Editorial

For more than a quarter century, Dianne Pothier—as teacher, scholar, practitioner, colleague, mentor, and citizen—has been a leader in the pursuit of substantive equality in Canada. Sometimes alone, and sometimes in collaboration with others, Dianne has fused her outstanding analytical skills with the ambitious aspiration of challenging the deep structures of inequality in Canada. The title of this special volume of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (CJWL) is inspired by a piece authored by Dianne in 1994 in the Alberta Law Review. In that piece, Dianne underscores the challenges of working through the multi-faceted nature of equity and access issues and urges us, in the light of Bertha Wilson’s Task Force report, to expand our conceptual horizons.¹ This volume seeks to do that by taking on the still seemingly radical act of explicitly centring disability feminisms.

Critical disability scholars have explored how we contextualize, design, construct, and enforce education, communication, work, and benefits regimes, for example, in ways that are fundamentally rooted in the exclusion of people with mental and physical disabilities. Despite this growing body of work, feminist legal scholarship still struggles to take seriously the claims of critical disability scholarship and to bring to that scholarship the insights of feminisms in the context of law, social-legal inquiry, and legal regulation.

Looking through past volumes of the CJWL reveals that even it, a journal focused on the interactions of sex and gender in a broader frame of the social, economic, and political power laid bare by legal regulation, has paid relatively little attention to the contributions of critical disability scholars, to say nothing of developing the field as a whole. The work of authors such as Vicky D’Aoust (Tanis Doe), Estair Van Wagner, Janice Tait, Fiona Sampson, Judy Mosoff, and Carolyn McCarney, among others, come to mind as contributors to the Journal who have greatly enriched our pages because of their focus on the development of critical disability analysis. Add to that list Isabel Grant (who has contributed to this volume) and Dianne Pothier (in whose honour we have undertaken this work).

We hope that this edition of the Journal will inspire others to build on the work of these Canadian pioneers in the field. It seems that there is much work left to be done. In this issue, we profile some of the insights that might be garnered through an exploration of the interactions of critical disability theories and feminisms. The authors in the volume have engaged with a diverse array of topics, including: developing Dianne’s analysis of dignity; assessing what competency might mean for women with mental disabilities; reviewing critically the evolution of section 15(2) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; exploring cross-disciplinary insights that inform feminist critical disability theory; revealing how social programs invisibilize disabled women; and postulating about the potential for critical disability studies to inform the development of private law remedies.²

The volume opens with a piece by Suzanne Bouclin and Joëlle Pastora Sala. It builds on Dianne Pothier’s work on discrimination and human dignity, developing a “Pothienne perspective.” The Pothienne perspective serves the analysis of the particular case of regulation of obstructive solicitation in Winnipeg. In the pluralist tradition, Bouclin and Pastora Sala explore the complex ways in which formal decision-making bodies create and reinforce barriers. They expand the concept of dignity to reveal mechanisms through which street-engaged people might cope with their daily reality. Ultimately, the article makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of how anti-poverty strategies might be adapted in the light of Pothier, Bouclin, and Pastora Sala’s insights.

The second article, by Janine Benedet and Isabel Grant, tackles the complex issue of competence to testify in sexual assault prosecutions for women with mental disabilities. Drawing on Dianne’s analysis of the distinction between ad hoc and system accommodations, Benedet and Grant engage in a critically constructive interrogation of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R. v DAI, which addresses this matter.³ While they agree with the ultimate outcome of the majority decision, they...