Jehovah's Witnesses are a religious group that is an outgrowth of the Bible student movement founded by Charles Taze Russell in the nineteenth century.
When Hector Charlesworth banned this activity as well, he was "indirectly attacked" in an issue of the Golden Age and Jehovah's Witnesses launched a petition to regain their licenses that resulted in 406,270 signatures.
[11] After these bans were lifted, men who had been jailed tried to apply for the ordained minister exemption of the National Selective Service Mobilization Regulations without success.
[12] This led to a legal case being filed, R. v. Stewart, which ruled that Jehovah's Witnesses were participants in a "commercial undertaking" and did not qualify as ministers.
[13] A similar outcome was reached in Greenlees v. A.G. Canada, where the judge decided that Jehovah's Witnesses could not be ministers because they considered every member to be one and that they did not have an organizational structure independent of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Rabbi Solomon Frank, a founding member of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), advocated for the religious freedom of Jehovah's Witnesses, criticizing Quebec's government of being "anti-democratic.
[20] In response, Jehovah's Witnesses published Quebec's Burning Hate for God and Christ and Freedom is the Shame of all of Canada, which Duplessis perceived as another subversive act and copies of the tract were seized by police.
[21] In 1953, the case of Saumur v Quebec (City of) (1953) 25 CR 299 (in which a Jehovah's Witness challenged a Quebec City bylaw prohibiting public distribution of literature without a permit) left the question of religious freedom undecided as: "both Parliament and the provinces could validly limit freedom of worship providing they did so in the course of legislating on some other subject which lay within their respective powers.
[17] This decision was part of a series of cases the Supreme Court dealt with concerning the rights of Jehovah's Witnesses under the Duplessis government of Quebec.
[23] In several other cases, including Chaput v Romain (1955) and Lamb v Benoit (1959), Jehovah's Witnesses successfully sued the police for damages.
[24] In order to obtain religious freedom, Jehovah's Witnesses in Canada helped promote the creation of a national bill of rights.