coalition for Gay Rights in Ontario was established by activists proudly wearing the liberationist label, but focused, through much of the group’s mandate, on securing formal rights protections in provincial human rights law (Warner, 2002). Such examples muddle the characterization of the Canadian movement as moving from radical liberationism to mainstream rights claims.

Among the groups that combined radical ideas and a focus on the rights of a definable gay and lesbian minority was Vancouver’s Gay Alliance Toward Equality, which launched a formal challenge to the Vancouver Sun’s refusal to print one of its ads soon after its formation in 1971, eventually securing a victory in the Supreme Court of Canada (Gay Alliance Toward Equality v. Vancouver Sun, 1979). Gays of Ottawa, founded in 1971, represented a similar blend and ended up as one of the country’s most enduring centers of activism.

During this time there was no sustained group with a plausible claim to representing sexual minorities across the country. In 1972 and 1974, National Gay Election Coalitions were established with a mandate to raise sexuality issues with federal candidates. The National Gay Rights Coalition (later the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Rights Coalition) was established in 1975, though its half decade of existence was marked by the scarcity of resources and the recurrence of conflict across gender lines, strategy, and political ideology. It was especially difficult for any cross-Canada network to fully include francophone Quebec activists, the vast majority of whom saw themselves as part of the nation-building project in Quebec, and were wary of anglophone dominance and justifiably suspicious of groups claiming bilingual capacity without delivering it.

Of the community newspapers that were shaped by the radical politics of this period, only The Body Politic (established in 1971) developed something of a cross-country profile (and an international readership). However, even if it devoted much print space to political developments outside its home base, it was unmistakably a product of Toronto’s activist and cultural scene (Jackson & Persky, 1982). Bookstores such as Toronto’s Glad Day and Montreal’s Androgyny were established in 1971 and 1972, and constituted vital regional activist hubs alongside the political newspapers and magazines that sprouted in every significant Canadian city. In 1983, they were joined by Vancouver’s Little Sisters, which then became a centerpiece of opposition to state-sponsored censorship of LGBT materials brought in from the United States. Alongside these were activist groups that created phone lines, self-help groups, community dances, “imperial” drag courts, and sporting teams, routinely attracting interest far beyond the still quite small clusters of political advocates, and helped build a sense of community. Canada’s first gay pride events were held in Toronto and Vancouver in 1972, though in those cities and elsewhere several years would pass before they were firmly established as annual events.

Lesbian and gay faith communities also emerged in this period, emboldened by the militancy of the explicitly political movement. In the early 1970s, such groups were formed by Unitarians, Catholics, Anglicans, members of the United Church, and Jews. In addition, Canadian branches of the American-born Metropolitan Community Church, based largely on lesbian and gay congregations, were established in Toronto and Montreal in 1973, and soon after in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, and Ottawa.

As was true in other countries, lesbians were very much under-represented in liberationist groups. They also encountered resistance in feminist circles, and their experience in these early years was a largely unhappy one (Warner, 2002, pp. 77–80). Starting in the early 1970s, autonomous lesbian groups or housing cooperatives appeared in cities across the country, as did lesbian caucuses of male-dominated organizations in the large cities (Demczuk & Remiggi, 1998; Stone, 1990; Ross, 1995). People of color were under-represented in these activist formations and in the larger array of lesbian/gay cultural and political networks. Canada’s racial demography was changing rapidly as a result of changing immigration rules in the 1960s and 1970s, but there was little sense of that in social movement advocacy.

1975–1984: Expanded Mobilization in the Face of Antigay Attacks

1985–1992: AIDS Activism, Relationship Recognition, and Expanded Political Opportunity

1993–2005: Accelerating Political Impact

2005+: Post-Marriage Complacency?

From the mid-2000s on, the LGBT movement was less able to marshal unity or a sense of urgency than before. There were large and solidly established institutions in the large cities and, increasingly, even beyond, including those that sponsored Pride-related events, film and arts festivals, and LGBT archives. Pride Toronto, the Vancouver Pride Society, and Fierté Montréal were well established. These all had important political currents, but more driven by celebration than advocacy.

The provision of social services to sexual minorities, particularly to young people and those most on the community margins, was being increased, sometimes through government-funded health and social service agencies, and sometimes through community centers that were explicitly (as in Vancouver) or de facto LGBT focused (as in Toronto). These centers were part of the movement, as were those professionals who advocated for new or enhanced services within local and regional agencies. The same was true of staff and volunteers in organizations focused on HIV/AIDS, though the diversification of communities affected by the epidemic beyond sexual minorities meant that this sector was less integrally a part of the LGBT activist movement than in the past.

By this period, there were LGBT-positive networks in a wide variety of other institutional settings—workplaces, churches and synagogues, educational institutions, government departments, professional associations, and arts bodies. Many of these had only a modest commitment to political advocacy, but they usually included some activists urging greater inclusivity. Academic centers devoted to the study of sexual diversity had emerged first in the 1990s, but now were more prominent, most notably the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre. Some such centers were well connected to advocacy networks, and facilitated media access to respected expertise in a variety of specialties associated with LGBT community life.⁵

Immigration and refugee issues were also drawing more activism than ever. In 2006, the Toronto-based group Rainbow Railroad was created to support those seeking escape from persecution, and like Egale, to work on improving Canadian government responsiveness. Groups such as this, alongside long-established networks of immigration professionals across the country, were also attentive to screening processes applied to sexual minority refugees that set either unrealistic standards for proving homosexuality or for determining the unfriendliness of places from which claimants were escaping.

Escalating trans activism significantly increased the established LGBT movement’s attention to gender identity and expression. The success of the overall LGBT movement in securing formal rights associated with sexual orientation created opportunities to extend those rights to include gender identity and expression. Efforts to secure legislative guarantees against discrimination on those grounds were finding success across the country, either in the formal addition of those terms to human rights statutes or in declarations from human rights commissions that they would interpret existing grounds to include trans rights. Federal action was delayed by the continuing resistance of a Conservative government that gained office in 2006, though its defeat in the 2015 election cleared the way for enactment of such a measure in 2017.

Despite such activist proliferation, there were fewer groups focused primarily on political advocacy than in the past. There were fewer of the bookstores and newspaper offices that had once been the heart of LGBT politics. As in other countries, the geographic “villages” in the three largest cities were less vibrant, with recurrent talk of their no longer meeting the needs of sexual minority populations. The explosive growth of the Internet may well have been a factor in the decline of such community hubs. Although expanding the ease of communication between those supporting LGBT claims, and potentially broadening the reach of advocacy groups, the development of social media may have reduced the capacity for such groups to generate serious activist energy to the work required for effective grassroots campaigning. Breadth, in other words, may have come at the expense of depth of commitment.

The two most firmly established groups explicitly focused on broad-ranged LGBT advocacy were the Toronto-based Egale Canada and the Montreal-based Coalition LGBT. Egale was still the main advocacy claiming a cross-country role, and to some extent it had adapted to the movement’s earlier gains and managed to secure sufficient funding from governments and other institutions to sustain more paid staff than at any time in the group’s history (even if still under 10). It helped mobilize support for the inclusion of trans rights in federal law during the politically unfriendly time of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. It also devoted considerable attention to schooling, part of a broader commitment to youth at risk, publishing a resource package for the formation of LGBT-inclusive student groups in the mid-2000s and releasing an influential survey of school climate in 2011 (Taylor & Peter, 2011). In 2017, it secured a formal apology from the federal government for the dismissal of thousands of government employees in the antigay purges that lasted for decades in the postwar period. Despite all this laudable work, however, it was more difficult for Egale to retain cross-country prominence. This was true everywhere, but the separation between the LGBT movement in Quebec and the rest of Canada also meant that Egale’s visibility was especially modest in that province.

In Quebec, the Coalition LGBT has played a similar role and now hosts large galas attracting politicians from across the political spectrum, as well as other mainstream community leaders (Tremblay, 2015a). It focuses less on schooling than Egale, as there are well-established groups with long experience in that domain (most notably GRIS-Montreal, La Groupe de recherche et d’intervention social de Montréal). It spends more time on parenting issues, particularly in response to the challenges faced by same-sex parents in overcoming restrictions in access to surrogacy and assisted reproduction. Another of the most established groups is the Fondation emergence, which has developed public education programs targeting prejudice and has became the major Canadian supporter of the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. Groups like the Fondation and GRIS have benefitted from the Quebec government’s cross-ministry commitment to combating homophobia and transphobia, and its willingness to fund groups engaged in that work (Quebec, 2017).⁶

In broad terms, the advocacy agenda and the array of groups articulating political goals are not categorically different from those to be found in other big cities. What is different is the extent to which the “national” question still affects the movement, at all times creating the potential for tension between anglophones and francophones and on some occasions among French-speaking activists themselves. Since 2007, the mainstream media and the political arena in Quebec have been recurrently seized by debate over the integration of immigrants, and specifically over the wearing of symbols or clothing with religious significance, in a society increasingly drawn (in principle, if often not in practice) to the kind of assertive secularism found in France. The target of such concern is unmistakably Muslims, who constitute (as in the rest of the country) the largest religious minority. When a Parti Québécois government introduced a form of “values” test for newcomers, labeled as a Quebec Charter of Values, queer activist coalitions formed on both sides of the debate (l’Association LGBT pour un Québec inclusive vs. LGBT pour la laïcité). Although there has certainly been support for such exclusionary policy in the rest of Canada, there is no credibly LGBT community voice for it anywhere outside Quebec.

There is a tendency for Canadian politicians to talk of LGBT inclusivity as a natural accompaniment to the country’s official endorsement of multiculturalism. The fact that the 2017 federal government apology for civil servant purges elicited almost no legislative opposition is one example of how little appetite there is, at least in the current leadership of the Conservative Party, for preying on opposition to public recognition of sexual diversity.

This has occasionally translated into “preachiness” toward other countries that maintain explicitly oppressive policies on sexual diversity. In general, however, the LGBT movement has been cautious about proclaiming Canada as a world leader, not least because there have been recent examples of federal and provincial governments playing to antigay sentiment. It is true that Pride groups tout the LGBT-positive environments they operate in to draw in more visitors, and certainly LGBT groups focused on immigration and refugee issues can hardly avoid acknowledging that Canada is advantageous for sexual minorities fleeing persecution. But in general, movement activists are aware of the distance still to be traveled for full-fledged inclusiveness.

“Homonationalism” is somewhat more obvious in Quebec. As Valérie Lapointe argues, Quebec’s media regularly talk of Quebec as significantly more progressive on LGBT issues in comparison to the rest of Canada (Mercure, 2018). Immigrants in general, and Muslims in particular, are also frequently characterized as the archaic “other,” juxtaposed to the thoroughly inclusive “us.” This is reflected in the approach of important currents in the LGBT movement, though the Coalition LGBT and other parts of the Montreal-based activist community have also become attuned to the racism that lies at the heart of such frameworks.

In Canada’s other large cities, race-focused challenges to established components of the LGBT movement have been more prominent since the turn of the century, and especially in the 2010s. The history of activism in Canada, as elsewhere, has been marked by recurrent critiques about exclusion, and although increased overall LGBT engagement with trans issues has diminished (not eliminated) complaints of marginalization within the movement, tensions over movement priorities and leadership from racialized minorities have intensified.

The most vocal critiques have come from queer blacks, who were prominent in the Canadian groups that formed under the banner of Black Lives Matter, originating in the United States (Walcott, 2016). Policing was a major focus, reflecting the activist preoccupations of black communities across North America. Although there were many in the LGBT community at large who believed that police forces had become genuinely more inclusive, instances of police harassment long after the period of high-profile raids in the 1970s and 1980s had maintained a degree of distrust, especially among activists representing trans people, sex workers, and racialized minorities. In 2016, Black Lives Matter protested the presence of police in Toronto’s Pride march and then secured agreement to ban uniformed police officers from participating in the 2017 parade. This was soon followed by a similar ban in Calgary and a partial ban in Vancouver. A number of other LGBT community institutions were, at the same time, coming under fire for not being sufficiently inclusive in ethno-racial terms, with black activists frequently taking the lead.

Divisions over how to address such issues are increased by the range of communities that can reasonably claim to have been largely left out of the political and institutional gains of previous decades. Blacks, for example, constitute between 15% and 20% of Canada’s visible minorities, outnumbered by those with roots in South and East Asia. Among those most dramatically on the margins of Canadian society—and LGBT communities—are Indigenous peoples, whose struggles are quite distinct from those of people of color, Muslims, and queers with disabilities.

Overall, then, the Canadian movement became more fragmented after the mid-2000s, not only as a result of the reduced role of multi-issue groups, regionalization, issue specialization, and reliance on individual court challenges, but also of disagreement over how to approach issues such as ethno-racial inequality. The relative weakness of religious conservatism has deprived the LGBT movement of the unifying force of a powerful opposition. It also produces complacency not only within sexual minority communities but in the general public as well. Emblematic of that is the 2009 decision to close up shop by the dwindling core of activists in the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario.

And yet there has still been a need for political vigilance. Between 2006 and 2015, the federal government was in the hands of a Conservative government that avoided taking on the highest profile issues pressed upon it by religiously traditionalist supporters, but it still undertook many smaller steps to signal its sympathies with their antigay agenda (Rayside et al., 2017, chap. 2). In 2017, Alberta’s reconstituted Conservative Party chose as leader a social traditionalist neoliberal with a solid record of supporting antigay measures. In Ontario, a new elementary school curriculum on sexual health provoked controversy when first introduced in 2010, in part because of its inclusive messaging around sexual diversity, and even more protest arose when it was reintroduced five years later (Rayside et al., 2017, chap. 6). Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives sided with protesters in 2010, and when that party won the 2018 provincial election, it lost no time before suspending the revised curriculum.

Conclusion

By the 2010s, religiously conservative opposition to the public recognition of sexual diversity was weaker than ever, and even conservative parties led by moral traditionalists were usually wary of appearing homophobic—admittedly with important exceptions. More common are political claims—across a wide partisan spectrum—that Canada (and Quebec) are models of inclusion worthy of international emulation. As Tim McCaskell wryly notes at the beginning of his critical assessment of “queer progress,”

As a social movement, gay rights had been successful beyond its early strategists’ wildest dreams. From a reviled, quasi-criminal class, we were now included in the constellation of minorities valued by Canadian multiculturalism.

(2016, p. 1)

Indeed, there has been a significant shift in law, public policy, institutional practice, and public attitudes. Survey questions tapping “approval” or “disapproval” of homosexuality have shown a spectacular fall in moral condemnation, from 55% “disapproving” in 1987 to 15% in 2013 (Langstaff, 2011, p. 51; Pew Research, 2013). By 2010, more than two-thirds of Canadians supported same-sex marriage.

Christian-led antigay mobilization certainly delayed the enactment of inclusive policies, in Alberta, for example, but ultimately there is no province or territory in which moral conservatives have been able to roll back gains in law, public policy, or institutional practice. On several occasions, centrist politicians with no deep-seated allegiance to the recognition of sexual diversity have recognized the electoral advantage of associating conservative opponents with homophobic extremism. The political gains effected by the LGBT movement in Canada were eased significantly by the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, though courtroom gains have to be understood as a consequence of strategic activism.

The movement’s successes have come despite its geographic fragmentation, the limits on resources, and the challenges facing any group seeking cross-Canada legitimacy. LGBT movements around the world have in most periods been primarily local or regional, but that is more the case in Canada than elsewhere. As Manon Tremblay says, activism in this country “is carved up into a checkerboard of territories, ideologies, organizations, and constituencies” (Tremblay, 2015b, p. 275). That said, there have been strong cross-regional similarities in the kinds of struggles engaged, the strategies deployed, and the political frameworks used by activists to overcome countrywide reluctance of governments to respond, which persisted into the 1990s.

The Canadian movement, not unlike movements in other places, went from one in the 1970s dominated by radical challenges to the social and institutional status quo, to one that by the 2000s had become less confrontational, less transformative in its aspirations, and more professionalized. But the makeup and outlook of the 1970s movement was more of a blend than most accounts suggest, and even if in the post-1990s environment the movement was a largely reformist one working within established social and political frameworks, we are still seeing confrontational currents emerging under the LGBT umbrella.

The Canadian LGBT movement has had no shortage of issues to take up in the period following the policy takeoff of the 1990s and early 2000s. There is an understandable concern about whether the movement’s past success has widened a sense of complacency that then diminishes its capacity to mobilize grassroots constituencies. There are also legitimate critiques pointing out that there are still sexual minority communities who experience discrimination within and beyond LGBT communities. In some cases, this has generated new activist energy, though not all such causes have unified the broad community or its most established activist networks.

LGBT community engagement and activist mobilization have been shaped by social and technological change. The much-touted connectivity associated with the Internet, for example, has enhanced the capacity to mobilize activism, but also increases isolation and potentially diminishes preparedness to join in collective action. As Robert Putnam (2000) points out, the decline of civic engagement began decades ago, long before the massive spread of the Internet. Metaphorically, he points to the shift from joining community sports leagues to “bowling alone.” LGBT community members who might once have visited clubs or bars are now less likely to, and those who might once have gone to political group meetings stay at home and assume that specialists, experts, and institutional staff will look after the issue challenges that remain.

The Canadian movement, then, is fundamentally different from that which started to surge into public view in 1969. It is less confrontational and less driven by transformative ideologies. There seem to be fewer focal points to the movement—fewer groups with wide political agendas. There is more issue specialization and more emphasis on the application of pressure inside mainstream institutional channels. There is less large-scale mobilization and perhaps less capacity for that. There remains, however, a rich set of connections within an ever-expanding range of sexual minority communities, and we are right to recognize that political energy can still be applied to insist that governments, religious institutions, employers, and service providers respond inclusively to the full range of community members asserting their rights to be included.