Product Description
Canada is at a crossroads. The gap between our national self-image as a country that respects human rights and the reality of socio-economic inequality and exclusion demands a re-engagement with the international human rights project and a recommitment to the values of social justice and equality affirmed in the early years of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
This book sketches a blueprint for reconceiving and retrieving social rights in diverse spheres of human rights practice in Canada, both political and legal. Leading academics and activists explore how the Charter and administrative decision making should protect social rights to health, housing, food, water and the environment; how homelessness and anti-poverty strategies could incorporate international and constitutional rights; how the federal spending power, fiduciary obligations towards Aboriginal people, and substantive equality for women and people with disabilities, can become tools for securing social rights; and how social protest movements can interact with courts and urban spaces to create new loci for social rights claims.
This book provides inspiration as well as an indispensable resource for all those who share an interest in advancing human rights and social justice in Canada.
Introduction: Advancing Social Rights in Canada
Bruce Porter and Martha Jackman
Chapter 1: International Human Rights in Anti-poverty and Housing Strategies: Making the Connection
Bruce Porter
Chapter 2: Rights-Based Strategies to Address Homelessness and Poverty in Canada: The Charter Framework
Martha Jackman and Bruce Porter
Chapter 3: Poverty as a Human Rights Violation (Except in Governmental Anti-poverty Strategies)
Vincent Greason
Chapter 4: Accountability Regimes for Federal Social Transfers: An Exercise in Deconstruction and Reconstruction
Barbara Cameron
Chapter 5: Challenging Discriminatory and Punitive Responses to Homelessness in Canada
Marie-Eve Sylvestre and Céline Bellot
Chapter 6: Immutability Hauntings: Socio-economic Status and Women’s Right to Just Conditions of Work under Section 15 of the Charter
Kerri A Froc
Chapter 7: Litigating to Advance the Substantive Equality Rights of People with Disabilities
Gwen Brodsky, Shelagh Day, and Yvonne Peters
Chapter 8: Access to Energy: How Form Overtook Substance and Disempowered the Poor in Nova Scotia
Claire McNeil and Vincent Calderhead
Chapter 9: The Right to Safe Water and Crown-Aboriginal Fiduciary Law: Litigating a Resolution to the Public Health Hazards of On-Reserve Water Problems
Constance MacIntosh
Chapter 10: Participation and Accountability: New Avenues for Human Rights Engagement with the Distribution of Health Resources in Canada
Alana Klein
Chapter 11: Social Rights and Administrative Justice
Lorne Sossin and Andrea Hill
Chapter 12: Environmental Concerns and the Interdependence of Human Rights: A Path to Political Responsibility?
Sylvie Paquerot
Translated from the original French by Sadie Scapillato
Chapter 13: Has Public Protest Gone to the Dogs?: A Social Rights Approach to Social Protest Law in Canada
Graham Mayeda
Chapter 14: Sleeping Rough and Shooting Up: Taking British Columbia’s Urban Justice Issues to Court
Margot Young
