Dominique Clement, Canada's Rights Revolution: Social Movement and Social Change, 1937–82.

Abstract

Dominique Clement, Canada's Rights Revolution: Social Movements and Social Change, 1937-82. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008, 296 pp. $32.95 paper (978-0-7748-1480-5), $85.00 hardcover (978-0-7748-1479-9) Canada's Rights Revolution is an ambitious book on the history of Canadian civil liberty and human rights advocacy over the 1937-1982 period. It grapples with a number of key issues facing social movements, including generational differences among activists, ideological tensions, and the struggle to launch national bodies. Most interesting is its critical engagement of the role of federal government funding in Canadian mobilization. The book's early chapters introduce readers to concepts that frame the rest of the analysis. These include understandings of negative versus positive rights, differences between civil liberty and human rights advocacy, and generational shifts between early campaigns seeking antidiscrimination for particular groups versus later ones fighting for the universal legal entrenchment of individual and socioeconomic and cultural rights. Clement argues that early generations of rights activists faced an uphill battle against the Canadian state, which branded many as radicals or communists, and repressed their organizations as a result. The government was reluctant to abandon Parliamentary supremacy in protecting the rights of Canadians, which accordingly generated harsh divisions with the movement between leftists and liberals. Despite these tensions, the book argues that through fighting discriminatory practices early advocates were successful in gaining rights legislation that protected negative rights, or those relating to civil and political liberties. Thus, early rights activists were essentially civil libertarians. Human rights activism and broader conceptions of rights, seeking to protect positive rights, did not fully emerge until the late 1960s and peaked during the 1970s. Clement notes a generational shift from earlier advocacy, seen in the emergence of new organizations and a younger generation of activists. They sought more than just civil and political equality, instead looking to protect group rights, such as language, and demanding that the state protect socioeconomic and cultural minorities. The new generation had unprecedented political opportunities to mobilize as a consequence of Canadian nation-state building, which saw increased resources distributed by the federal Secretary of State, geared to building a stronger Canadian civil society. They also had new institutional forums open to their advocacy, such as the courts. …