Via the
Canadian Legal History Blog, we have word of a new release from the University of British Columbia Press (co-published with the Osgoode Society):
Equality Deferred: Sex Discrimination and British Columbia's Human Rights State, 1953-84 (May 2014), by Dominique Clément (University of Alberta). Here's a description from the Press:
In Equality Deferred, Dominique Clément
traces the history of sex discrimination in Canadian law and the origins
of human rights legislation, demonstrating how governments inhibit the
application of their own laws, and how it falls to social movements to
create, promote, and enforce these laws.
Focusing on British Columbia -- the first jurisdiction to prohibit
discrimination on the basis of sex -- Clément documents a variety of
absurd, almost unbelievable, acts of discrimination. The province was at
the forefront of the women's movement, which produced the country's
first rape crisis centres, first feminist newspaper, and first battered
women's shelters. And yet nowhere else in the country was human rights
law more contested. For an entire generation, the province's two
dominant political parties fought to impose their respective vision of
the human rights state. This history of human rights law, based on
previously undisclosed records of British Columbia's human rights
commission, begins with the province’s first equal pay legislation in
1953 and ends with the collapse of the country's most progressive human
rights legal regime in 1984.
This book is not only a testament to the revolutionary impact of human
rights on Canadian law but also a reminder that it takes more than laws
to effect transformative social change.
A few blurbs:
"Curious
about the origins of our human rights protections? This marvellous book
presents fascinating insights. It romps through stories of the
courageous individuals who claimed those human rights. It profiles the
discriminators in all their egregious glory. And it probes the
underbelly of the Canadian state that mediated between the two.
Dominique Clément is by turns brilliant, challenging, and inspiring.
Read this and ponder our history ... and our future."
-- Constance Backhouse
"Dominique Clément's book is timely. The purpose and value of human
rights are being challenged in the press and even in parliament. If we
are to avoid an extended era of human rights retrenchment, it is
important to learn what has been accomplished and how human rights codes
and commissions have affected our lives."
-- James W. St. G. Walker
More information is available here.
