Maher Arar is a telecommunications engineer with dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship who has resided in Canada since 1987.
John Carnell Crosbie, was a Canadian provincial and federal politician who served as the 12th lieutenant governor of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Prior to being lieutenant governor, he served as a provincial cabinet minister under Premiers Joey Smallwood and Frank Moores as well as a federal cabinet minister during the Progressive Conservative (PC) governments of Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney. Crosbie held several federal cabinet posts, including minister of finance, minister of justice, minister of transport, minister of international trade, and minister of fisheries and oceans.
Transgender rights in Canada, including procedures for changing legal gender and protections from discrimination, vary among provinces and territories, due to Canada's nature as a federal state. According to the 2021 Canadian census, 59,460 Canadians identify as transgender.
In Canada, the Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s, about 30 percent of Indigenous children were attending residential schools. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 30,000, mostly from disease.
Ezra Isaac Levant is a Canadian conservative media personality, political activist, writer, broadcaster, and former lawyer. Levant is the founder and former publisher of the conservative magazine, The Western Standard. He is also the co-founder, owner, and CEO of the far-right media website Rebel News. Levant has also worked as a columnist for Sun Media, and he hosted a daily program on the Sun News Network from the channel's inception in 2011 until its demise in 2015.
Omar Ahmed Said Khadr is a Canadian citizen who at the age of 15 was detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay for ten years, during which he pleaded guilty to the murder of U.S. Army Sergeant 1st Class Christopher Speer and other charges. He later appealed his conviction, claiming that he falsely pleaded guilty so that he could return to Canada where he remained in custody for three additional years. Khadr sued the Canadian government for infringing his rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; this lawsuit was settled in 2017 with a CA$10.5 million payment and an apology by the federal government.
A truth commission, also known as a truth and reconciliation commission or truth and justice commission, is an official body tasked with discovering and revealing past wrongdoing by a government, in the hope of resolving conflict left over from the past. Truth commissions are, under various names, occasionally set up by states emerging from periods of internal unrest, civil war, or dictatorship marked by human rights abuses. In both their truth-seeking and reconciling functions, truth commissions have political implications: they "constantly make choices when they define such basic objectives as truth, reconciliation, justice, memory, reparation, and recognition, and decide how these objectives should be met and whose needs should be served".
Canadian lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights are some of the most extensive in the world. Same-sex sexual activity was made lawful in Canada on June 27, 1969, when the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968–69 was brought into force upon royal assent. In a landmark decision in 1995, Egan v Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada held that sexual orientation is constitutionally protected under the equality clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 2005, Canada was the fourth country in the world, and the first in the Americas, to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide.
The Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup was a mass arrest of foreign Jewish families by French police and gendarmes at the behest of the German authorities, that took place in Paris on 16 and 17 July 1942. According to records of the Préfecture de Police, 13,152 Jews were arrested, including more than 4,000 children.
Canada and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia share robust economic ties; Saudi Arabia represents Canada's second largest trading partner in the Middle East, a relation that was bolstered in February 2014 with the purchase of C$15 billion worth of Canadian arms by Saudi Arabia. Until August 2018, there were over 16,000 Saudi students on government scholarships in Canada.
The International Grenfell Association (IGA) is an organization founded by Sir Wilfred Grenfell to provide health care, education, religious services, and rehabilitation and other social activities to the fisherman and coastal communities in northern Newfoundland and the coast of Labrador.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was a truth and reconciliation commission active in Canada from 2008 to 2015, organized by the parties of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.
Canada–China relations, or Sino-Canadian relations, officially date back to 1942, when Canada sent an ambassador to China. Before then, Canada had been represented by the British ambassador. The Communist victory (1949) in the Chinese Civil War caused a break in relations that lasted until 1970, when Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau became one of the first Western leaders to recognize the People's Republic of China.
A Canadian captured by American forces in Afghanistan at the age of 15, Omar Khadr is currently on interim release from prison in Canada pending an appeal of his war-crimes conviction before a military commission in Guantanamo Bay. Formerly the only Western citizen remaining in Guantanamo, Khadr is unique in that Canada refused to seek extradition or repatriation despite the urgings of Amnesty International, the Canadian Bar Association and other prominent organisations. His lawyer Dennis Edney has summarised the differential response towards Khadr stating that "one of the problems" with defending the youth is that he's a member of the Khadr family rather than "a Smith or an Arar"
Reparations are broadly understood as compensation given for an abuse or injury. The colloquial meaning of reparations has changed substantively over the last century. In the early 1900s, reparations were interstate exchanges that were punitive mechanisms determined by treaty and paid by the surrendering side of conflict, such as the World War I reparations paid by Germany and its allies. Reparations are now understood as not only war damages but also compensation and other measures provided to victims of severe human rights violations by the parties responsible. The right of the victim of an injury to receive reparations and the duty of the part responsible to provide them has been secured by the United Nations.
Anna-Louise Crago is a Canadian activist, researcher and author in the field of Sex workers' rights. She has also researched violence and other human rights abuses against sex workers, the homeless and drug addicts in more than 25 countries. Crago is a former sex worker, and has had several works published.
The foreign policy of Justin Trudeau is Canada's foreign policy since Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in November 2015. Mélanie Joly has served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs since October 2021.
Sarah AnalaC.M., is a Canadian social worker, particularly with the indigenous peoples of her country.
Pope Francis visited Canada from July 24 to 29, 2022, with stops in the provinces of Alberta and Quebec and the territory of Nunavut. The trip mainly focused on apologizing for the Catholic Church's role in the Canadian Indian residential school system and reconciliation with the country's Indigenous peoples. It was the first papal visit to Canada since 2002, when Pope John Paul II visited Toronto for World Youth Day.
