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Dominique Clément, Human Rights in Canada: a History Tom Mitchell Document généré le 25 sept. 2021 17:18 Labour Journal of Canadian Labour Studies Le Travail Revue d’Études Ouvrières Canadiennes Dominique Clément, Human Rights in Canada: A History Tom Mitchell Volume 83, printemps 2019 URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1061046ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.1353/llt.2019.0014 Aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) Canadian Committee on Labour History ISSN 0700-3862 (imprimé) 1911-4842 (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer ce compte rendu Mitchell, T. (2019). Compte rendu de [Dominique Clément, Human Rights in Canada: A History]. Labour / Le Travail, 83, 265–267. https://doi.org/10.1353/llt.2019.0014 All Rights Reserved © Canadian Committee on Labour History Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS / 265 Dominique Clément, Human Rights in or invention of new languages to advance Canada: A History (Waterloo: Wilfrid human freedom and dignity. In his ac- Laurier University Press 2016) count of human rights from World War I to the early 1960s, Clément discerns no The author of Human Rights in human rights victories, but clear progress Canada sets out an important agenda. was made to entrench antidiscrimination Dominique Clément is intent on explain- laws in Canada. In the 1940s, civil liber- ing “how and when human rights became ties – historically associated with state Canada’s primary language for social abuse of rights – were redefined to in- change.” (2) An important question, be- clude the principle of non-discrimination cause, as he argues, it is in the language in the public and private spheres. Ontario of human rights that Canadians have passed Canada’s first antidiscrimination learned to “frame the most profound law in 1944. Clément’s later focus on the – and the most commonplace – griev- agency of social movements in Canada’s ances.” Moreover, the recognition and “rights revolution” is anticipated here in enforcement of human rights “has proven his account of the role of activists associ- more bitterly controversial over the past ated with the Jewish Labour Committee generation” than any other issue in the campaign to ban discrimination in em- public sphere. (1) ployment and accommodation. Clément begins his account with a Some historians of human rights, search for the origins of human rights in pointing to the postwar creation of the Canada’s colonial history to World War Universal Declaration of Human Rights I. He argues that the constrained notion by the United Nations, and the European of rights associated with British justice Convention on Human Rights, have root- in the colonial history of Canada cannot ed the origin of the modern human rights be taken as human rights, or as the origin regime in the late 1940s. Clément rejects of contemporary rights talk. The British this origins story and periodization. In conquest brought a particular rights cul- his view, “human rights has evolved in ture to the colonies – basic freedoms and Canada not because of the existence of due process, but rights talk in the 19th some abstract principle or in response century encompassed only basic civil and to global developments, but because of political rights, not human rights. circumstances specific to this country.” This account mirrors the trajectory (20) Moreover, the language of “human of the current historiography of human rights” was nowhere part of postwar pub- rights away from searches for the origins lic discourse in Canada. In the 1940s and of human rights in the historical roots of 1950s Canadians were concerned with modernity. Clément presents his history civil rights not human rights. of human rights in Canada in a chrono- In an implicit manner, language and logical narrative, but he cautions read- subjectivity are at the center of Clément’s ers not to look for the development of account of human rights in Canada. He modern human rights in a linear story is sensitive to the social and political of progress. Such strictures foreshadow implications of rights talk noting that Clement’s eventual portrayal of what he the perpetuation of the language of civil terms the human rights revolution as a rights forestalled debate on the broader sudden and deep discursive rupture that terrain of human rights. The founding ushered in the era of human rights. documents of both the Canadian Civil Clément’s hermeneutics of human Liberties Union and the Association for rights is often a story of the transformation Civil Liberties, Clement notes, defined LABOUR / LE TRAVAIL, ISSUE 83 (2019), ISSN 0700-3862 266 / LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL 83 rights as civil and political rights. It was civil liberties in public discourse.”(85) the civil rights of Canadians that were at Through these developments, the “inex- stake in the debates over the treatment of orable evolution of human rights would Japanese Canadians during World War soon lead to a moment in history that rev- II and the Star Chamber methods em- olutionized Canada’s rights culture.”(87) ployed during the Gouzenko Affair. Supplanted or evolved? Clément nowhere Though Clément seems determined to suggests a kind of Hegelian provenance distance his account of human rights in of human rights in Canada, always im- Canada from the burgeoning and incho- manent in earlier languages, now present ate historiography of human rights, he in the guise of human rights, so we have does appear to embrace Samuel Moyn’s a rights revolution of sudden origin that thesis advanced in The Last Utopia: supplants an existing language of rights. Human Rights in History (Cambridge: The human rights revolution took Harvard University Press, 2010) that the its most material form in legislation. provenance of the rights revolution was a The passage of British Columbia’s 1974 sudden and deep ideological and discur- Human Rights Code marked a critical sive transformation during which “the moment in Canadian human rights his- moral world of Westerners shifted, open- tory. Clément describes this code as “per- ing a space for the sort of utopianism haps the most progressive human rights that coalesced in an international human law in the world.”(93) The inclusion of rights movement that had never existed “reasonable cause” in the BC code banned before.” (1) Moyn’s human rights activists all forms of discrimination unless the had come to view anti-colonialism, na- accused could demonstrate reasonable tionalism, and socialism as false utopias. cause. Legal reform was also at the cen- In Canada, Clément argues, rights tre of the rights revolution. The equal- talk replaced the languages of socialism, ity section of the Charter of Rights and Christianity, citizenship, or industrial Freedoms would redefine the Canadian justice to become the common vernacu- law on human rights in family law, crimi- lar in Canada for framing grievances. nal law, employment law, and sexual ori- Moyn’s human rights heroes are ngos entation. Dissent, reaction, controversy, and activists in civil society; Clément’s and political activism on the right were rights revolution was the product of so- not unexpected products of the rights cial movements peopled by student ad- revolution. herents of the New Left, Second Wave The rights revolution, it might be ar- feminists, gay rights and Aboriginal ac- gued, is a product of changes in how tivists, among others, who embraced hu- Canadians imagine their relationships man rights as a vision for social change. with one another and the state. The late The language of rights rooted in “the Benedict Anderson famously noticed principle that non-discrimination was a how the workings of the human imagina- fundamental human right” (95) was the tion were central to the social relations of common denominator that united all. human beings. Unfortunately, the cogni- Clément credits the October Crisis and tive processes of the human imagination the use of War Measures Act as the cata- and the processes that shape the imagi- lysts of Canada’s rights revolution. Like native rendering of social life by indi- the Gouzenko Affair, the October Crisis vidual Canadians are not addressed here. launched debates about civil liberties in Clément may have missed an important Canada over the course of which the lan- opportunity. Rather than brusquely dis- guage of human rights was “supplanting missing the likes of Grotius and Locke DOI: 10.1353/llt.2019.0014 REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS / 267 from the Canadian story because, he John Conway, another political soci- asserts, neither seriously considered ex- ologist, has contributed greatly to what tending equal rights to all human beings, Lipset began so long ago. In this impor- he might have enriched his analysis of hu- tant book, Conway argues, as Lipset had man rights in Canada by exploring how earlier, that the ccf in Saskatchewan at Charles Taylor, relying on Anderson and its heart was a rural phenomenon. Its the seminal work of Jürgen Habermas, radicalism was rural; it was the farm- has illuminated how Grotius and Locke, ers who turned to democratic socialism. among others, bequeathed the imagina- And, John Conway shows that George tive moral terrain on which rights that Hara Williams was at the centre of what are prior to and untouchable by political occurred. structures – human rights – first became George Williams was not a pioneer visible. It was on this protean terrain settler in Saskatchewan and was not a that the campaign for contemporary hu- product of the wheat boom era of the man rights has been waged.
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