Stop the Presses: A Brief History of Literary Censorship in Canada

While most of us would like to believe that Canadians have always stood for the freedom of expression that we enjoy today, the facts tell a different story, particularly with regards to the control of print media. Beginning in the seventeenth century, with the banning of Molière’s Tartuffe in Quebec City, the struggle for literary expression has been ongoing. The works of Balzac, James Joyce, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood have each seen legal and community challenges in Canada, as have titles by some rather more surprising authors such as Morley Callaghan and W.O. Mitchell. As custom and standards have evolved over time, so has the response by Canadians to what constitutes suitable accommodation for self-expression. That process is necessarily open-ended and is certainly not without tension. 

This lecture, Stop the Presses: A Brief History of Literary Censorship in Canada, narrated by PJ Carefoote, the head of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Toronto, looks at the ways in which Canada has a long record of imperfectly, but consistently, making this democratic ideal a reality.