Little Sister's receives the award from the Canadian Library Association.
In 1998, recognition for Little Sister's arrived from an unexpected corner: the library world. The Canadian Library Association honoured the store with its Award for the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom — a striking tribute to a small independent bookstore locked in a fight with its own federal government.
The award mattered because of who was giving it. Librarians are the people whose whole profession is built on the freedom to read, on the principle that access to ideas shouldn't be rationed by the state or anyone else. For that community to single out Little Sister's was to say, plainly, that the store's fight against Canada Customs wasn't a niche grievance — it was a defence of a foundational freedom that belongs to everyone.
By 1998, Little Sister's had been bombed three times, had its shelves stripped bare by customs agents, and had spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in court. The store was still awaiting its final answer from the Supreme Court of Canada, which wouldn't come until 2000. Recognition like this, in the middle of the fight, was both an encouragement and an argument: it placed the store's struggle in a long tradition of defending intellectual freedom.
It was one of many honours the store and its people would collect over the years — from Janine Fuller's honorary degree and Order of Canada to a Canada Post stamp decades later. But this one came while the outcome was still uncertain, which is exactly when it counted most.
