Human Rights in Canada: A History by Dominique Clément (review)

The author of Human Rights in Canada sets out an important agenda. Dominique Clément is intent on explaining "how and when human rights became Canada's primary language for social change." (2) An important question, because, as he argues, it is in the language of human rights that Canadians have learned to "frame the most profound – and the most commonplace – grievances." Moreover, the recognition and enforcement of human rights "has proven more bitterly controversial over the past generation" than any other issue in the public sphere. (1)

Clément begins his account with a search for the origins of human rights in Canada's colonial history to World War I. He argues that the constrained notion of rights associated with British justice in the colonial history of Canada cannot be taken as human rights, or as the origin of contemporary rights talk. The British conquest brought a particular rights culture to the colonies – basic freedoms and due process, but rights talk in the 19th century encompassed only basic civil and political rights, not human rights.

This account mirrors the trajectory of the current historiography of human rights away from searches for the origins of human rights in the historical roots of modernity. Clément presents his history of human rights in Canada in a chronological narrative, but he cautions readers not to look for the development of modern human rights in a linear story of progress. Such strictures foreshadow Clement's eventual portrayal of what he terms the human rights revolution as a sudden and deep discursive rupture that ushered in the era of human rights.

Clément's hermeneutics of human rights is often a story of the transformation or invention of new languages to advance human freedom and dignity. In his account of human rights from World War I to the early 1960s, Clément discerns no human rights victories, but clear progress was made to entrench antidiscrimination laws in Canada. In the 1940s, civil liberties – historically associated with state abuse of rights – were redefined to include the principle of non-discrimination in the public and private spheres. Ontario passed Canada's first antidiscrimination law in 1944. Clément's later focus on the agency of social movements in Canada's "rights revolution" is anticipated here in his account of the role of activists associated with the Jewish Labour Committee campaign to ban discrimination in employment and accommodation.

Some historians of human rights, pointing to the postwar creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations, and the European Convention on Human Rights, have rooted the origin of the modern human rights regime in the late 1940s. Clément rejects this origins story and periodization. In his view, "human rights has evolved in Canada not because of the existence of some abstract principle or in response to global developments, but because of circumstances specific to this country." (20) Moreover, the language of "human rights" was nowhere part of postwar public discourse in Canada. In the 1940s and 1950s Canadians were concerned with civil rights not human rights.

In an implicit manner, language and subjectivity are at the center of Clément's account of human rights in Canada. He is sensitive to the social and political implications of rights talk noting that the perpetuation of the language of civil rights forestalled debate on the broader terrain of human rights. The founding documents of both the Canadian Civil Liberties Union and the Association for Civil Liberties, Clement notes, defined rights as civil and political rights. It was the civil rights of Canadians that were at stake in the debates over the treatment of Japanese Canadians during World War II and the Star Chamber methods employed during the Gouzenko Affair.

Though Clément seems determined to distance his account of human rights in Canada from the burgeoning and inchoate historiography of human rights, he does appear to embrace Samuel Moyn's thesis advanced in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard...