Children's rights in the Canadian context

Abstract

In recent years, the issue of children's rights has engendered controversy in both Canada and the United States. Popular and specialized journals, television documentaries, and academic monographs have questioned the image of the North American child as indulged and protected by a liberal and affluent society. Such criticisms have emphasized that the modern child's dependent status is fraught with vulnerability. Indeed, as Patrick Lee argues, the traditional child support system is breaking down and some North American children are being left stranded as victims of social oppression, economic exploitation, and legal deprivation. At the same time, research has increasingly demonstrated that children frequently possess talents and competencies that have been ignored or misunderstood by a society more interested in conformity and control than in individual fulfilment. Bob MacKay's conversational analysis of the classroom, Glenn Eastabrook's analysis of school change, and Dennis Conly's descriptive analysis of the training school attest to the authority structures that systematically deny the child's self-determination intellectually and socially. Recognition of children's latent abilities as well as their vulnerable status are necessary steps toward the elimination of the destructive dimensions of age-ascribed dependency. Thus far, child advocacy has been much more prevalent in the United States than in Canada. In America, child advocates have emphasized the need for recourse to civil rights when a child's dependency has not been reciprocated with attention and care. However, Canada does not have a deeply entrenched civil liberties tradition, and American policy changes and legal decisions do not have direct relevance to our experience here. Canada's founding legislation is not based on the individualistic premises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but rather on the conservative principles of peace, order, and good government. As Romulo Magsino argues, the development of Canadian student rights has largely had to contend with our virtually inoperative Bill of Rights. Furthermore, unlike the United States, Canada has not experienced government by diverse political parties whose alternating leadership provides a force of dynamic change within which wrongs can be righted. Our federal government has always been dominated by brokerage parties of the centre that characteristically do not aid oppressed minority groups unable to mobilize support on their own behalf. These kinds of differences suggest that the status of Canadian children must be examined within the particular framework of our society. In this context, the articles in this special double issue of Interchange provide a foundation upon which responses to the need for Canadian children's rights can be successfully constructed. Although some of the articles focus upon the United