- Diversity and Equality: The Changing Framework of Freedom in Canada
This is a collection of essays on questions of political philosophy about the rights of minority groups and peoples that in recent years have engaged the Canadian body politic. The editor, Avigail Eisenberg, and the other eight contributors are scholars at the University of Victoria. The book shows that a lively and talented interdisciplinary community of scholars has emerged at uvic and that their work is fundamental to understanding the distinctive quality of the liberal democracy that Canada is becoming.
At one level, this is a very Canadian book. Canada’s multinational and multi-ethnic nature provide fertile ground for thinking about how the freedom of cultural and religious minorities and first peoples should be accommodated with other fundamental rights. Dealing humanely and rationally with issues of diversity, one might say, is Canada’s philosophic niche. Yet these essays also deal with issues of universal importance. In philosophically navigating their way through issues of diversity, Canadians serve as pilots for a global community whose peace and well-being increasingly depends on the accommodation of difference.
A common foil for nearly all of the essays in this collection is the presumption that there is a culturally and religiously neutral liberalism that can gauge the amount of freedom that ought to be afforded non-mainstream groups. James Tully’s opening essay sets the tone in advocating a ‘dialogical civic freedom’ through which relations among groups are worked out according to settlements reached through mutually respectful negotiations rather than top-down solutions imposed by state authorities. John McLaren and Jeremy Webber’s essays of religious freedom critique the unreflective secularism that permeates judicial decisions and systematically undervalues religious experience.
Maneesha Deckha’s feminist appraisal of cultural identity claims and Colin Macleod’s concerns about attributing cultural identity interests to children are less sanguine about the limits of cultural diversity. Deckha would resist cultural diversity claims that intersect classical equality concerns about subordination and hierarchy. Macleod questions attributing cultural interests to children when doing so imperils their non-identity interests. Choosing to place culture integrity interests ahead of other conditions of well-being, he argues, is for adults, not for children. [End Page 197]
The book gives a lot of attention to the misuse of ‘culture’ as a category of legal analysis, particularly with respect to Aboriginal peoples. Treating Indigenous peoples as cultural minorities, James Tully argues, is a serious act of mis-recognition that stands in the way of a working at reconciliation with them through respectful dialogue. Shauna McRanor is critical of the kind of liberalism that, by viewing relations with Aboriginal peoples primarily through the lens of cultural diversity, appears to accept the assertion of Euro-state sovereignty over Aboriginal peoples as unproblematic. While Avigail Eisenberg carefully rebuts arguments that claims based on cultural integrity should be dismissed because they are too inscrutable, or essentialist, or conflict-producing, she is highly critical of the way the Supreme Court of Canada has transformed disputes that are fundamentally about questionable claims of Canadian state sovereignty over Aboriginal peoples into tests of whether a particular activity is integral to a First People’s culture. Cindy Holder looks to the focus on freedom to participate in distinctive collective activities as the best guide to dealing with culture rights.
The most frequent target of criticism in the book is the Supreme Court of Canada. In the age of the Charter, the Supreme Court is called upon to act as a national political philosopher on these questions of equality and diversity. Neil Vallance’s chapter indicates that often its philosophical work in this area is pretty amateurish, and no more so than in its inconsistent and use of the term culture, a term that it has been used 494 times since 1982, but has never been defined.
All Canadians, but none more than the justices of the Supreme Court, can benefit from this thoughtful set of essays on issues at the centre of Canada’s distinctive character as a highly diverse political community...