Taking Liberties: A History of Human Rights in Canada, ed. David Goutor and Stephen Heathorn

This collected volume, arising from an international workshop held at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, represents a significant contribution to the study of human rights. Because of the richness and variety of its contents (which cover everything from labour rights to the rights of indigenous peoples, to the rights of gays and lesbians) the book makes substantive interventions in a broad range of fields and will consequently interest diverse audiences inside and outside academia. Taken as a whole, this book offers a revisionist account, which corrects the sometimes overly sunny appraisal of Canada’s domestic human-rights record and its record in promoting human rights abroad. One of the most striking points emphasised here is the great reluctance with which the Canadian government supported the establishment of an international human rights regime in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. The ‘golden age’ of Canadian foreign policy, a time when Canadian diplomats played a creative and influential role in constructing many of the institutions of post-war global governance, did not extend to rights. Although later generations would point to the involvement of Canadian legal scholar John Humphrey in drafting the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR), Humphrey participated in this project not as a representative of the Canadian government, but as a member of the UN secretariat. Humphrey, in fact, was highly critical of the Canadian government’s position on human rights, which he characterised as ‘skeptical’ and almost antagonistic (p. 88). To understand Canada’s initially negative attitude towards human rights, we have to enter (as this book does very ably) into the world of small ‘l’ liberalism and laissez-faire government which shaped so many of Canada’s diplomatic and political elites in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. While committed to what they regarded as traditional British notions of liberty, justice and fair play, these men largely saw attempts to develop an international framework of legally binding human rights as wrong-headed and ill conceived. As Jennifer Tunnicliffe shows in her important contribution to this volume, the Canadian government held deep misgivings about the inclusion of economic and social rights in the UNDHR and in the later international covenants on rights debated and eventually adopted by the UN. It was felt by Canadian policy-makers that these social provisions would entail an unprecedented degree of government interference in the lives of Canadians. This, of course, was absolutely true. As the contributors to the book reveal, many of the most important rights secured through grass-roots activism in the mid to late twentieth century did indeed represent a new degree of government intervention in realms that many Canadians would have associated with the private sphere. Some of the earliest human rights established in Canada were labour rights, which impinged upon the private rights of employers to run their businesses in the manner they saw fit. Similarly, later efforts to secure the right to non-discrimination in employment and accommodation also led to a more intrusive state presence in the everyday practices of employers and landlords. The enactment of human-rights measures of this kind required a considerable ‘revolution of mentalities’, to borrow the words of Michael Behiels. The extent of this revolution is all the more evident when one considers just how ingrained laissez-faire thinking was in Canadian society and its institutions, including the law. In his contribution, James W. St.G. Walker tells the story of Fred Christie, a black man who was refused service at a Montreal bar in 1936, and whose suit against the tavern owner eventually made its way to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Christie case focused on the issue of rights, but here the right in question turned out to be the right of a business owner to do business (or not, in Mr Christie’s case) with whomsoever he chose. As the Supreme Court put it: ‘Any merchant is free to deal as he may choose with any individual member of the public’ (p. 38). Just as telling as the Court’s complicity with racism was its inflexible commitment to the private rights of the business owner—an example of just how durable the principle of state ‘non-interference’ was in Canada during the mid-twentieth century. It would, of course, be easy to dismiss these attitudes as just another set of primitive mentalities which lie, thankfully, in the past; but the contributors to this book are too proficient a group of historians to do that. Rather, these authors seek to historicise human rights and the variety of social forces which facilitated and impeded their development. As this book constantly reminds us, our contemporary understanding of rights and freedoms is startlingly new and, in many ways, is discontinuous with older notions of liberty. Indeed, many of the authors point out that human rights remain a highly contested idea in Canada. The rights of the individual championed in the mid to late twentieth century by Canadian political figures such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau sit uneasily alongside the claims to collective rights often advanced on behalf of First Nations peoples and francophone Quebeckers. And the social and economic rights which vexed Canadian diplomats and their government in the 1950s and ’60s remain largely alien to Canada’s human-rights regime. Canadians today might be puzzled about their government’s hesitancy towards human rights in the 1950s, but for the most part they have not shown themselves any more eager to enshrine social and economic guarantees in law. Canadians’ relationship with rights (political and social, individual and collective) thus remains complex, and it is a signal contribution of this book to remind us that conceptions of rights continue to be products of historical contingency.

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