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Labour Journal of Canadian Labour Studies Le Travail Revue d’Études Ouvrières Canadiennes

Dominique Clément, in : A History Tom Mitchell

Volume 83, printemps 2019

URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1061046ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.1353/llt.2019.0014

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Éditeur(s) Canadian Committee on Labour History

ISSN 0700-3862 (imprimé) 1911-4842 (numérique)

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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

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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. of human rights that 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 , and the European of rights associated with British justice Convention on Human Rights, have root- in the colonial 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 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 ’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 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. Nonetheless, early 1900s. Williams was a First World Clément has rendered a great service to War veteran who acquired a half section scholars and the general public in com- of land in 1921 in the Semans district as posing this account of the history of a part of the soldier settlement program. human rights in Canada for there is no The 1920s was a turning point in the his- doubt that human rights has been and re- tory of the province: gone forever was the mains at the centre of a deep transforma- false optimism and boosterism of Clifford tion of the Canadian social order. Sifton when it was said that wheat was Tom Mitchell king and that Saskatchewan held the key Brandon University to Canada’s future. During the 1920s the farm movement was radicalized, the wheat pool was organized, and various John F. Conway, The Prairie Populist: forms of independent political action George Hara Williams and the Untold were considered as farmers attempted to Story of the ccf (Regina: University of make a living under increasingly difficult Regina Press 2018) circumstances. George Williams became involved in all aspects of this struggle Much has been written about the Co- and in 1929 was elected president of the operative Commonwealth Federation United Farmers of Canada (Saskatchewan (ccf) in Canada. Surprisingly, however, Section). The Great Depression followed; little of the academic work has focused an already vulnerable wheat economy directly on where the ccf was most suc- collapsed, devastating what was then an cessful. Why did a socialist party emerge overwhelmingly rural province. in Saskatchewan, and how did it become In 1932 George Williams played a so deeply entrenched in an overwhelm- major role in the creation of the Farmer- ingly agricultural province? Why did Labour Party, the forerunner of the Saskatchewan become Canada’s ccf Saskatchewan ccf. Williams was elect- province? Such questions have not been ed to the Saskatchewan Legislature in satisfactorily answered. In 1950 the po- the 1934 provincial election, the riding litical sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, that he would represent for the rest of in his classic work Agrarian Socialism his life. In 1935 he became the provin- (Berkeley: University of California cial leader of the ccf and, during the Press), began to examine this case of next five years, was the central figure in Saskatchewan exceptionalism. And now successfully establishing and building

Mitchell