Irving M. Abella, born 1940 in Toronto, Ontario, is a Canadian writer, historian and academic. He specializes in Jewish Canadian history.
His books have included Coat of Many Colours: Two Centuries of Jewish Life in Canada (1990) and None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 (1982). He is a professor at Toronto, Ontario's York University.
She is married to prominent Jewish historian IrvingAbella, a former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
Abella was passed over for the high court in 1998, when her supporters and those of John Laskin — the son of Canada’s first Jewish Chief Justice, the late Bora Laskin — engaged in bitter and unseemly lobbying for the appointment.
Abella is a self-described “Charter fan,” and has publicly slammed opponents of judicial activism, describing them as the “new inhibitors” for trying to prevent the court from expanding minority rights in Canada.
Abella was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, and came to Canada with her family in 1950.
Abella, who is considered one of Canada's foremost experts in human rights law, has also been a chair of the Ontario Labour Relations Board and the Ontario Law Reform Commission, and a board member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
Abella was the author of the 1984 federal Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, in which she coined the term employment equity, a strategy for reducing barriers in employment faced by women, non-whites, people with disabilities, and Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
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