Human Rights Codes: Are They Ready for Today's Challenges?

Abstract

One of the most challenging aspects of my work with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission (NSHRC) is the opportunity to reach new audiences and engage them in a thoughtful dialogue about the importance of human rights issues. Each new audience poses different questions and contexts in which to carry on this dialogue. Amazingly, while the locales may change, the issues themselves are not really all that different. Equality and the freedom to build a future for ourselves and our communities are common values I believe are shared the world over. The groundwork for this article was actually laid some years ago by one of my colleagues from the NSHRC. Viki Samuels, Coordinator of Race Relations and Affirmative Action, was at Queen's University Belfast in November 2000 talking about the work of her division and the challenges and opportunities which a diverse society can bring. I like to call Ms Samuels' work the leading edge of human rights in Nova Scotia. Instead of waiting for issues of discrimination to be brought forward by complainants, her division is reaching out to all the various sectors of Nova Scotian society and encouraging them to protect equity and fairness before discrimination can become an issue. When I came to the NSHRC in August 1999, I knew that I was going to have to roll up my sleeves - a lot of work needed to be done. As Director and CEO, I came with a mandate to create change within the organisation because a cultural shift was needed. We needed to become more customerfocused and more efficient at what we were doing. We needed to expand our gaze beyond reactive work, to work which anticipated the change happening around us. By making that shift we could become agents of positive change for Nova Scotia. The work of Ms Samuels' division is enabling that positive change. One of the first things I did as CEO was to initiate a comprehensive organisational review of the Commission, its first since it was created in the late 1960s. That review meant taking a hard look at our current practices and resources and making sure they matched the external climate. When the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act and the NSHRC were created the intention was to help combat the discrimination which had marginalised communities of people such as African Nova Scotians and aboriginals. Three decades later we need to ask the question, 'Were we doing that job well enough?' A lot has changed in the intervening thirty years. Both complainants and respondents are more aware of their rights, thanks to the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ('the Charter') and the reach of the media. And now immigration is a more important factor to counter the ageing of our population. In Nova Scotia, we have one of the highest occurrences of disability in Canada - 17.1 per cent in 2001 (Statistics Canada 2002) - making issues of accessibility of critical importance. These and other factors challenge the NSHRC to evolve and keep pace with change. One thing I believe passionately is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It is far better for the NSHRC to be engaging business and community leaders in a dialogue that promotes positive change instead of waiting for issues to be brought to us requiring investigation of complaints of discrimination. Surely we have become smart enough in this new century to realise that racism, sexism, classism and all those other 'isms' not only are a moral blemish on our societies, but harm all of us by diminishing our well-being on the social and economic level. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned how interconnected our world is. 'Globalisation' is a fashionable phrase used to describe the intricate web of relationships that binds Canada with the United Kingdom and both of us to the rest of the globe. People, money and resources flow in ways which could never have been imagined even fifty years ago. Along with the material aspects of a globalised society, human rights continue to occupy an ever more important role. …