The presentation will encompass a history of LGBTQ2+ Canada with a focus on Canadian LGBTQ2+ employment discrimination starting in the 1970s. Utilizing pieces of the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives extensive collection archivist Lucie Handley-Girard will bring LGBTQ2+ history to light. The talk will highlight specific court cases that have changed the course of LGBTQ2+ rights in Canada, as well as instances of discrimination that have gotten less national media and legal traction but nevertheless showcase human rights violations, hate crimes, and the consequences of being out and outed in Canadian workplaces over time.

Learning Goals:

• The struggle for LGBTQ2+ rights in Canada
• How legal cases drove LGBTQ2+ rights forward
• The experiences of LGBTQ2+ people in employment

Audience:

• General employee populations
• LGBTQ2+ Employee Resource Group members
• Lawyers and legal professionals

Presenter:

Lucie Handley-Girard (she/her), Archivist, The ArQuives 

Lucie Handley-Girard (she/her) has served as an Archivist at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives since 2017. She holds a BA and a Masters of Information both from the University of Toronto. In 2016 she was the Archives Assistant at The ArQuives and previously worked in records management. She currently sits on the Association for Canadian Archivists’ Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Taskforce. She was Digital Archivist for The Family Camera Network, a SSHRC-funded archival project focused on collecting oral histories and the family photographs of queer and trans migrants. Her research interests include community archives, archives as practice vs. theory, memory, and archives as spaces for activism and resistance.

The ArQuives is one of the largest independent LGBTQ2+ archives in the world and the only archive in Canada with a mandate to collect at a national level. Founded out of The Body Politic newspaper collection in 1973, its mandate is to safeguard the LGBTQ2+ history of Canada. The archives formally incorporated in 1980 and following a legal challenge was granted charitable status in 1981. Today, The ArQuives preserves a wide range of material including personal and organizational papers, books, monographs, photographs, moving images, sound recordings, periodicals, artifacts (like buttons, board games, t-shirts, and banners), and other reference material.