Covering in Canada: Potential to Animate Human Rights

Abstract

This paper seeks to situate Kenji Yoshino’s thesis from Covering: the hidden assault on our civil rights within the Canadian human rights context. The main research question is whether his thesis is of any practical utility within the Canadian human rights statutory framework – that is if there is room for improvement in the current legislation. After examining the case law, one course of action in the Canadian law context is to protect gender expression to gender identity in jurisdictions that have not already chosen to do so. Instead of only protecting the most blatant covering demands related to gender expression, it would be beneficial to apply the protection of gender expression in a very broad manner. “Covering” as defined by Yoshino is an issue applicable to the Canadian legal context under many different protected grounds of discrimination, such as place of origin and sex.