Canada Post honoured Little Sister's, recognizing the store as one of the country's most significant queer historic sites.
There's an irony here that nobody at the store misses. For the better part of two decades, the Government of Canada treated Little Sister's as a problem to be managed — seizing its shipments at the border, deeming its books “obscene,” dragging its owners through a legal fight that cost a quarter of a million dollars and ran all the way to the Supreme Court. On June 4, 2026, the Government of Canada put Little Sister's on a stamp.
Canada Post released it as part of the Places of Pride collection, which honours the sites and events that shaped 2SLGBTQIA+ history in this country. The stamp features the people at the heart of the store: Jim Deva, Bruce Smyth, Janine Fuller — and Little Sister, the cat who gave the bookstore its name. It was designed by Kelly Small and illustrated by Tim Singleton.
It's a small object, and it carries an enormous amount of history. A business the federal government once tried to shut down is now part of Canada's official visual record, celebrated by a federal Crown corporation as a place of national pride. That arc — from target to tribute — says something about how far the country has moved, and about what happens when people refuse to be silenced.
Jim and Bruce opened a bookstore because they couldn't find their own stories in print. Janine spent twenty-five years making sure those stories kept reaching the shelves. The stamp says, in the smallest and most official way possible: this mattered, this was real, and it's worth remembering. Not bad for a second-floor walk-up named after a cat.
