Canadian Civil Liberties Association

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA; French: Association Canadienne des Libertés Civiles) is a nonprofit organization in Canada devoted to the defence of civil liberties and constitutional rights.

The CCLA was founded in 1964 in Toronto, prompted by the Ontario's government's proposal of a bill that would have granted special powers to the police in the face of a rise in organized crime. Its predecessor was the Association for Civil Liberties (ACL), which at its foundation had been intended to address national issues, but had become focused primarily on issues in Ontario. The ACL was led by Irving Himel, and in response to the bill, he gathered human rights leaders in Toronto, including Pierre Berton, June Callwood, Bora Laskin, Mark MacGuigan, Harry Arthurs, and John Keiller MacKay, and they formed the CCLA with Mackay as its honorary president.

In 1968, the CCLA won a grant from the Ford Foundation to study due process in Canadian lower courts and used the findings as a guide for its advocacy in the ensuing years.

The CCLA was one of the few groups in Canada that protested the 1970 invocation of the War Measures Act by then Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau in response to the October Crisis in Quebec.

In the opinion of Dominique Clément, its most enduring contribution was its influence on the drafting of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was enacted in 1982.