Equality Deferred: Sex Discrimination and British Columbia's Human Rights State, 1953–84 by Dominique Clément (review)

This is an important book. Written by a historical sociologist, Equality Deferred employs British Columbia as a case study of the emerging Canadian human rights state. The volume begins in the 1950s, setting out the state of rights in the national context during an era when access to education, employment, accommodation, and services was routinely denied to women, Jews, Indigenous peoples, and visible minorities. The focus then narrows to bc in the late 1960s and 1970s, when a mosaic of progressive social movements placed rights squarely on the public agenda, resulting in new human rights laws and structures. By the 1980s, Clément reports in the final section of his study, each Canadian province had human rights legislation and the administration for enforcement, research, education, and legal reform, while notions of human rights had expanded to include sexual orientation, physical appearance, and disability.

As any Canadian historian with even a fleeting familiarity with bc would guess, the tidy storyline I set out above was fractured and twisted by intense political upheaval and widely divergent understandings of human rights. Lined up on one side was the Social Credit Party, linked with business interests big and small and dominated by white men of privilege. Standing in opposition was the provincial New Democratic Party (ndp), representing organized labour and ordinary people, and allied with a plethora of social change organizations. Clément writes that he concentrated on bc and women because the province was a human rights pioneer and innovator, and redressing gender inequalities became a focus of action in his period; however, I think the bc story also serves as a critical cautionary tale of democracy's fault lines. In 1969, the Social Credit government passed a Human Rights Act and shuffled one lone career bureaucrat into place to administer the new law. Four years later, the short-lived ndp government moved quickly to put the bc Human Rights Code in place and to establish a Human Rights Commission and an activist Human Rights Branch with multiple districts and a mandate to investigate all complaints, support complainants, and enforce rulings. Returning to power in 1975, the Social Credit Party set about dismantling what their predecessors had created. In 1983, before the relevant Bill 27 had even made its way through the provincial legislature, all human rights staff were dismissed, the commission disbanded, and regional offices closed. Thwarted by protest coming all the way from local grassroots groups to national and international organizations, the Social Credit government withdrew momentarily, only to fold their plan to hobble the human rights process into a comprehensive restraint package. When I joined more than forty thousand fellow Solidarity protestors at Vancouver's Empire Stadium in August 1983, I was furious at the loss of funding for important women's services like Rape Relief and the slashing of government jobs, but I was most deeply troubled by the systemic effort to dismantle bc's human rights state–clearly a serious attack on democracy masked as fiscally responsible policy. I did not know that I was witnessing the birth of neo-liberalism in my home province.

The complexity of this history clearly made the organization of this book a challenge. I found repetition of material and interpretive confusion in sections covering boards of inquiry and their chairs, to give just one example. A bird's-eye global edit would have been helpful here. Yet, an attention to detail is also one of the great strengths of Equality Deferred. Clément writes feminism into Canadian human rights policy, telling the stories of the brave women who risked ridicule and much worse to pursue complaints alongside a series of biographical portraits of key female bureaucrats: Kathleen Ruff, Shelagh Day, Hanne Jensen–all strong feminists who brought passion and scholarly and experiential knowledge of human rights to government. Similarly, the inclusion of rural human rights practice and a sensitivity...