Editing Freethought (section)

====Canada====
In 1873, a handful of secularists founded the earliest known secular organization in [[English Canada]], the Toronto Freethought Association. Reorganized in 1877 and again in 1881, when it was renamed the Toronto Secular Society, the group formed the nucleus of the Canadian Secular Union, established in 1884 to bring together freethinkers from across the country.<ref>[[Ramsay Cook]], ''The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada'' (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 46–64.</ref>

A significant number of the early members appear to have come from the educated labour "aristocracy", including Alfred F. Jury, J. Ick Evans and J. I. Livingstone, all of whom were leading labour activists and secularists. The second president of the Toronto association, [[T. Phillips Thompson]], became a central figure in the city's labour and social-reform movements during the 1880s and 1890s and arguably Canada's foremost late nineteenth-century labour intellectual. By the early 1880s scattered free thought organizations operated throughout southern [[Ontario]] and parts of [[Quebec]], eliciting both urban and rural support.

The principal organ of the free thought movement in Canada was ''[[Secular Thought]]'' (Toronto, 1887–1911). Founded and edited during its first several years by English freethinker [[Charles Watts (secularist)|Charles Watts]] (1835–1906), it came under the editorship of Toronto printer and publisher James Spencer Ellis in 1891 when Watts returned to England. In 1968 the [[Humanist Association of Canada]] (HAC) formed to serve as an umbrella group for humanists, atheists, and freethinkers, and to champion social justice issues and oppose religious influence on public policy—most notably in the fight to make access to abortion free and legal in Canada.