Commentary
In July 1940, the federal government banned Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs). As William Kaplan explains, it became “illegal for Jehovah’s Witnesses to worship God as they wished—and the law was vigorously enforced. Beatings, mob action, police persecution, as well as state persecution, were the order of the day as Jehovah’s Witnesses ignored the ban and continued to go about their work, spreading the word of God.”
The persecution of JWs led to several cases before the Supreme Court of Canada. In the Court’s 1953 Saumur decision, Justice Ivan Rand stated, “a religious incident reverberates from one end of this country to the other, and there is nothing to which the ‘body politic of the Dominion’ is more sensitive.”…