The 1960s have a special place in the cultural memory of the West Coast of Canada. They have informed its regional identity, the cityscape of Vancouver, and the social infrastructure of the modern state. But lost in the mythos that has surrounded Vancouver’s long sixties is the story of the Georgia Straight. Founded by a group of poets in 1967 to combat a campaign launched by the municipal government to discriminate against the counterculture, it is today, in 2018, the most prosecuted newspaper in Canadian history. Between 1967 and 1972, the municipal and provincial government deliberately took advantage of the legal justice system to censor an outlet for dissent, with the end goal of inhibiting it from publishing. This thesis challenges popular conceptions of the 1960s in British Columbia’s popular memory by demonstrating the extent to which the state deliberately censored freedom of expression by attempting to silence an outlet for dissent, and highlights how the municipal and provincial government infringed on the civil liberties of Vancouver’s counterculture community, in one instance in August 1971, threatening it with outright violence. / Graduate