The last in a series of related court cases, the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Noble and Wolf v. Alley erected significant barriers against the enforcement of racial and religious restrictive covenants by invoking a strict reading of covenant doctrine and by questioning the clarity of racialized language. The case became a prominent step in the legal struggle against discrimination and for human rights in the mid-20th century.
Litigating the case constituted an important component of a multi-faceted attack on racial and religious discrimination mounted in the middle of the 20th century by the Canadian Jewish Congress and other voluntary associations, ultimately leading to the enactment of human rights and anti-discrimination legislation in Ontario in the decade that followed. After the highly publicized litigation and the Supreme Court’s decision, the popular view was that racial and religious restrictive covenants were unenforceable, public opinion was against them, and legislation outlawed them in several provinces.
The Supreme Court of Canada hands down hundreds of decisions every decade and, important though each judgement is in resolving a legal dispute, few are true landmarks in Canadian jurisprudence. Noble and Wolf v. Alley is widely considered to be one of those landmark rulings. Decided in 1951, the case pitted a property seller, Ms. Noble, and a buyer, Mr. Wolf, against a neighbourhood association (Alley et al.) seeking to enforce a legal agreement whose restrictive ownership clauses prevented certain groups from purchasing or renting property in a vacation development near Grand Bend, Ontario. These kinds of covenants were commonly used in real-estate agreements in the first half of the 20th century to create private communities segregated on the grounds of race or religion by discriminating against unwelcome target groups.
The court’s ruling declared invalid the section of the agreement which required that owners, renters or occupiers of the property must be “persons of the white or Caucasian race ….” The court decided that this restriction was unenforceable because it ran with the owner rather than with the land, contrary to common law covenant doctrine. Additionally, the Supreme Court ruled the covenant to be void for uncertainty because its racialized language was unclear. The effect of the decision was to question the legal status of any existing discriminatory property covenant based on race or religion. The ruling reinforced efforts by advocacy groups such as the Canadian Jewish Congress to outlaw these kinds of weapons of discrimination, efforts which led several provincial legislatures to outlaw them by the early 1950s. The Supreme Court’s decision constituted an important step in the broader battle for human rights and against discrimination on racial and religious grounds in Canada.
