Human Welfare, Rights, and Social Activism: Rethinking the Legacy of J. S. Woodsworth [1 ed.] 9781442660342, 9780802096999

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HUMAN WELFARE, RIGHTS, AND SOCIAL ACTIVISM: RETHINKING THE LEGACY OF J.S. WOODSWORTH

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EDITED BY JANE PULKINGHAM

Human Welfare, Rights, and Social Activism Rethinking the Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9699-9

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Human welfare, rights, and social activism : rethinking the legacy of J.S. Woodsworth / edited by Jane Pulkingham. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9699-9 1. Human rights – Canada. 2. Woodsworth, J.S. (James Shaver), 1874–1942.  I. Pulkingham, Jane JC599.C3H86 2010  323.0971  C2010-904271-9

This book has been published with the help of a grant from Simon Fraser University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Art Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Contributors ix 1 A Common Interest? Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth and the Contemporary Politics of Social Change in Canada 3 jane pulkingham 2 The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics 42 allen mills 3 Labour Rights in an Interregnum: The Ambiguous Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 65 eric tucker 4 The Changing Struggle for Rights: A Critical Look at the Origins and Fate of Human Rights 91 gary teeple 5 Social Rights Are Human Rights: Furthering the Democratic Project 114 hugh shewell 6 Human Rights and Poverty: A Twenty-First Century Tribute to J.S. Woodsworth and Call for Human Rights 136 gwen brodsky 7 Human Needs above Property Rights? Rethinking the Woodsworth Legacy in an Era of Economic Globalization 161 david schneiderman

vi Contents

8 Zones of Abandonment: The Cultural Politics of Public Health in Vancouver’s Inner City 180 denielle elliott 9 ‘Re-construction’ from the Viewpoint of Precarious Labour: The Practice of Solidarity 199 geraldina polanco and cecily nicholson 10 J.S. Woodsworth and the Discourse of White Civility 221 daniel coleman 11 Embodied Memory: Universal Citizenship and Indigenous Cree Identity 244 neal mcleod 12 Canadians of Tomorrow: J.S. Woodsworth and the New Ethnicities 266 david chariandy Index 287

Acknowledgments

This book contains a selection of papers initially presented at a conference entitled Human Rights and Social Activism: Rethinking the Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth. The conference, held at Simon Fraser University in the fall of 2005, provided a unique opportunity to bring together a cross-section of academics working in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and law, as well as politicians and labour and social activists, to focus on the wide-ranging social legacy of J.S. Woodsworth. The intent of the conference, as well as the book, was to facilitate an integrated discussion of a diverse set of contemporary social and political issues arising from an assessment of Woodsworth’s contribution to human rights and social activism. I am grateful to a number of individuals and organizations for their contributions to and support of this book project. I would like to begin by acknowledging the work of the Simon Fraser University conference organizing commi ee, chaired by Sandra Djwa and co-chaired by Ian Angus, which also included David Chariandy, Noel Dyck, Dorri a Fong, Jef Clarke, Stephen McBride, Ryan Miller, Jane Pulkingham, Allen Seager, Patrick Smith, and Laurel Whitney. The conference was supported by the Department of the Humanities, the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, the J.S. Woodsworth Endowment Fund, the SFU 40th Anniversary Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In addition, this book received generous financial support from the University Publication Fund, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at Simon Fraser University. Margaret Manery provided superlative editorial assistance and I thank her for her meticulous work. And last, but definitely not least, I

viii Acknowledgments

want to thank the contributors to the book for their time, commitment, and shared knowledge: I have learned a tremendous amount from their insightful reflections and am indebted to them for the opportunity to work on this book project.

Contributors

Gwen Brodsky, LL.B. (University of Victoria), LL.M. (Harvard), Ph.D. (Osgoode Hall), is a leading international expert on equality rights and the Charter, with experience arguing equality rights cases before tribunals and courts, including appearing as counsel in leading cases in the Supreme Court of Canada. She has wri en extensively about equality rights theory, social and economic rights, the Charter, and access to justice problems experienced by members of disadvantaged groups. She has taught in the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Law, and in the Akitsiraq Law Program in Iqaluit. Currently, she is a director of the Poverty and Human Rights Centre in Vancouver, and an adviser to Canadian non-governmental organizations, human rights commissions, governments, trade unions, employers, and universities. David Chariandy, assistant professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University, specializes in contemporary fiction (especially English Canadian, Caribbean, and Black Atlantic), as well as interdisciplinary theories of postcoloniality, diaspora, and ‘race.’ He has published scholarly articles and reviews in several periodicals, and his novel Soucouyant was published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Daniel Coleman, professor and Canada Research Chair in Diversity in Canadian Literary Cultures at McMaster University, teaches and carries out research in Canadian literature, the literary and cultural production of categories of privilege such as whiteness, masculinity, and Britishness, and most recently, the spiritual and cultural politics of reading. Denielle Ellio received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Simon Fraser University in 2007 and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia.

x Contributors

Neal McLeod, from James Smith Cree First Nation, Saskatchewan, is associate professor of Indigenous Studies at Trent University. His recent publications include Cree Narrative Memory, and two books of poetry, Gabriel’s Beach and Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow. He is also a painter (Au Fil de Mes Jours, Museum of Civilization) and a founding member and former member of the comedy troupe, the Bionic Bannock Boys (A Man Called Horst, Berlin). Allen Mills, professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Winnipeg, is mainly interested in the intellectual foundations of contemporary Canadian political thought. He has wri en an intellectual biography of J.S.Woodsworth, Fool for Christ, and is currently working on a book-length manuscript on the political thought of the young Pierre Trudeau, 1950 to 1965. Cecily Nicholson coordinates the funds and administration of the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre and Shelter in Vancouver, B.C. As a researcher and consultant her work considers issues of precarious labour, migration, and alternative economy. Her Ph.D. thesis was based on narratives of women who have exited sex work in Vancouver. She is a poet and member of the Vancoiver VIVO media collective. Geraldina Polanco is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. In her work she employs a critical lens to interrogate how processes of neoliberal restructuring affect governmental and international policies related to labour and migration. Applying these insights, she examines their consequences in (re) organizing hierarchies in service sector worksites around key axes of difference, paying particular a ention to lived experiences of privilege and/or disadvantage. Jane Pulkingham, professor of sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, teaches and carries out research in critical policy studies, inequality and the welfare state, the politics of welfare reform, women, income security and labour market policy, and gender, family, and the state. Her recent publications include Public Policy for Women: The State, Income Security, and Labour Market Issues (with Marjorie Griffin Cohen). David Schneiderman, professor of law and political science at the University of Toronto, has authored numerous articles and chapters on Canadian constitutional law and history, comparative constitutional

Contributors xi

law, and economic globalization in a variety of journals and books. He has most recently authored Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy’s Promise and co-authored The Last Word: Media Coverage of the Supreme Court of Canada. Hugh Shewell is associate professor and Director of the School of Social Work in the Faculty of Public Affairs at Carleton University. In 2007–08 he was Visiting Scholar at the Centre of Canadian Studies, University of Edinburgh. His research and writing are focused on a critical and historical analysis of Aboriginal-state relations in Canada, poverty and ideology, and social work education. Gary Teeple is professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. His research interests lie in the global division of labour, human rights, political economy, Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, and the sociology of art. His publications include The Riddle of Human Rights and Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform, Marx’s Critique of Politics, and Capitalism and the National Question in Canada. Eric Tucker, professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, has wri en extensively on the history of labour and employment law, as well as on its current challenges. He is the author of Administering Danger in the Workplace and co-author of Labour before the Law and Self-Employed Workers Organize. He is also the editor of Working Disasters and co-editor of Work on Trial.

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HUMAN WELFARE, RIGHTS, AND SOCIAL ACTIVISM: RETHINKING THE LEGACY OF J.S. WOODSWORTH

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1 A Common Interest? Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth and the Contemporary Politics of Social Change in Canada1 ane pulkingham

‘Who is this Woodward’s (sic) person? Who is he to me? Who are you to me?’ A young Aboriginal man stands up and directs his questions to the panel of First Nations speakers and then to his fellow, largely non-Aboriginal, audience. His words, tone, and manner, provocative and aggrieved, challenge the proceedings. In the uncomfortable silence that ensues, amid conflicting feelings of surprise and initial discomfort, clearly echoed in the restless hushed movements and murmurs of those in the room, I am compelled by the intervention. The young man resumes: ‘What you are doing isn’t enough. We need to push some bu ons. What action are you going to take to change things, to challenge?’ The encounter described above occurred during a panel of the Human Rights and Social Activism: Rethinking the Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth conference, held at Simon Fraser University’s downtown Vancouver campus in the fall of 2005. The Vancouver campus sits at the edge of the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood renowned for many years as Canada’s ‘poorest postal code.’ 2 ‘Woodward’s’ is a landmark turnof-the-century (1903) building situated in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. Site of the original city of Vancouver, the Downtown Eastside is ‘home’ to Canada’s most concentrated unhoused population3 and the district with the highest incidence of HIV infection,4 even while processes of gentrification make it one of the more rapidly changing and polarized postal codes. Through a ‘cacophony of media depictions’ (Robertson & Culhane, 2005: 7), the Downtown Eastside is associated as much with those who trade in street drugs and sex, and single room occupancy ‘hotels’ (SROs), as it is with its diverse neighbourhoods (e.g., Chinatown), its inhabitants (e.g., a relatively large urban Aboriginal

4 Jane Pulkingham

population,5 and both established and recent immigrant populations) and heritage buildings. It is a ‘neighbourhood branded by layers of stigma,’ especially for those who live on the streets, in shelters, and in substandard housing, or who seek out services and subsistence in the area (ibid.). For these individuals, daily life is a paradoxical experience of being hidden in plain sight, of being subjected to simultaneous political and social silencing amid intense public scrutiny, surveillance, and stereotyping (ibid.: 14). For the past decade and a half, the Woodward’s building has been a lightning rod for social and political activism about poverty, homelessness, the lack of non-market housing for low-income singles and families, and processes of gentrification in the Downtown Eastside and adjacent neighbourhoods. Once a thriving department store, the flagship of a western Canadian chain of ‘one-stop’ shopping department stores catering to residents living in and near the city’s downtown core, in 1993 bankruptcy forced the closure of the Woodward’s Department Store located on Hastings Street (City of Vancouver, 2007). The building changed ownership over the years but social protest delayed its redevelopment, reaching a peak in the autumn of 2002 when more than one hundred homeless people squa ed in and around the Woodward’s building for three months, se ing up a large tent city. Though they were forcibly removed by the police on a couple of occasions, and their belongings destroyed or discarded at the city dump, the ‘Woodsquats’ (Vidaver, 2004) occupying Woodward’s kept returning and demonstrating. It was only a er a fall election and a change in municipal government to one that was more sympathetic to the concerns publicized by the squat-demonstrators, that the last of the squa ers, approximately eighty individuals, agreed to be moved (Cameron & Swanson, 2004). On 14 December 2002, the city, working together with a local nonprofit housing society, provided funding to temporarily house these individuals elsewhere in the Downtown Eastside (City of Vancouver, 2002; Cameron & Swanson, 2004). One of the newly elected (Coalition of Progressive Electors) municipal politicians was Ellen Woodsworth, J.S. Woodsworth’s great niece. Though the newly elected municipal government did not solve the homeless crisis, the Woodsquats are credited with successfully protesting the provincial government’s a empts to sell the building to private interests without a commitment to social housing6 and in spurring the city to take a leadership role in redeveloping the Woodward’s site (Vidaver, 2004; Cameron & Swanson, 2004). In 2003, the city of Vancouver purchased the Woodward’s property,

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 5

embarking on a process of community consultation to redevelop the site with the assurance that non-market housing would be included.7 The redevelopment of Woodward’s remains controversial with many housing and antipoverty activists in the Downtown Eastside questioning the kind and mix of market and non-market housing developed.8 In this introductory chapter, the intervention described in the opening paragraph provides a frame for thinking about the legacy of James Shaver Woodsworth. The value of reflecting on the encounter described, in a contemporary reading of J.S. Woodsworth, is several-fold.9 (1) The transposition of the words ‘Woodward’s’ and ‘Woodsworth’ is significant, given the nature of the se lement work J.S. Woodsworth undertook in a formative phase of his adult life in Winnipeg’s ‘foreign district’ in the northeast end of that city in the first decades of the twentieth century. (2) The challenging and provocative questions posed by the Aboriginal intervener evoke the premise of Woodsworth’s 1911 book, My Neighbor: A Study of City Conditions, a Plea for Social Service. In this book, whose title explicitly invokes the parable of the Good Samaritan, Woodsworth reflects on the questions ‘who is my neighbour’ and ‘what does it mean to be a neighbour’ in his examination of the ‘urban problem’ in Canada and call for urban reform and social solidarity. (3) Reading Woodsworth through the prism of this encounter underscores the telescopic nature of time and experience in the politics of social change, where the distance between the past – then – and the present – now – is at once proximal and removed. Following in the steps of McKay, this reading of Woodsworth aims to be both ‘presentminded’ and ‘anti-presentist’ (2008: 3). As McKay suggests, a presentminded examination of the history of the le in Canada is driven by issues and concerns that are of contemporary import, even urgency, while an antipresentist analysis recognizes the importance of reconstructing the past as much as possible in its own terms. In striving to be both present-minded and antipresentist in considering the legacy of Woodsworth, the aim of this volume is to produce a politically useful account of the relevance of the past to the present, and a more insightful and reflexive understanding of the relationship of ‘past le s’ (ibid), in this instance, J.S. Woodsworth, to the present, and in particular, to the contemporary concerns that preoccupy the le in Canada today. This introductory chapter is divided into three main parts. For those unfamiliar with J.S. Woodsworth, the first part provides a brief discussion of his life and times, focusing in particular on the first two of four pivotal phases in his life’s work. This discussion elucidates the

6 Jane Pulkingham

foundational influence of a range of social problems that Woodsworth encountered in his work in Winnipeg and the social, political, and economic climate of Canada, especially the western and Prairie provinces, where he drew most of his political support in his subsequent career as an elected federal politician. In particular, this section of the chapter traces the transformation of Woodsworth from Christian moral reformer and social worker to socialist labour activist (McKay, 2008). The second part of the introduction turns to contemporary considerations, beginning with a brief discussion of the Woodward’s – Woodsworth connection followed by a consideration of key transformations and transitions in the Canadian welfare state in the intervening years since Woodsworth was engaged in social and political activism. This discussion is elaborated in the final part of the introduction which provides an overview of the themes and content of the contributions to this volume. Then: J.S. Woodsworth, His Life and Times10 In a personal memoir of his father, Charles J. Woodsworth describes James Shaver Woodsworth’s career as ‘storm-tossed’ (2005: 37). This description is an apt one, at least up until the time when J. S. Woodsworth was elected Member of Parliament for the riding of Winnipeg North in 1921, a position he was to hold until his death in 1942.11 Prior to holding his elected office as a federal politician, Woodsworth had several different forms of employment (teacher, ordained minister, social worker, manual labourer, labour writer-activist) and the change-ofcareer moves – whether by choice or necessity – were at times abrupt, a consequence of Woodsworth following his strongly held convictions. The first half of his employment history, then, might be characterized as turbulent, at least more turbulent than would be expected based on his initial and conventional career choices (as a teacher, briefly, and then a er further studies, and following in the footsteps of his father, ordination as a Methodist minister). Arguably, however, Woodsworth’s life’s work is be er encapsulated not so much in terms of tumult and the different jobs that he did, but rather by a strong sense of vocation or calling, an enduring drive to bring about progressive social reforms and to do so through social and political action, public education, and ultimately, through parliamentary and constitutional means. It is in light of Woodsworth’s sense of calling that he is variously described as a ‘social pioneer,’ a ‘prophet,’ and ‘a man to remember’ (Ziegler, 1934; MacInnis, 1953; McNaught, 1970; Woodsworth, 2005) by

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 7

his biographers. But in contrasting Woodsworth’s life’s work to his inherited background (as a son of a conservative Methodist minister), McNaught describes Woodsworth as an unlikely ‘radical in any accepted sense of the word’ (1970: 231) even while he profoundly questioned the existing social and economic order, and saw the need to work openly with the working class to achieve reform (p. 233). Woodsworth’s son, recalls that his father was ‘increasingly absorbed by social and political activity ... beset by the urgency of the problems pressing in upon the world and distressed by the fact that so few appeared willing to take up the load ... a restless nature combined with a Puritan conscience drove him to labour ceaselessly’ (2005: 16). Grace MacInnis, the eldest of J.S. Woodsworth’s six children, and the only one to follow her father into elected politics at the federal level, perhaps best sums up the overarching nature of Woodsworth’s sense of calling, a calling that spanned his lifetime, by reflecting that ‘from the beginning he regarded life as a trust to be spent in the service of others’ (1967–1968, n.p.).12 No doubt this sense of calling was rooted in a Methodist moralism (that persisted even a er Woodsworth later parted ways with the Methodist Church), with its ‘long tradition of practical idealism and a doctrine of personal perfection in love in this life’ later transformed by the influence of the social gospel, that made it easy ‘to see self-interest and economic greed in every influence corrupting the city’ (Allen, 1972: xvi). What propelled Woodsworth was an ‘unshakeable certainty about the ethical, as distinct from the theological, teachings of Christianity,’ and a restless search for an institution that would enable him to take up the cause (Cook, 1985: 213–14). Over time, these institutions included church social agencies, secular organizations such as the Canadian Welfare League, trade union and farmers’ movements, the Labor Church, and ultimately, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, forerunner of the New Democratic Party). Along the way, and mirroring the contemporaneous evolution in Protestant Christianity, Cook argues that Woodsworth substituted theology, the science of religion, with sociology, the science of society (ibid, and p. 4). Woodsworth’s adult life spanned the First World War up to and including part of the Second World War, and in the intervening years, the Great Depression, as well as a period of unprecedented working-class activity in Canada – a ‘workers’ revolt’ (Heron, 1998) – most widely associated with but by no means confined to the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. Woodsworth’s influence today can be traced to four pivotal phases. These phases are (1) his work as a ‘pioneer social worker’

8 Jane Pulkingham

(Ziegler, 1934) in the period 1907–1917 in Winnipeg; (2) his brief, but life-altering, work in manual dock labour as a stevedore in the Port of Vancouver in 1918 and his associated work as a labour activist-writer during which time he was arrested and incarcerated (the Winnipeg Strike of 1919); (3) his work in federal politics as the Member of Parliament for Winnipeg North and North Centre (1921–1942); and (4) his role as a founding member and first leader (acting in the capacity as both chairperson and party leader) of the CCF (1932–1942). Woodsworth may be best remembered for the work he engaged in, in the four phases identified above, in reverse order of the chronology of these phases. Certainly, as a Member of Parliament, and one of such long standing, he was not content to passively a end si ings of the House of Commons and then return home when the House was not in session, to busy himself with ‘local’ constituent issues alone. Rather, he was high profile, and tirelessly engaged in ‘multitudinous meetings’ across the country – from informal gatherings, to discussion groups, to parliamentary commi ee meetings – year a er year, preparing speeches, and corresponding, by hand and in person, with ‘the thousands who wrote to detail their problems or offer advice’ (Woodsworth, 2005: 36). Moreover, the close of Parliament every year brought a different, and more strenuous schedule: ‘Provided with the courtesy pass extended all federal representatives by the railways, he moved with scant pause to meet a constant and formidable number of engagements, from one end of Canada to the other. No audience was too small, no distance too great, no accommodation too mean or uncomfortable for him to undertake to speak. It was not that he felt himself a martyr on the altar of his beliefs. He was eager, anxious, to spread the doctrine he felt vital to the safety and happiness of the world ... To be on his feet, to be voicing his thoughts ... was as necessary to him as it was to eat and breathe’ (p. 37). But to many on the democratic le in English Canada, Woodsworth is one of Canada’s foremost national political figures of the twentieth century, an ‘icon,’13 not because he was a parliamentarian, but because of his role in founding and leading (for the first ten years) a new political party – the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Morton argues that at the time it was founded, the CCF, which emerged out of ‘the bias of Prairie politics,’ was the Prairie West’s most advanced initiative during the utopian period to bring together farmer-agrarian and labour movements in order to effect ‘a radical reconstruction of western and indeed Canadian society ... to undertake a reorganization of Canadian economic society on socialist principles’

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 9

(1970: 298–300).14 It was through the CCF, and in his elected position, that Woodsworth strove to improve the living and employment conditions of Canada’s working people, to bring about, in his own words, ‘a co-operative commonwealth in which the profit motive would be subordinated to that of public service and ruthless competition replaced by collective ownership under democratic control’ (1935: 1). He was a social policy pioneer who made a significant impact on the emergence of Canada’s welfare state, negotiating with the (minority) government leader of the time, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, Canada’s first old age pension program, implemented in 1927. Woodsworth was an early proponent of universal family allowances (not enacted until a er his death) (Robertson, 1955: 35), divorce law reform, unemployment insurance, and a tireless advocate for civil liberties and minority rights, criminal law reform, and workers’ right to organize. Over the years as a federal politician, he called for legal restrictions on employers’ private rights of contract and property and legal recognition of, and protection for, workers’ rights. He demanded that ‘human welfare,’ and more specifically ‘human rights’ considerations be placed above those of property rights or financial interests. As Clément argues in Canada’s Rights Revolution, a noticeable paradigm shi in human rights did not occur until a er the Second World War, peaking as a widely recognized human rights movement in the 1960s (2008: 12–20). At the same time, Clément also emphasizes that ‘in a way, the [earlier] movement for a bill of rights and its challenge to parliamentary supremacy represented the ultimate triumph of the rights revolution in Canada’ (p. 19). Notably, the CCF was a key player in the early movement for a bill of rights, and ‘unique in its unwavering dedication to a constitutionally entrenched bill of rights’ (p. 23). The 1933 Regina Manifesto, the CCF’s founding document, called for constitutional amendments to offer protections for racial and religious minorities, and freedom of speech and association. As a founding member of the CCF, Woodsworth both as an individual, and as a member of a generation of activists, was instrumental to the development of a human rights discourse and legislative framework in Canada (Djwa, 1987; Mills, 1991). Not only did Woodsworth advocate for an entrenched charter, his idea was picked up by Frank Sco (also a founding member of the CCF) who passed it on to Pierre Trudeau in the 1940s and 1950s who in turn presided over the implementation of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Djwa, 1987). Prior to 1960, then, there had been a number of a empts to introduce a bill of rights at the national or provincial level, with the

10 Jane Pulkingham

CCF a central player in these initiatives: the first two a empts at the national level failed – the first being a resolution presented before Parliament in 1945 by a CCF Member of Parliament, followed in 1946 by John Diefenbaker’s (Conservative) a empt to introduce a bill of rights into the proposed Citizenship Act. A turning point occurred in Saskatchewan in 1947 when Tommy Douglas, then leader of the CCF, succeeded in introducing the country’s first Bill of Rights, followed in 1960 with a federal Bill of Rights (introduced by Diefenbaker) (Clément, 2008: 19–22). Notably, however, the Saskatchewan and national bills of rights ‘approached rights from a minimalist perspective. Tommy Douglas and the CCF created the first public health care program in the country, but their 1947 Bill of Rights did not suggest that health care was a human right ... And ... at a time when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spoke of employment and social security as human rights, the CCF limited its vision of a national bill of rights to basic civil and political rights’ (p. 23). The nature and scope of contemporary (human) rights approaches is a topic deliberated by several contributors to this volume. In the remainder of this brief introductory overview, the focus shi s to consider the work Woodsworth undertook prior to his career as a parliamentarian. It was during this formative period that Woodsworth underwent a transformation from Christian moral reformer-turnedsocial worker, to manual labourer and socialist labour activist (McKay, 2008: 436). In the first of these phases, Woodsworth spent six years in front-line ‘pioneer social work’ as superintendant of a Methodist mission – All People’s (from 1907 to 1913), followed by five years (1913 to 1917) outside of the Church, as a social worker engaged in research and administration first with the Canadian Welfare League and then a short stint as director of the Bureau of Social Research for the governments of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta (Ziegler, 1934). Immediately prior to embarking on the social work phase of his career, Woodsworth was an ordained Methodist minister working for a well-heeled church in Winnipeg. But he soon found himself increasingly questioning organized Christianity and Methodist doctrine, and the failure of the Christian church to fulfil what he saw as its social mission, and so not long into his career as an ordained Methodist minister, he decided that he should resign from the ministry. But the Methodist Conference refused to accept his le er of resignation (Ziegler, 1934; Mills, 1991), and so instead of withdrawing his services altogether, Woodsworth redirected his energy into a less conventional and more challenging form of

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 11

ministry in the growing field of social se lement work, at a new Methodist mission – All People’s – in Winnipeg’s North East. Woodsworth’s interest in the ‘social problems of the modern city’ and urban mission, was heavily influenced by events of the day and the broader social contexts and movements in the English-speaking world, especially Great Britain (McNaught, 1970: 231). For Canada the first few decades of the twentieth century were a time of intensive industrialization, industrial consolidation, urbanization, migration and immigration, and labour unrest. Considerable expansion and development was occurring in the western provinces in particular. For example, between 1901 and 1911, the urban population of the West grew more than three-fold, from 193,000 to 673,000 (Robertson, 1955: 29), with migrants from central and eastern Canada, as well as immigrants from Great Britain, the United States, Europe (increasingly Eastern Europe), and Asia, drawn by government and private enterprise alike as a cheap source of labour, in particular for the wheat fields and railway development. During the same period, when the country’s urban population grew by 62 per cent, Toronto and Montreal’s populations almost doubled, and the populations of Winnipeg and Vancouver grew four-fold, while those of Regina and Calgary (which were very small towns to begin with) shot up almost ten-fold (Allen, 1972: ix). By 1911, in the four western provinces, fully one-half of the population were recent immigrants (ibid., x). Winnipeg, the commercial hub of western development and gateway to the West, is described by Ziegler, in an ‘authorized sketch’ of Woodsworth, as the ‘centre of the melting process’: ‘But 1907! During that year, two hundred and fi y thousand immigrants came to Canada ... From 1902 to 1907, an average of thirty thousand immigrants a year came into the Canadian West. Almost every third man who stepped off the train in Winnipeg “no spik English”’ (1934: 28). Ziegler goes on to explain how this influx of newcomers impacted the city and its surrounds: ‘the trains, having here disgorged their picturesque hordes into the Immigration Hall, some days, weeks or months later bore them out of the city and sca ered them far and wide over the prairies,’ only to have them return in the ensuing weeks and months because of their inability to adjust to the travails of farming life in the sparsely populated rural prairies where they had been ‘sca ered’ (ibid). And when they did find themselves back in Winnipeg, it was to Winnipeg’s ‘foreign district,’ in the north end of the city where Woodsworth had been appointed to the All People’s Mission. Ziegler continues, ‘up at the North End, near the C.P.R. tracks, a strange

12 Jane Pulkingham

transformation was taking place ... The residents were trekking to a more fashionable section to the south, while into their deserted houses, originally intended for one family, the foreigners packed themselves like sardines in a tin. In the front and rear of vacant lots double-decker tenements were erected, with windows like sightless eyes ... concealing ... unbelievably crowded and unsanitary conditions ... such were the homes into which Canada welcomed many of her new citizens’ (p. 29). At the time, there was no (compulsory, universal) provincial primary or secondary educational system, there were no kindergartens, there was not even a coordinated system of charity organizations, protections and provisions for workers were limited, and as Ziegler underscores, there were ‘no night schools where the foreigner might learn English, no place where he could find recreation, no pleasant surroundings where he could meet Canadians. Here were appalling housing conditions, serious problems of health and sanitation, and the climax perhaps, of the city’s disgrace – a segregated red-light district in the heart of Winnipeg’s foreign quarter’ (pp. 33– 4). It is into this breach that Woodsworth stepped in 1907 and where, by 1911, with the assistance of church workers engaged in ‘ever-widening circles of social activity’ he had ‘created a multifaceted institution with several bases in Winnipeg’s north end’ (Allen, 1972: xiv). All People’s Mission, run by a staff of paid workers and students in training,15 as well as some one hundred volunteers from the Methodist college (Wesley) and the city, was transformed into a complex of ‘institutes, se lements, and neighbourhood houses provid[ing] religious services in foreign languages; men’s, women’s, and children’s associations and clubs; language, industrial, and household science classes; concerts; lectures; libraries; gymnasiums; baths; community and hospital visiting; and relief’ (ibid). Leading up to, and during, this period, Woodsworth was heavily influenced by the emergence of the social gospel movement, and All People’s Mission was developed by him out of Sunday school classes to become a ‘work of civic reform and social reform of national significance’ (Allen, 1973: 18). And while the story of the emergence of the social gospel movement in Canada was in part one of ‘stimulus and response’ to the break-neck pace of industrialization and urbanism and the social fall-out of these processes, as both Cook and Allen point out, the social gospel was fundamentally a religious and intellectual movement, ‘something much more radical in its religious implications than merely a social reform movement inspired by religious ideals’ (Cook, 1985: 176). Allen argues that ‘revivalism was to evangelicalize Canadian Protestantism as far as it would go’ (1973:

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 13

12), making possible a more ‘hopeful basis for Christians to engage in “secular” social reform’ (p. 22). Not only did the social gospel bring about a new sense of optimism, as Cook (1985: 219) explicates, it was predicated on a fundamental reversal in the order of regeneration – individual salvation followed rather than preceded social salvation; and with the focus on societal rather than individual salvation, the goal was to build the Kingdom of God on Earth. During this period of ‘total immersion in the city problem’ (Allen, 1972: xv), Woodsworth wrote two influential books, Strangers within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians (initially published in 1909) and My Neighbor: A Study of City Conditions, a Plea for Social Service (initially published in 1911). Both books were commissioned as part of a series of Canadian textbooks for Canadian Methodist ‘Young People’s’ groups across the country, whose membership numbered 80,000 strong, and the publications provided a basis for monthly discussion groups, as well as Sunday school classes and summer schools. In the wake of an intensification of concern about the city and its problems, and discussion of same in a range of organizations from Women’s Missionary Societies and Men’s Brotherhoods to Canadian Clubs, Empire Clubs, secular women’s organizations, and associations of young men and women, the texts were circulated outside of the Church as well (Allen, 1973: x–xiii). The first of the two books, Strangers within Our Gates, deals with the immigration ‘problem’ – the phenomenal increase, and more specifically the shi , in the source of immigration, and the ensuing difficulties associated with assimilating people from increasingly diverse geographical, cultural, and racial backgrounds into turn-of-the-century Canadian (white settler) society.16 The second book, My Neighbor, is a much more optimistic take on the impact of industrialization and immigration, and a call for urban reform and social solidarity (Allen, 1972; McKay, 2008). In this book, Woodsworth elaborates a functional-structuralist sociological analysis of the character of civic relations in the modern city, and he is at pains to impress upon the reader the importance of understanding the fact of social interconnection between inhabitants of the city, between ‘Canadians’ and the very ‘strangers’ that he wrote about with such trepidation in his earlier book. For Woodsworth, that there is a common interest arises not in spite of, but because of, the increasingly complex nature of civilization in an industrializing and urbanizing society. In the first chapter he writes: ‘And who is my neighbour?’ That question has been asked in and by every age ... Nowhere does the question come with greater force than in the

14 Jane Pulkingham latest and most complex product of civilization – the modern city. On the wild, lonely road between Jerusalem and Jericho the desperate plight of the stranger would arouse some sense of duty in the most promotive modern man. But when at breakfast this same modern man reads that, through the negligence of someone, ten workmen were maimed for life or hurled into eternity – well, what is that to him? He hardly pauses as he sips his coffee. His eye and his a ention pass to the next news item – the rise in the price of wheat or the account of the great race. Even if he should own stock in the corporation in whose factories the unfortunate workmen had been employed, it would hardly occur to him that he was even remotely responsible for their injury or death. The directors, the manager, the foreman, factory inspectors – a hundred officials come between him and the victims of the accident. Countless legal and moral questions complicate the situation and confuse the moral sense. But ... Someone is responsible! Every unjustly-treated man, every defenceless woman, every neglected child has a neighbor somewhere. Am I that neighbor? Not only do we need to learn who our neighbor is, but also how we can help him ... They are part of a system as we are part of the same system. We as individuals cannot help them as individuals. The whole system must be reckoned with – possibly completely changed. We find ourselves, as the business men say, ‘up against a big proposition.’ Yet we must face the situation. We must learn to be neighborly not only in the wilderness, or in the comparatively simple life of a country community, but in the crowded city with its many and complicated interests. (Woodsworth, 1972 [1911]: 10–11)

McKay argues that Strangers within Our Gates and My Neighbor are two of the best known books of the period in Canada to explore the ‘cultural contradictions of turn of the century liberal order’ (2008: 378). At the same time he suggests that they are o en misrepresented insofar as they have become grist for ‘many a seminar dramatization of the shortcomings of a past generation, annually dissected (in whole or in part) by legions of students hunting for signs of anti-immigrant intolerance, nativism, and racism’ (pp. 378 and 595n116). The problem with these dramatizations is not that instances of nativism and racism are absent from Woodsworth’s works, but that these works are not simply texts that illustrate ‘the bad old days of ethnic prejudice and racial exclusiveness in a long-ago Canada’ (p. 383). Rather, the texts provide insight into ‘certain lasting proclivities of the liberal order that conquered and rese led the West according to a program of rapid

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 15

economic growth’ (ibid.). As McKay also underscores, My Neighbor ‘reveals a transition from a liberal moment of refusal [Strangers within Our Gates] to a tentative and partial moment of supersedure’ (p. 381). It is in this book that Woodsworth moves ‘to a more organic “sociological,” though not “socialist,” conception of modern city life’ as he repeatedly takes the reader through ‘cases in which the narrator comes face to face with the surprising fact of social interconnection – a first formation theme that, perhaps more than any other, made a deep impression upon the writer’ (ibid.). The period from 1907 to 1917, then, was a time of concentrated research into social problems, research that was carried out initially through what McNaught describes as Woodsworth’s immersion in the ‘shabby work’ of the All People’s Mission on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ in Winnipeg’s north end (1970: 231–2). The research continued in the second phase of Woodsworth’s career in pioneer social work (1913 to 1917), when he served as secretary of the newly established Canadian Welfare League and then, briefly, when he served as director of the Bureau of Social Research, a joint initiative of the governments of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. In these years, the country experienced a prolonged economic downturn, with layoffs, wage cuts, and shortened work weeks, and to add insult to injury, price inflation (Heron, 1998: 18). As the Great War progressed, economic expansion ensued, but the boom was accompanied by yet more price inflation such that over the four-year period of the war, the cost of a basket of food for a family had risen by 128 per cent, while real wages had fallen. Amid allegations of widespread corporate profiteering, ‘deference to the captains of finance and industry came unhinged’ (pp. 20–1). During this period, Woodsworth redoubled his energies into the investigation of social problems in order to bring about ‘more efficient citizenship’ and ‘progressive legislation’ (Ziegler, 1934: 66), producing numerous survey reports on issues ranging from rural communities, to the ‘care of mental defectives,’ to the life of Ukrainians in western Canada, and making hundreds of addresses across Manitoba and the rest of the country. His position with the Bureau of Social Research, however, was to be shortlived (lasting one year). Though Woodsworth had never participated in demonstrations against the war, he ultimately became an ‘embarrassment’ to the government by speaking out against the war when the government established a National Service registration (Ziegler, 1934: 70) and a empted to enlist his (and the Bureau’s) ‘help in making the National Service registration scheme a success’ (Woodsworth, 28 Dec.

16 Jane Pulkingham

1916, quoted in Ziegler, 1934: 71). Likening the registration effort to a form of conscription, Woodsworth’s long-standing pacifism became a very public affair as he felt compelled (in full knowledge of the potential consequences) to write a le er to the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, a le er that was published in full, publicly denouncing the registration initiative and his conscientious objection to military service (ibid.). This ‘moment of refusal’ (McKay, 2008: 438) proved to be an irrevocable turning point in Woodsworth’s life, as he was then promptly ‘let go’ from his position with the Bureau and found himself profoundly alienated from his former friends, colleagues, and associates, Winnipeg’s predominantly Protestant, middle-class elite, who supported the war effort. Unemployed and estranged from personal and professional social networks, including those within the Methodist Conference in Manitoba, Woodsworth moved his family to British Columbia in 1917, but with no firm employment arrangements. Subsequently, he found temporary employment as an interim minister of a Methodist church in Gibson’s Landing, a small coastal community north of Vancouver. This position, too, was short-lived. A er a year, Woodsworth le the Methodist Church once and for all, resigning from the ministry, and in 1918, unemployed, in poor health, with few savings le , and with a large family to feed (a wife and six children), he le for Vancouver to find manual work on the docks. He was to work on the docks as a stevedore for a year, leaving his family behind in Gibson’s Landing. By all accounts the move to Vancouver and to manual dock work was incredibly difficult for Woodsworth, but also transformative. Finding lodging in a longshore worker’s home, Woodsworth joined the ranks of the non-unionized unemployed, as a casual day labourer, living from hand to mouth. Although eventually he was put forward for union membership (when an opening for membership became available) and was accepted, Ziegler submits that Woodsworth’s experiences as a non-union and union labourer were life-altering: ‘Even his feeling as head of a family was different, but it was a feeling, he now realized with a shock, quite customary among the men of many working-class families – one of insecurity and helplessness ... Inside the Union he had more opportunities for work, but even so, and a er cu ing his personal expenses to the bone, he found that he could not begin to support his family. The terms “living wage” and “class struggle” began to take on a new significance for him’ (1934: 81–2). Woodsworth’s deepened concern for, and ability to understand, the plight of working people, and the injustice of distributional

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 17

inequities in the capitalist system, was grounded in his own personal experience as a manual worker: ‘We read of large profits in the paper and bi erly compare this with the meagre sums which barely suffice to keep our families at the lowest standard of living’ (Woodsworth, quoted in ibid.: 82). A year or so later, writing to Lucy, his wife, from jail during the Winnipeg strike in June 1919, Woodsworth reflects on his predicament noting that the experience of incarceration was not nearly ‘so trying as the first plunge on the waterfront ... the fact is that a great fight is on and if one enters it ... he must be prepared to face the risks. It’s a serous thing to leave a privileged class and join the ranks of common labor. This is all a part of it’ (Woodsworth, 2005: 46). Woodsworth’s official connection to organized labour began earlier in Winnipeg when he served as a representative for the Ministerial Association on the Trades and Labor Council, and as labour’s representative (1911–12) on the provincial Royal Commission on Technical Education (Ziegler, 1934: 49; Allen, 1972: xiv). Woodsworth’s unofficial connections to labour preceded this with his writings for a Labour paper called The Voice (Ziegler, 1934: 35), and concern about labour issues as reflected in his many lectures and public educational talks on topics such as the ‘wages of unskilled labour’ and the ‘minimum wage’ (p. 49). But the year in Vancouver brought Woodsworth, ‘a renowned social worker with a Canada-wide following’ turned manual dock labourer (McKay, 2008: 437), into the labour movement proper; he became an active union member, a ending meetings, helping to organize the Federated Labour Party of British Columbia, and writing for the official labour newspaper, the BC Federationist (Ziegler, 1934: 85). The time spent in British Columbia, living and working as a ‘common’ labourer, and exposed to a more radicalized socialist movement, cemented Woodsworth’s belief that ‘war was the inevitable outcome of the existing social organization with its undemocratic forms of government and competitive system of industry’ (quoted in ibid.: 76). This experience radicalized his own political thought and activism, pushing him to rethink earlier views and writings, to ‘translate them into a more combative dialect’ and to share ‘the dream of a people’s scientific enlightenment’ (McKay, 2008: 438).17 Woodsworth found himself talking to labour and non-labour audiences, to educate them about labour issues. A ‘brilliant’ orator (ibid.: 470), he was invited to make a speaking tour of western Canada ‘in the interests of the Labour movement’ (Ziegler, 1934: 89). It was this tour that brought him to Winnipeg during the General Strike of June 1919, where thousands of workers

18 Jane Pulkingham

marched the streets and violent encounters occurred between police, the striking workers, and their supporters. McNaught (1970: 233) describes Woodsworth as an accidental, though not reluctant, ‘radical’ in terms of his role in the Winnipeg strike of 1919, when, on the speaking tour stopover in Winnipeg, he temporarily stood in as editor of a local labour paper, and was indicted for ‘publishing seditious libels’ and ‘speaking seditious words,’ in support of the workers’ cause (Manitoba, 1919), and jailed. Though he was released five days later, and the charges ultimately stayed, Woodsworth’s coincidental though not unimportant role in the strike was instrumental to his subsequent and successful run for federal office in the district of Winnipeg North in 1921. In contrast to the more radical image his role in the strike generated, McNaught (1970) suggests that in his various writings, Woodsworth ultimately penned a ‘gradualist policy of socialization, progressive taxation, and related measures’ (1970: 233) very much in keeping with that of the British Labour Party. Similarly, Mills (1991) concludes that in the end, Woodsworth preferred to bring about social change through parliamentary and constitutional rather than more revolutionary direct action. McKay (2008) takes a somewhat different position, at least in relation to Woodsworth’s politics in the period between 1915 and 1921. In this period, he suggests that Woodsworth ‘transformed himself from an evolutionary liberal into an orthodox first formation socialist, working quite comfortably with its Spencerian and Marxian concepts and arguing for revolution as a greatly accelerated process of evolution – a position not well captured in the dichotomies of later scholars’ (p. 436). Although he considers Woodsworth a moderate in his politics, in all realms save the issue of war, and his politics ‘enduringly Anglo-centric,’ McKay nevertheless argues that in the period immediately following the First World War, Woodsworth’s vision for social change was not limited to a parliamentary path, but rather, like ‘most of the first formation, his eye was on the long-term, thoroughgoing, cosmic transformation of the social order’ (p. 440). Now and Then: The Woodward’s–Woodsworth Connection18 In light of the circumstances and events described in the opening paragraphs in relation to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and in subsequent sections regarding Woodsworth’s years in social work in Winnipeg’s north end, the transposition of the name Woodward’s for Woodsworth is a timely reminder that to critically engage

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 19

Woodsworth’s social legacy is to grapple with the fraught politics of social change here and now, not somewhere else and in the past. In the same way that the name Woodsworth signifies a discursive field of power relations, and not just a man who lived a century ago, a point that Daniel Coleman makes in his contribution to this volume, ‘Woodward’s’ is a signifier, emblematic of much more than the building itself. As a symbol of the Downtown Eastside-as-moral-problem (Valverde, 1991), Woodward’s connotes a complex of troubling social conditions, myriad government interventions, policy initiatives, political neglect, and social justice activism. This makes the Downtown Eastside precisely the kind of urban problem to which J.S. Woodsworth as a moral reformer and social worker turned his a entions, especially in the earlier part of his career (Valverde, 1991; Allen, 1972). From his beginning years as a Methodist minister and social gospeller, through his years as a social worker and labour activist, and later as a federal parliamentarian, Woodsworth wanted to make social change happen. So in many ways, he would have been in his milieu in the Downtown Eastside, working alongside the antipoverty activists, faith groups, welfare advocates, and researchers, as well as the many helping professionals in the social, housing, and health sectors, assisting with the destitute, homeless, and marginalized. In other ways, the multifaceted social conditions in the Downtown Eastside, the politics surrounding this area and those who live and work there, a dynamic explored in detail by Denielle Ellio in this volume would likely make this urban se ing unrecognizable to Woodsworth. For one, in his day, Woodsworth had li le to do with or say about Aboriginal peoples living in Canada (Mills, 1991; McKay, 2008).19 In spite of the fact that during his youth he o en accompanied his father on missions to isolated reserves in Canada’s North West; his was a world largely preoccupied with ‘old’ and ‘new’ Canadians, of ‘strangers’ (Strangers within Our Gates) and turning strangers into neighbours (My Neighbor) where to be ‘old’ and not a stranger, was to be a white se ler of a certain heritage and class (Valverde, 1991: 116). Returning to the questions posed by the young Aboriginal conference participant, the seemingly simple, but challenging questions help to crystallize my understanding of and thoughts about the social legacy of J.S. Woodsworth. In asking those around him, ‘who are you to me?’ and in the unspoken corollary question, which also reverberates in my head, ‘who am I to you?’ the young Aboriginal man’s question brings to mind the questions ‘posed in and by every age’ that Woodsworth

20 Jane Pulkingham

deliberated in his book, My Neighbor: ‘who is my neighbour’ and ‘am I that neighbor?’ (Woodsworth, 1972 [1911]: 10–11). The searching and confrontational question about the nature of civility – of social interconnection – posed by the Aboriginal intervener, and the charges that follow, ‘what you are doing isn’t enough. We need to push some bu ons. What action are you going to take to change things, to challenge?’ strike at the heart of what it is about Woodsworth’s social legacy that is at turns, compelling, limiting, and instructive, and why it is important to critically engage this legacy. Woodsworth believed in the progressive power of Canada’s evolution as a nation, an evolution that in his lifetime, Allen Mills points out, he thought was bearing witness to the ‘emergence of a national ideal, a common social language of communication ... a common interest, a community spirit, and a disinterested and efficient citizenship.’ Yet, in spite of his expansive social vision, Woodsworth’s view of community was not straightforwardly inclusive. As previously discussed, his thought, particularly in his earlier career (Strangers within Our Gates) reflected an explicit ‘nativism ... a normative hierarchy of acceptable, less acceptable and even totally unacceptable immigrant cultures and what he called “races”’ (ibid.). As Allen Mills, Daniel Coleman, and David Chariandy, respectively, explore in their contributions to this volume, Woodsworth’s thought was tempered by the expression of considerable social anxiety about English Canada’s changing immigrant base, ethnically and racially. Later, he went on to revise his perspective on immigration and immigrants, appealing for greater tolerance and the humanitarian treatment of certain ‘foreigners,’ reflecting that ‘it is for us older Canadians to find common ground with the newcomer. Only in this way can we prevent what might become something of a Balkanization of this country. Only in this way can we build up a greater Canada which will not be an English Canada or a French Canada but a larger and more inclusive Canada in the building of which all these various people will contribute’ (Woodsworth, Hansard, 7 June 1928: 3903– 4, quoted in Mills 1991: 231). Even so, as this quote reveals, through the equation of ‘older Canadians’ with people like himself, members of white se ler society, he contributed to the a empted social, political, and cultural erasure of Aboriginal peoples as inhabitants of Canada. Woodsworth’s commitment to the advancement of human rights, then, was conditional, circumscribed by a valorization of unity in contradistinction to the perceived risks posed by cultural diversity (in particular, though not exclusively, non-white) and traditionally

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 21

derived cultural identities. His was ‘an account of community that [saw] li le virtue in cultural diversity’ (Mills). Reflecting a long history of white hegemony, Woodsworth’s nationalist vision of Canada was to be achieved through assimilationist practices in relation to the treatment of Aboriginal peoples in Canada and immigrants to the country.20 But as McKay (2008) suggests, rather than writing off Woodsworth and others like him, because their views were by turns racialist, racist, and nativist, a present-minded and antipresentist analysis of Woodsworth’s legacy more usefully traces the ‘lasting proclivities of the liberal order,’ and the continuities between past and present ‘le ’ struggles with effecting progressive social change. One hundred years later, the Canadian social landscape is considerably different than in Woodsworth’s day. Demographically, the difference is evident in changing immigration pa erns but as the latest census figures indicate, this has more to do with differences in where Canada’s immigrant population is drawn from21 rather than rates of immigration. The proportion of the population in Canada who are foreign-born, now at its highest level in seventy-five years,22 is only beginning to approach rates witnessed in the period from 1911 to 1931 (Statistics Canada, 2007), when Woodsworth was most actively writing about immigration concerns. But Canada is not only returning to higher rates of immigration (directed at permanent residents),23 it is increasingly honing a ‘just-intime’ (Canada, 2008: 117) immigration system by expanding programs that enable employers to access temporary workers24 through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFW).25 In any given year, Canada now relies on temporary workers almost as much as it does family class and economic immigrants. According to Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC), in 2006, as many as 171,844 temporary foreign workers were living in Canada,26 approximately four-fi hs the number of family class and economic immigrants admi ed in the same year (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2007).27 The past century is also witness to a transformation of the Canadian welfare state (including the scope of protections for social or welfare needs through public policy provisions), and to a rights revolution that ‘represented an important shi not only in the relationship between citizens and the state but also within civil society’ (Clément, 2008: 18). The social activism of the early twentieth century in which J.S. Woodsworth participated was important to subsequent welfare state developments, and to Canada’s rights revolution, including the institutionalization of social welfare policies in the education, health, and income security

22 Jane Pulkingham

arenas, the expansion of workers rights through labour law and unionization, and human rights protections through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Notably, welfare state expansion in this period (cemented in a forty-year span ending in the early 1980s) is characterized by the emergence of a broadly based, if fragile and contestable (Dean, 2007) consensus for universalistic principles underpinning some programs such as old age security, and the (now eliminated) family allowance, and in a more limited fashion, primary/secondary education and health care (Siltanen, 2002). As Hugh Shewell describes, these programs can be viewed as having provided a limited set of social rights (de facto rather than de jure) that align with second-generation citizenship rights articulated by T.H. Marshall who envisaged them as ‘absorbing’ (Marshall, 1965: 91) people into society through an ‘intimate blending of rights and duties’ (p. 90). Universalism reflected the notion that societal interests were furthered by state provision for the shared human needs and conditions of Canada’s citizens. These shared needs largely revolved around providing services and income supplements/replacements to support citizens as future or past workers, regardless of their socioeconomic status. In this sense, universalism was a principle borne of the ‘working classes’ but with changing pa erns of employment and unemployment, it was taken up as a principle that transcended class divisions. Yet the social rights of citizenship o en a ributed to this period were in fact never fully realized or implemented in Canada (Siltanen, 2002). As Clément suggests, because ‘the source of human rights lies not in the law but in human morality,’ rights claims, as distinct from rights recognized in law or regulation by the state, are allowed, even encouraged, in a ‘society with a strong rights culture ... even though, at the time, they are not recognized by the state or even the community around them’ (2008: 34). As a result, there has been a tendency to overstate the degree of social protection afforded by the welfare state in the past and to conflate social and economic rights with ‘whatever social programs governments deigned to provide’ (Brodsky).28 What is o en claimed to be a social right, then, is in reality, simply a welfare provision or protection, even if, as Clément suggests, the pillars of the welfare state in Canada were a manifestation of a rights culture, ‘rooted in a powerful belief in the legitimacy and necessity of social rights’ (2008: 35, emphasis added). In the last twenty years in Canada, following a period of incremental expansion to social welfare protections domestically, and internationally (e.g., becoming a signatory of the United Nations Universal

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 23

Declaration of Human Rights), there is general consensus that welfare state protections have, for the most part, diminished in significant ways. Janine Brodie describes the nature of welfare state change in this period as a ‘tectonic shi in the epicenter of Canadian politics’ that has as much, if not more, to do with changes in understandings about governance as it does with constitutional or institutional change itself (2002: 90). Influenced by international and domestic pressures to pursue a global economic market liberalization strategy to limit collective rights and universal income security provisions, this period is associated with neoliberal welfare rollbacks (or contraction) and roll-out (disciplinary techniques of governance designed to contain the marginalized, to reinforce individual responsibility and the citizen-as-worker) (Peck & Tickell, 2002). In Canada, one of the consequences of this shi in governance is the abandonment of universal income support programs, and a gradual undermining of the universal dimensions to health care and education. Meanwhile, Canada’s domestic commitment to enhancing and strengthening certain protections for its citizens was fortified through the establishment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), and the establishment of provincial Human Rights Commissions. As Clément charts, until the Second World War, ‘there was li le legal recognition of the rights of minorities, but within forty years, a massive human rights program was initiated by federal and provincial governments in Canada, creating a veritable “human rights state”’ (2008: 25). Arguably, it is this prevailing rights culture that explains the phenomenon observed by Brodsky that as Canadians began to lose social programs and benefits, they nevertheless have come to regard them ‘perhaps unconsciously as established rights that governments are not at liberty to abandon.’ Yet, what kind of social change can a rights discourse promote, in particular a discourse that is predicated on the notion of human rights as a universal idiom? Although the Charter gives some recognition of minority rights, and protection of minority rights certainly animated many protagonists in the movement for a bill of rights and the Charter, the Charter itself focuses primarily on civil and political rights (ibid.). Given the prevailing minimalist definition of human rights (civil and political rights) and emphasis on negative freedom or rights, do social and economic rights ma er and if so, how? And to what extent does an emphasis on individual rights within human rights projects crowd out the possibility of simultaneously pursuing alternative justice projects that have a collective basis?29 The ‘cultural turn’ in

24 Jane Pulkingham

progressive political thinking and the emergence of new social movements point to new insights into social relations of power that draw attention to social divisions beyond class and a class-based politics (Dean, 2007: 6 –7), and beyond individual rights. Thus, rather than focusing on redistributive rights in isolation, these movements demand ‘a different kind of rights ... to participation, empowerment and to recognition’ (p. 7). Contributors to this volume take up these points of debate in different ways. Critics of human rights activism are sceptical of even an expansive approach to human rights, suggesting that it can ‘function as a camouflage for inequality ... if rights discourse leads activists to focus too much on the state [and legal redress] and does not address abuses at the substate, social level, then it is incapable of confronting systemic inequality’ (Clément, 2008: 210–11). As Wendy Brown argues, ‘human rights activism is a moral political project and if it displaces, competes with, refuses, or rejects other political projects, including those also aimed at producing justice, then it is not merely a tactic but a particular form of political power carrying a particular image of justice, and it will behoove us to inspect, evaluate, and judge it as such’ (2004: 453). What then can we expect from human rights protections, especially in the current political climate and the move towards neoliberal ‘welfare contractualism’ (White, 2000) where contractarian rather than solidaristic perceptions of dependency (Dean, 2007) prevail? The emergent duty discourse is part and parcel of what David Schneiderman describes as a remapping of our ‘constitutional culture.’ What is being redrawn are our expectations about civility, seemingly universal or common sense understandings about who we are to one another and how we should govern ourselves (Brodie, 2002) and what citizens and inhabitants can ‘legitimately expect of their neighbours, markets and government’ (Kershaw, 2005: 4). At one level, these shi s can be seen as a significant weakening of Canada’s commitment to social protections, to social citizenship rights claims. At another level, the current siege can also be interpreted as devolving from and laying bare a long-standing fault line in the post – Second World War welfare state which is Canada’s comparatively weak commitment to social citizenship rights from the outset (Siltanen, 2007, 2002). Over the past thirty years, feminist, antiracist, and Aboriginal movements, among others, have been instrumental in pointing to the needs and interests of Canada’s citizens and inhabitants who were not well provided for by the postwar welfare state in its heyday, or in its subsequent restructured configurations, human rights protections notwithstanding. These movements, influential in law and policy reform,

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 25

have broadened public understanding about exclusions to polity based on group identity, increasingly focusing a ention on understanding not just who, but how, people are excluded (i.e., processes and experiences of exclusion) (Cohen & Pulkingham, 2009; Kingfisher, 2002; Larner, 2000). Themes and Content Though much has changed since Woodsworth’s time, his social legacy remains salient today. As Daniel Coleman suggests, ‘the name of Woodsworth has become associated with a set of ideals, a cluster of rationalizations and provisions for social justice and human rights, which, either because of the subsequent developments of economic and political history or because of internal flaws, are slipping dangerously into extinction.’ It is these sets of ideals and provisions for social justice and human rights that contributors to this volume critically engage. The astute questions posed by the Aboriginal intervener recounted at the beginning of this chapter have staying power because they demand that we recognize our ‘culturally freighted’ sense of civility (Coleman) even while we hold on to a sense of the importance of protecting rights and freedoms we have come to associate with civil society. The intervention also expresses a frustration with the seemingly narrowed scope of options that states and citizens can (or are willing to) take to redress recent and more long-standing pa erns of inequality. And it reminds us, as do Geraldina Polanco and Cecily Nicholson, that we need to pay a ention to how we go about practising social change, and that exclusions to polity are intersectional, occurring not simply between, but also within and across, group identities. What is the balance of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship? Can human rights activism be politicized to work in concert rather than against other justice initiatives? How do we effect social change and accommodate and reconcile social diversity and difference while articulating a common interest? How can common ground be found, especially where there is a profound incommensurability of experience? While the contributions to this volume suggest that the answers to these questions are neither straightforward nor determinate, they do engage these questions through a reassessment of Woodsworth’s social justice legacy and the sets of ideals associated with it. As several contributors underscore (Mills, Coleman, Chariandy), rather than eschew the achievements of social progressives, such as Woodsworth, through a politics of blame, or conversely, elevate them through uncritical idolatry (Mills), we can

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learn more by understanding that ‘the deeper truth about social justice legacies in general [is] that they sustain themselves neither through self-congratulation nor hero-worship, but through courageous introspection and critical reappraisal’ (Chariandy). In considering the contemporary significance of a human rights frame for pursuing social welfare objectives, and examining the historical and contemporary exclusions to polity that occur around gender, ethnicity, class, and race, the contributors to this volume invite readers to reflect critically on the contemporary politics of social change in Canada. To begin, Allen Mills provides readers an overview of the social and political thought of J.S. Woodsworth, as well as a biographical sense of the man. Drawing on his own incisive political biography of Woodsworth, Fool for Christ: The Political Thought of J.S. Woodsworth (1991), Mills considers the general significance for activism and politics today of three main aspects of Woodsworth’s thought and practice – his perspective on community, domestic political action, and the international system (or ‘globalism’) respectively. Mills reflects that not only was Woodsworth crucial to the historical formation of a Canadian democratic le , ‘musing’ on Woodsworth’s life is instructive because it highlights the need to question the possibilities and limits of past and contemporary forms of political and social action. Mills argues that Woodsworth’s contemporary iconic status is dubitable not least because many of the policies and positions he supported have been abandoned or modified by contemporary le politics. Even so, Woodsworth’s life history provides insight into understanding the contestable and ambiguous pathway of radical action historically and contemporarily. Staying with this theme, but developing it through a Gramscian-inspired analysis of labour rights, Eric Tucker suggests that there are two important reasons to reflect on Woodsworth’s legacy at this juncture; first of all, like Woodsworth in the first part of his career, we find ourselves in an ‘interregnum,’ a period in which there is a coercive turn regarding labour rights; and second, we too have to work out ‘ways to live otherwise’ in the face of the ‘crisis in the liberal order.’ According to Tucker, the ‘problem of our time’ is how to make sense of the unclear and fraught dynamic between a ‘politics of amelioration, gradualism, and transformation,’ and to do so, we need to recognize the fundamental connection between the pursuit of labour rights, both individual and collective, and ‘the role of subordinate classes in creating the conditions that [make] resistance and reform, let alone transformation, possible.’ He suggests that Woodsworth failed to make this

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 27

connection in large measure because Woodsworth assumed that it was enough to simply elect a social democratic government to see to fruition the socialist project. Tucker sees an alternate visionary starting point in recognizing the need for the ‘construction of a counter-hegemonic bloc that confronts capital not only in the state but in civil society as well.’ The question is how? For Tucker, there is no question that social change has to come about through a politics of amelioration but he sees two routes along this path, one legal and the other, direct action. Reflecting on the record to date, he is not overly optimistic about the potentiality of the legal route, arguing that the ‘legal path has led the labour movement into the courts to challenge the constitutionality of the coercive turn and into international forums to show that these state actions violate Canada’s international commitments. Neither strategy has been terribly successful.’ As far as political strategy goes, Tucker suggests that legal routes alone are insufficient; they are demobilizing and tend to reinforce the status quo or past ways of organizing relations, rather than alternate ways. Woodsworth envisaged a world where human rights and welfare are privileged over property rights. For Woodsworth, unlike some contemporary human rights activists,30 human rights were envisaged as serving an expressly political end as a counterweight to free-market capitalism. And he placed unquestioning faith on the potential of parliamentary and legal frameworks to assure human rights. But what transpired with the institution of human rights in Canada? Gary Teeple shares Tucker’s concern about the antipolitical strain of contemporary human rights activism and questions how well national and international legal frameworks can protect the needs and interests of ordinary citizens or individuals. But Teeple goes further than questioning existing legal frameworks to argue that the very concept of ‘human rights’ is a misnomer. In his estimation, human rights are at best entities that have lapsed in their applicability; at worst they are entities that take on a form of false advertising. He suggests that the International Bill of Rights31 enshrines human rights that are limited in scope, limited by transformations in the capitalist system that presided over their development in the first place. Specifically, Teeple suggests that what we commonly understand to be distinctive about human rights, which is that they are universal and absolute, does not apply today, even though these rights continue to be advertised as such. Tracing the historical genesis of human rights, he argues that their application, when first implemented, was also circumscribed by virtue of who had the

28 Jane Pulkingham

material means to stake private claims to rights within the marketplace even though at that time, the notion of the universality of the rights of the market and corresponding political rights were relatively speaking, emancipatory, given ‘feudal arbitrariness.’ In contrast, Teeple suggests that today there can be no doubt that ‘the essential interests of the working classes cannot be met within the confines of a marketplace society, unlike the classes a ached to the expansion of capital.’ On the one hand, Teeple’s analysis appears to reject the possibility of social change through a politics of amelioration. From his perspective, a more transformative position is warranted, one that struggles to realize the underlying logic of human rights, rather than a position that simply demands respect for human rights. On the other hand, as he concludes his analysis, Teeple offers passing acknowledgment that in light of the fact that the system ‘cannot honour these [human rights] principles,’ there is a radical dimension to demands that the ‘system live up to its own principles’ – that human rights principles be respected. A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision appears to provide grounds for qualified optimism regarding the potential of Charter jurisprudence to be er protect the labour rights of employees into the future.32 In what is described as a ‘path breaking’ decision (Lynk, 2007: A5), in June 2007, the Supreme Court overturned a judicial precedent it had previously established twenty years earlier when it then ruled that Charter rights (Section 2(d)) pertaining to freedom of association were not offended by legislative restrictions on collective bargaining. The recent ruling concerns the case of health care and social service employees in British Columbia, whose Charter rights the Court now deems, were offended when the B.C. Liberal government implemented Bill 29, the Health and Social Services Delivery Improvement Act in January 2002. Bill 29 invalidated a range of workplace protections achieved through collective bargaining processes, by se ing aside negotiated se lements dealing with contracting out, job security, and layoffs and seniority; the intent was to pave the way for privatization of the work. The end result, a mass firing of hospital support staff, is reported to be the largest firing of women in Canadian labour history, with approximately 8,000 workers, mostly immigrant women of colour, who on average were also older than the general workforce, losing their jobs (Cohen & Cohen, 2004). The Supreme Court ruling, that required the B.C. government to negotiate with the affected unions, has now resulted in an agreement that will see the B.C. government pay some $85 million to the affected unions, most of the money going to compensate workers who lost their

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 29

jobs, and to provide retraining. While those who lost their jobs will not get their jobs back and most support services (in food and housekeeping) are now contracted out, the agreement will limit future contracting out and requires increased consultation on the part of the government before it can a empt to implement legislation that interferes with collectively bargained agreements. As Lynk observes, the ruling has for the first time, ‘constitutionally tempered’ the ‘unrestricted authority of governments to legislate as they please in labour relations’ (2007: A9). This ruling, which establishes that collective bargaining deserves Charter protection, that workers have a right to collective bargaining, represents the Court’s more recent willingness to embrace a more emboldened and broad approach to the section of the Charter that deals with associational rights, interpreting these rights as exercisable by collectives and not merely by individuals (Lynk, 2007). Like Tucker and Teeple, the contributions by Hugh Shewell, Gwen Brodsky, and David Schneiderman, respectively, challenge the juridical limit placed on welfare regimes by a dominant apolitical human rights discourse that privileges negative liberty and liberal individualism. But rather than eschewing human rights justice projects altogether, as arguably does Teeple, their analyses suggest that contemporary struggles over human rights remain an important and necessary part of activism to produce justice. These struggles involve challenging narrowly cast, or weak, interpretations of human rights principles (e.g., that preclude social or collective rights) and the mechanisms by which they are to be assured; or alternately, rigid interpretations of human rights that privilege the rights of the individual over existing social and collective principles (e.g., that undermine existing social programs or thwart the possibility to re-establish dismantled social programs). For Hugh Shewell, who details the challenges to, but importance of making the case that social rights are human rights, a ‘necessary first step’ in transforming liberal capitalism is to entrench social rights in the constitution, rather than leave it to legislation or Charter provisions. In his view, one of the most important things this would accomplish would be to raise ‘the consciousness of people to the possibilities of society beyond capitalism’ while advancing a ‘fuller meaning of democracy.’ Gwen Brodsky underlines the importance of demanding that social and economic rights be recognized as human rights as well. But her analysis also explores why it is important to move beyond constitutional provisions, drawing a ention to what she calls a human rights ‘accountability gap,’ the disjuncture between the Canadian government’s willingness to

30 Jane Pulkingham

sign treaties, charters, and constitutional guarantees to protect social and economic rights and its tendency to undermine or not pursue the federal-provincial agreements and social programs that are the machinery to realize these guarantees. In spite of the accountability gap, Brodsky argues that within Canada, the struggle to identify poverty as a human rights violation demonstrates the importance of grounding social programs in human rights norms insofar as a human rights language and framework provides community-based advocates and activists in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), at the national and international level, a stronger basis for defending and enhancing social programs and pressuring governments to develop legislative provisions to concretize human rights principles into standards. Brodsky and Shewell’s analyses draw a ention to the ways that governments o en pursue public policy through a strategy of inaction, promoting and relying on narrow interpretations of existing constitutional, charter, legislative, and policy provisions. This is a tactic of ‘studied ignorance’ where the systemic basis for inequality, poverty, or social and economic discrimination is simply not seen, or publicly recognized, so nothing can be done (Cohen & Pulkingham, 2009). David Schneiderman’s assessment of the contemporary interplay of charters of rights and trade and investment treaties highlights another, arguably more ominous, dimension to the accountability gap. Schneiderman’s contribution to this volume directs our a ention to a policy dynamic where the courts are invoking a rigid or strong (rather than narrow or weak) interpretation of human rights as individual rights to undermine the provisions of existing public programs. By way of example, Schneiderman examines the way a Canadian court (Quebec, in the Chaoulli case) actively invoked ‘human rights in order to constitutionalize a neoliberal vision of health that undermines the principal of universal accessibility irrespective of an ability to pay.’ In this instance, the Charter is being used to shore up the rights of the individual (e.g., to require the government to allow private provision of health care services and to ensure that individual citizens can actualize the right to buy such services in their province) at the expense of policy provisions that are guided by social priorities and principles other than individual rights (e.g., the provision of public services according to medical need within the context of finite resources). In addition, as Schneiderman points out, ‘with North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) strictures in place, it would seem that once a part of the health care system is open to U.S. health insurance providers, it would be practically impossible to restore

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 31

a fully public system because of NAFTA’s takings rule.’ The ‘takings’ rule means that any future a empt to ‘take back’ what is now a privatized service, and resocialize it, or convert it back to a publicly funded and/ or provided service, would mean that the (foreign) private investors whose economic interests would be harmed would have to be compensated, at a prohibitively expensive rate, by the government concerned (in this instance, Quebec). As a result, Schneiderman suggests that the kind of transition afoot today is different from that in Woodsworth’s day. Whereas in Woodsworth’s time, constitutional culture was more open, with few legal or constitutional impediments to a social democratic agenda seeking a strong interventionist role for the state in terms of economic expansion and social protections, today Canada is a aching itself to a more closed, U.S.-style constitutional culture, embracing agreements that tie its hands in relation to its ability to nationalize and/ or expropriate private property. Neoliberal ‘constitutional culture’ or governance is o en associated with discursive and institutional processes of retreat or dismantling. It is this backdrop of retreat that in part fosters the seemingly paradoxical use of charters of rights, on the one hand, to demand the protection and extension of social programs for the poor, or alternately, to a empt to bu ress the rights of the individual (with the necessary financial means) to undermine the principles of socialized health care where money in principle should be no barrier (or advantage) to access. Denielle Ellio ’s ethnographic analysis of the politics of health care directed at the urban poor in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside points to yet another dimension of neoliberal governance, one that ‘challenges the notion that social welfare programs and health care are simply being cut or withdrawn.’ Rather, in focusing on processes of marginalization, Ellio argues that the surprising intensification and concentration of health service provision observed in this urban space represents a ‘new technology of regulating and managing populations’ associated with the shi to a roll-out (as distinct from an earlier rollback) phase of neoliberal governance. This la er phase is designed to ‘contain and discipline’ those marginalized under the earlier phase of neoliberalism (Peck & Tickell, 2002). In the Downtown Eastside, new technologies of governance are evident in the spatial delivery of services, a ghe oization of sorts, which serves to enclose and monitor the urban poor, as much as it does to help them, combined with a new mode of service delivery that emphasizes self-monitoring and personal responsibility on the part of the ‘at risk’ population. In addition, there is a fiscal shi where cutbacks in core

32 Jane Pulkingham

government grants to community service providers and funding of social welfare programs are accompanied by increased public and private funding (from large pharmaceutical corporations) of more specialized project-based medical programs and services. The result is a curious bio-medicalization of the lives of residents where they are more likely to be provided medical tracking numbers and a cocktail of drugs than they are food or shelter. Marginalization o en occurs through a complicated dynamic of surveillance and abandonment. While many who live in the Downtown Eastside find themselves having to subsist on income generated outside of the formal economy, Geraldina Polanco and Cecily Nicholson direct our a ention to labour practices in the formal economy that also render many workers ‘disposable.’ Canada’s migrant or temporary workforce is one of the country’s most vulnerable groups of workers, many of whom come to Canada to escape economic hardship (and provide support to families they leave behind) in their country of origin. Highlighting the large-scale presence of these workers and the extent to which Canada now relies on temporary workers, Polanco and Nicholson explore the dynamics of transnational flows of labour through an examination of the Live-In Caregiver Programme (LCP), one of the foreign temporary worker programs operated by the federal government. While Polanco and Nicholson underscore the limited labour rights and protections afforded the racialized and feminized LCP workforce, like Tucker, they too are concerned with questions about how to involve subordinated groups in creating the conditions to make resistance and progressive social transformation possible. As they argue, ‘what it means to enact solidarity moves practice well beyond the scope of simply demanding be er labour rights.’ Rather, in organizing for change, they suggest that we need to acknowledge and be a entive to ‘problems of representation, communication, and material barriers’ and the way we individually and collectively reinforce structures of oppression, in order to develop ‘alternative political mobilization strategies and community-building practices among those working for social justice.’ By way of example, they point to a number of initiatives that are local but globally linked, involving marginalized and racialized groups, to demonstrate that such groups can be at the forefront of community-building for change. Canadian approaches to cultural and racial difference, historically and in the present, and the implications for social justice activism, are examined in more detail in the chapters by Daniel Coleman, Neal McLeod, and David Chariandy. Tracing the genealogy of multiculturalism, Canada’s ‘most famous sign of civility,’ Daniel Coleman examines

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 33

‘how Woodsworth’s ideas about race and immigration operated, far beyond the reach of his own intentions or views as an individual person, within the evolution of multicultural ideals in Canada’ and today inflects Canadian approaches to cultural and racial difference. For Coleman, the purpose of undertaking this analysis is to understand how systemic racism works and how it is that social progressives in Woodsworth’s day and our own can be blind to the way they/we contribute to oppressive practices. As he argues, it is ‘easy to identify the racism of a completely fraudulent civility. It is much harder ... [and] more productive in the long term, to find ways to analyse the operations of white supremacy embedded in sincere and always-incomplete efforts to establish civility.’ The history of human rights activism and the progressive le in Englishspeaking Canada, on the one hand, and Indigenous movements, on the other, are two cases in point. As McLeod explains, while concepts such as individual human rights, equality, and universal citizenship, have a certain intuitive appeal, ‘the danger of invoking individual rights for Indigenous peoples is the potential neglect of historical processes associated with the creation of the nation state and the historical/political relationships that exist, vis-à-vis the treaties, between Indigenous people and the nation state.’ Treaty rights, on the other hand, he argues, ‘have the potential to widen the liberal fixation on individual rights, providing a more collective way of envisioning political space.’ McLeod sees the dilemma as one of ‘balancing historical justice concerns while being part of the larger community – Canada,’ which in his view, demands that we reach out to each other in an a empt to ‘see oneself in the Other.’ David Chariandy is similarly concerned to examine cultural and racial tensions within contemporary human rights justice projects, reflecting that there is a ‘lingering prejudice’ among le progressives today who see an automatic tension between the human rights gains won by established Charter groups (e.g., women, minorities, religious groups, and now sexual minorities) and the so-called identity politics of newer ethnic and racial minority groups. The tension examined by Chariandy, in fact, builds on a long-standing anxiety among some on the progressive le who also see the emphasis on human rights gains for established Charter groups as potentially diversionary and divisive, detracting from the capacity of the le to develop a unified front to resist capitalist exploitation. Like Polanco and Nicholson, Chariandy questions why it is that the ‘new ethnicities,’ especially racial minorities, are not approached as a ‘crucial resource’ but rather are imagined to be an obstacle in the ongoing struggle for social justice within modern nation states.’ Chariandy suggests that the problem is rooted in a ‘new racism,’

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a position of seeming disinterest or impartiality to questions of race or ethnicity, which in fact, rests on a ‘reified notion of “culture” [that] trumps all other explanations, and effectively takes the place of the old pseudoscience of “race” in providing the primary determinant of social standing and engagement.’ While the ‘new racism’ can and does entrench social divisions, Chariandy sees the potential for bridging a politics of disinterest, on the one hand, and a politics of particularity and difference, on the other, through the identification of transcultural issues and factors that are of common interest to those engaged in the struggle for social justice in Canada. So who is Woodsworth and of what relevance is he today? The contributors to this volume provide a range of answers to this question, directing a ention to concrete sites where a reconsideration of Woodsworth and his legacy is helpful. Fundamentally, Woodsworth is relevant today because he engaged in social justice struggles as a cleric, labour and social activist, political leader and parliamentarian, and the social reform movement, of which he was a part, is central to the race, class, and gender organization of contemporary English-speaking Canada (Valverde, 1991; McKay, 2008). He is relevant, not because he is a le ist figure from the past who needs to be rescued, or silenced (McKay, 2008: 3) but because to engage his legacy and simultaneously a wide range of contemporary issues that parallel those with which Woodsworth wrestled, reminds us that the way forward is, for us as for those who came before us, ‘difficult to discern – which is not the same as thinking that all paths are the same, or that it does not ma er which one we choose.’ Recognizing the insights to be gained by examining the historical antecedents to contemporary struggles for social justice, the contributions to this volume shed light on the continuities and shi s in historical and contemporary processes of marginalization and exclusions to polity occurring around class, gender, and race, and in so doing, they invite the reader to examine the tensions that inhere in contemporary understandings about who we are to one another and how we should govern ourselves.

NOTES 1 I would like to extend special thanks to anonymous reviewers from the University of Toronto Press, especially reviewer A-2, Daniel Coleman, and Dara Culhane for their insightful comments on earlier dra s of this chapter.

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 35 2 According to the 2001 Census, the average household income in the Downtown Eastside district was $15,647 (in 2000$), compared with $57,916 for the City of Vancouver as a whole (City of Vancouver, 2008). 3 According to the 2005 homeless count, homelessness in the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) grew 235 per cent since the previous count in 2002. Those who identify as Aboriginal are overrepresented among Vancouver’s homeless (30% of the homeless self-identified as Aboriginal, while the Aboriginal population in Vancouver was 2%) and Aboriginal people who are homeless are also much more likely to be street homeless (70% compared with 57% of those who do not self-identify as Aboriginal) (Goldberg et al., 2005). 4 For further discussion of the politics of care in the Downtown Eastside, see Denielle Elliot (in this volume). 5 While the proportion of the Aboriginal population living in the Downtown Eastside (and the adjacent neighbourhoods) is higher than that of the non-Aboriginal population, and urban Aboriginals are at greater risk of being homeless and street homeless, as Dara Culhane (2009) points out, we need to be mindful of the impact of and tendency to rely on selective reporting of statistical demographic information. As Culhane cautions, the fact is that the vast majority of Aboriginals who live in Vancouver do not live in the Downtown Eastside, and the majority of Aboriginal peoples living in the Downtown Eastside do not live on the streets. Yet even well-intentioned media and social reporting on the Downtown Eastside is a double-edged sword when it comes to social justice initiatives by and for Aboriginal peoples because these reports tend to fuel popular misconceptions and negative stereotypes about urban Aboriginal peoples living in the city, equating urban Aboriginal peoples with the minority, but highly visible, population of Aboriginal people living on the streets. 6 See Gwen Brodsky (in this volume). 7 In 2005, City Council selected two non-profit organizations to sponsor the development of 200 non-market housing units for low-income singles and low- and modest-income families at Woodward’s (City of Vancouver, 2005). The approved Woodward’s project called for a mix of market and non-market housing, retail and service outlets, community space, public green space, a day care centre, and a post-secondary education facility. 8 The controversy centres on what kind of non-market housing is needed, ‘institutional’ housing catering to specific client groups such as drug addicts and the mentally ill, or ‘affordable’ housing, directed at lowincome singles and families. 9 Unbeknownst to the Aboriginal intervener, his questions and the encounter they prompted have been enormously helpful in framing

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10 11

12 13 14

15

16 17

18

19

what it means to rethink Woodsworth’s legacy. Clearly, the nature of his intervention when it was delivered was powerful enough to prompt me to take detailed notes. Intuitively, I understood his words to be important. But over time, the prescience of the encounter, and its heuristic value in a contemporary reading of Woodsworth, has taken more solid form. James Shaver Woodsworth, 1874 –1942. Woodsworth was elected Member of Parliament for the riding of Winnipeg North from 1921 to 1925, and from 1925 to 1942, he was the elected MP for Winnipeg North Centre. Retrieved 19 Jan. 2009 from h p://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/transactions/3/ woodsworth_js.shtml. See Allen Mills (in this volume). Morton (1970) traces the bias of Prairie politics through several stages, beginning with colonial subordination at the time of Confederation, moving through agrarian sectionalism and finally by 1930, utopianism. Allen indicates that the staff included one ordained minister, eight deaconesses, four kindergarten teachers, a director of boys’ work, three theological students, two students training to work with ‘language groups’ and two women training for se lement work (1972: xiv). See Coleman and Chariandy (in this volume) respectively for detailed and incisive contemporary analyses of Strangers within Our Gates. McKay argues that what Woodsworth provided the labour movement in Canada was someone who could reach out to a broad spectrum of people because he conveyed ‘a sense that the mastery of the sociological facts led inextricably to a realm of freedom ... that it was simply a ma er of common sense that Christianity and the co-operative commonwealth were inextricably tied’ (2008: 439). Unless otherwise indicated, references in this chapter to contributors to this volume are in respect of their contributions published in this volume. At the turn of the last century, the Aboriginal population was small and growing at a very slow rate, with few Aboriginal peoples living in urban centres like Vancouver. But since the 1960s, this situation has changed dramatically. Today, the most recent census figures suggest that while the proportion of Canada’s population who self-identify as Aboriginal remains relatively small, this population is now growing faster than the nonAboriginal population. Between 1996 and 2006, it increased 45%, nearly six times faster than the 8 per cent rate of growth for the non-Aboriginal population over the same period. And, rather than living on reserves, the

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 37

20 21

22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29

30

31

32

majority (54%) of Aboriginal peoples now live in urban centres (Statistics Canada, 2008). Ibid. See also the contributions by Daniel Coleman and David Chariandy respectively. Among recent immigrants who came to Canada between 2001 and 2006, nearly 60% were born in Asian countries (including the Middle East) (Statistics Canada, 2007) while almost all of those immigrating to Canada in the early- to mid-part of the twentieth century were born in Great Britain and in European countries. The number of foreign-born almost tripled over this time period (Statistics Canada, 2007). In 2006, Canada admi ed 251,649 permanent residents, including family class, economic immigrants, and refugees (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2007). This expansion includes accelerating the pace at which work permits can be processed. This includes the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), the pilot project for occupations requiring lower levels of formal training, the oil sands construction projects in Alberta, and the hiring of foreign academics. This is a 122% increase over 10 years (HRSDC, 2007). Canada admi ed 208,765 family class and economic immigrants in 2006 (CIC, 2007). See also Siltanen (2007, 2002). See, e.g., Neal McLeod’s discussion of the relationship between individual rights and prospects for Indigenous treaty rights, and Eric Tucker’s discussion of individual and collective labour rights. Wendy Brown suggests that Michael Ignatieff ‘argues for human rights as the essential precondition for a free-market order and for the market itself as the vehicle of individual social and economic security’ (2004: 458), and that in so doing, he a empts to depoliticize human rights activism by presenting it as an ‘expressly moral and antipolitical project’ (p. 459). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The decision also makes clear why there has been such pessimism about the potential of the Charter to protect labour rights, given the court’s ineffectual or lifeless approach to Charter rights, when it comes to labour issues, over the past twenty years.

38 Jane Pulkingham REFERENCES Allen, R. (1972). Introduction. In J.S. Woodsworth, My neighbour: A study of city conditions, a plea for social service, v–xix. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — (1973). The background of the social gospel in Canada. In R. Allen (Ed.), The social gospel in Canada, 2–34. O awa: National Museums of Canada. Brodie, J. (2002). The great undoing: State formation, gender politics, and social policy in Canada. In C. Kingfisher (Ed.), Western welfare in decline: Globalization and women’s poverty, 90–110. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brown, W. (2004). ‘The most we can hope for. . .’: Human rights and the politics of fatalism. South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2/3), 451– 63. Cameron, S., & Swanson, J. (2004). Review of Aaron Vidaver, (Ed.), Woodsquat. West Coast Line, Issue 41. Burnaby, BC: West Coast Review Publishing Society. In The Rain Review of Books 2/3 (May/June), 1. Retrieved 20 Feb. 2008 from h p://www.rainreview.net /rain-020301.html. Canada. (2008). The budget plan 2008: Responsible leadership. Department of Finance. Tabled in the House of Commons by the Hon. James M. Flaherty, P.C., M.P., Minister of Finance, 26 Feb. 2008. Retrieved 24 April 2009 from h p://www.budget.gc.ca/2008/pdf/plan-eng.pdf. Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). (2007). Facts and figures 2006. Immigration overview: Permanent and temporary residents 2007–06 –29. Retrieved 14 March 2008 from h p://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/ statistics/facts2006/overview/01.asp. City of Vancouver. (2002). City funds housing for Woodward’s homeless. City Clerk’s Department. Retrieval 19 Feb. 2008 from h p://www.city.vancouver. bc.ca/ctyclerk/newsreleases2002/NRwoodwards.htm. — (2005). SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts joins Woodward’s development. City Clerk’s Department. Retrieved 19 Feb. 2008 from h p://www.city. vancouver.bc.ca/ctyclerk/newsreleases2005/NRwoodwards_sfu.htm. — (2007). Woodward’s ... a new beginning. The Story of Woodward’s. City of Vancouver, Real Estate Services. Retrieved 19 Feb. 2008 from h p://www. city.vancouver.bc.ca/corpsvcs/realestate/woodwards/story.htm. — (2008). Maps, Community Profiles. Retrieved 25 March 2008 from h p:// www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/community_profiles/downtown_eastside/ documents/DowntownEastsideDemographics.pdf. Clément, D. (2008). Canada’s rights revolution: Social movements and social change, 1937-82. Vancouver: UBC Press. Cohen, M.G., & Cohen, M. (2004). A return to wage discrimination: Pay equity losses through privatization of health care. Vancouver: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 39 Cohen, M.G., & Pulkingham, J. (2009). Public policy for women: The state, income security, and labour market issues. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cook, R. (1985). The regenerators: Social criticism in late Victorian English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Culhane, D. (2009). Narratives of hope and despair in Downtown Eastside Vancouver. In L. Kirmayer & G. Valaskakis (Eds.), Healing traditions: The mental health of Canadian Aboriginal peoples, 160–77. Vancouver: UBC Press. Dean, H. (2007). Social policy and human rights: Rethinking the engagement. Social Policy & Society 7(1), 1–12. Djwa, S. (1987). The politics of the imagination: A life of F.R. Sco . Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Goldberg, M., with Eberle Planning & Research, Jim Woodward & Associates Inc., Deborah Kraus Consulting, Judy Graves, Infocus Consulting, John Talbot & Associates. (2005). Homeless Count 2005: On our streets and in our shelters ... Results of the 2005 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count. Vancouver, BC: Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia (SPARC of BC). Retrieved 20 Feb. 2008 from h p://209.85.173.104/ search?q=cache:M3LqPpBpg2gJ:www.gvrd.bc.ca/homelessness/pdfs/ HomelessCount2005Final.pdf+SPARC+%26+homelessness&hl=en&ct=clnk &cd=1. Heron, C. (1998). Introduction. In C. Heron (Ed.), The workers’ revolt in Canada 1917–1925, 3–10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC). (2007). Temporary foreign worker program general backgrounder. Retrieved 14 March 2008 from h p://news.gc.ca/web/view/en/index.jsp?articleid=350829. Kershaw, P. (2005). Carefair: Rethinking the responsibilities and rights of citizenship. Vancouver: UBC Press. Kingfisher, C. (Ed.). (2002). Neoliberalism 1: Discourses of personhood and welfare reform. In C. Kingfisher (Ed.), Western welfare in decline: Globalization and women’s poverty, 13–31. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Larner, W. (2000). Post-welfare state governance: Towards a code of social and family responsibility. Social Politics 7(2), 244 – 65. Lynk, M. (2007). Commentary: Supreme Court boldly affirms labour rights. Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT/ACPPU) Bulletin 54(9), A5, A9. MacInnis, G. (1953). J.S. Woodsworth: A man to remember. Toronto: Macmillan. MacInnis, G. (1967– 68). J.S. Woodsworth – Personal Recollections. Manitoba Historical Society Transactions, series 3, no. 24, 1967– 68 season. Retrieved 19 Jan. 2009 from h p://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/transactions/3/ woodsworth_js.shtml.

40 Jane Pulkingham Manitoba. Court of King’s Bench. (1919). The King vs. J.S. Woodsworth: Indictment for publishing seditious libels, six counts, and speaking seditious words. Winnipeg: Defense Commi ee. Marshall, T.H. (1965). The right to welfare and a erthought. In T.H. Marshall (1981), The right to welfare and other essays, 83–103. New York: Free Press. McKay, I. (2008). Reasoning otherwise: Le ists and the people’s enlightenment in Canada, 1890–1920. Toronto: Between the Lines. McNaught, K. (1970). J.S. Woodsworth and a political party for labour, 1896 –1921. In D. Swainson (Ed.), Historical essays on the Prairie Provinces, 230–53. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Mills, A. (1991). Fool for Christ: The political thought of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morton, W.L. (1970). The bias of prairie politics. In D. Swainson (Ed.), Historical essays on the Prairie Provinces, 289–300. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34(3), 380– 404. Robertson, L., & Culhane, D. (2005). In plain sight: Reflections on life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver. Vancouver: Talon. Robertson, M.E. (1955). J.S. Woodsworth: A study and evaluation of his contribution to modern social work, its principles and concepts. Master of Social Work thesis, University of British Columbia. Siltanen, J. (2002). Paradise paved? Reflections on the fate of social citizenship in Canada. Citizenship Studies 6(4), 395– 414. — (2007). Social citizenship and the transformation of paid work. In V. Shalla & W. Clément (Eds.), Work in tumultuous times: Critical perspectives, 249–379. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Statistics Canada. (2007). Immigration in Canada. A portrait of the foreign-born population, 2006 Census. Retrieved 19 Feb. 2008 from h p://www12.statcan. ca/english/census06/analysis/immcit/index.cfm. — (2008). Aboriginal peoples in Canada in 2006: Inuit, Métis and First Nations, 2006 Census. Retrieval 18 Feb. 2008 from h p://www12.statcan.ca/english/ census06/analysis/aboriginal/index.cfm. Valverde, M. (1991). The age of light, soap, and water. Moral reform in English Canada, 1885–1925. Toronto. McCelland & Stewart. Vidaver, A. (Ed.). (2004). Woodsquat. West Coast Line, Issue 41. Burnaby: West Coast Review. White, S. (2000). Review article: Social rights and the social contract: Political theory and the new welfare politics. British Journal of Political Science 30, 507–32. Woodsworth, C.J. (2005). A prophet at home: An intimate memoir of J.S. Woodsworth, with three of his previously unpublished le ers. Vancouver: Tricouni.

Reflections on the Social Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth 41 Woodsworth, J.S. (1972) [1909]. Strangers within our gates, or coming Canadians. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — (1972) [1911]. My neighbour: A study of city conditions, a plea for social service. With an introduction by R. Allen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — (1935). Speech of Mr J.S. Woodsworth, Member for Winnipeg North Centre on cooperative commonwealth and unemployment insurance, delivered in the House of Commons on February 18, 1935. Canada: House of Commons Debates Official Report. Ziegler, O. (1934). Woodsworth social pioneer (authorized sketch). Toronto: Ontario Publishing Co.

2 The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics allen mills

An earlier generation called him a saint and a prophet.1 In more contemporary, demotic language, though equally prepossessing, James Shaver Woodsworth (1874 –1942), when he is still remembered, is regarded as an ‘icon’ of the Canadian le , an object of secular veneration and nearreligious reputation. In his lifetime he engaged in myriad forms of politics, from social movement-type advocacy to political party representation and leadership. Woodsworth continues to be esteemed as a model of social and political action that is both principled and effective. This essay looks at his life and legacy and poses, I hope, critical yet sympathetic questions about his paradigm of politics. My hope is that this introduction to Woodsworth’s life will provide a context for exploring what a progressive politics might mean in our own time. Woodsworth was a slight man of uncertain physical health. Of a decidedly nonconformist outlook, he indelibly changed the shape of modern Canadian politics. His most significant a ainment was to coordinate the formation and to preside over the earliest years of a permanent, influential third party of the le , the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a party that was non-Marxist, evolutionary and socialist, though, later, under the name of the New Democratic Party (NDP), more social democratic in ethos and practice. This party/ movement radically challenged economic and political power. Centred on the CCF, and its successor organization, the NDP, the hope has remained unchanged that a ‘new’ party of the le will realign Canadian politics leading to the development of a democratic class struggle, the falling away of one of the two ‘old’ parties and the coming to power of a socialist or social democratic government in O awa.

The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics 43

In the event such a vision has so far failed to materialize. Neither the CCF nor the NDP have won national power in the manner, say, of the A lee government in Britain a er 1945 or Mi erand and the Socialist Party in France a er 1981. Instead the progress of the parties that Woodsworth set in motion has stalled and become becalmed in a minority third-party position though the NDP continues to aspire to a soon-to-be-won hegemonic order of social democracy for all of Canada. Even so, the CCF-NDP and their civil society allies have not been without influence and, in five of the Canadian provinces and in one territory they have won governmental office. Of late the coming of the Charter has afforded new non-parliamentary avenues of social action such as the agitation over abortion rights that led to the Supreme Court decision of 1988 in the Morgentaler case. Altogether the impact of party and movement has been significant but incomplete. At its apogee of influence, circa 1980, the Canadian political and socioeconomic order had come to embrace policies of Keynesian demand-management and macro-economic stabilization, the egalitarianism and universal social citizenship standards of a welfare state, public, universal health care, collective bargaining rights, ecological advocacy, some intimations of public ownership and some measures of government regulation of the market; and, abroad, some success with internationalism, multilateral diplomacy, anticolonialism, and the peaceful resolution of conflict. In what follows I will mainly argue that the dominant structure of Woodsworth’s own model of political change – and his foremost bequest to the Canadian le – was a political, parliamentary one that envisaged power being won through deliberative, reflexive electoral means, leading to the installation of a benevolent elite of socialist governors and central planners. To Rosa Luxemburg’s famous dictum of a mass politics ‘durch das Fenster reden’ (‘speaking through the window’) to socialist legislators assembled inside, Woodsworth would have given only partial approval. Citizens should mobilize themselves and be mobilized en masse, to be sure. But for Woodsworth the preferable option was for the socialist movement to hew to the discipline of the ballot-box and channel its energy through its elected politicians. It should avoid superseding or supplanting its leaders. Change, above all, must be legislated and this gave primacy to the politician, the lawmaker, and the state. For Woodsworth the emphasis lay on parliamentary politics rather than a mass uprising and direct participation. Of course only a transformed electorate could be imagined electing a socialist parliament and

44 Allen Mills

government in the first place. But a er visiting the polling-booth socialist voters could safely return home, leaving ma ers to their elected officials. In any tension between the ‘party’ and the ‘movement,’ Woodsworth gave priority to the former.2 Regarding Woodsworth’s ‘iconic’ status, my view is that this should be assessed critically because many of the substantive policies and practices he embraced, along with their theoretical suppositions, have been modified or transcended by the contemporary Canadian le or have been compromised or altered by events and circumstances, and indeed in some cases by changes in popular cultural and moral evaluations. Yet I also believe that Woodsworth’s life history still offers an instructive example of the necessary yet uncertain interplay of thought and action, of principle and practicality in politics. If his life does not always provide an indisputably clear and certain signpost for la er-day le wing action, it does nonetheless throw a searchlight on the difficult and sometimes ambiguous and darkened terrain of our present history. Woodsworth in his day witnessed a maelstrom of change in Canada. In a sense he grew up with the economic development of the country. At the time of his birth, in 1874 in Etobicoke, on the western outskirts of Toronto, Canada was largely a political economy of subsistence agriculture. Later there came industrial capitalism, first in southern Ontario and Quebec in the la er half of the nineteenth century and then leapfrogging a er 1900 to isolated centres like Winnipeg and Cape Breton. The mining and forestry industries grew apace too, o en in farther flung hinterlands like northern Quebec and Ontario, the Rockies, and Vancouver Island. A national railway provided a spine of integration to this national economy a er 1885. In the twentieth century Canadian society developed an increasingly urban and technological character and at the same time the scale of business enterprises grew giving rise to fears about the overbearing power of trusts and combines. Politically, Woodsworth’s younger years coincided with the newly formed Canadian state stretching its imperial reach to incorporate the West, and subordinating many of its Aboriginal peoples to its control under the Indian Act (1876) and the reserve system. Woodsworth’s times were tempestuous in another sense. Overall, the pre–First World War economy with its industrial capitalism and several new investment frontiers in agriculture in the West was ripe with the possibility of a new culture of farmer-labour agitation. What was necessary to give it voice was popular education and that too was on hand as the effects of widespread initiatives in the mid-nineteenth

The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics 45

century in public education and compulsory school a endance in the English-speaking colonies and provinces – and, importantly, in Britain too, given the role of British immigrants in the labour movement in Canada – produced an Anglophone Canadian population that was by the eve of the First World War, in all essentials, a literate one. Out of the interpenetration of popular education and the eager minds of farmers and workers a new political constituency was born. Between 1870 and 1920 a literate proletariat came to be and so did a class of independent free-holder farmers. Seized by the opportunities for entertainment and self-development that newspapers, books, and pamphlets made available, these new classes generated a universe of new movements, or civil society or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as we would now call them. The churches had for a long time been the bedrock of Canada’s civil society, and trade unions too had not been unknown before 1870, but to these were added new insurgent groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union founded in 1885 and new forms of radical Christianity like the Labour Church in Winnipeg in 1918 under William Ivens. There were experiments between 1905 and 1920 in new unionism from the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, to the One Big Union. Farmers founded grain growers’ associations and co-operatives. There were even specialist organizations for the followers of the American land tax reformer, Henry George. S.J. Farmer, later mayor of Winnipeg, and Fred Dixon, who was put on trial for his support of the Winnipeg strikers in 1919, together formed the Manitoba Single Tax League. First-wave feminists like Nellie McClung agitated for votes for women through the Political Equality League. It was a remarkable period of self-help and self-education. It was a time of burgeoning popular agitation and organization in politics too. Workers did not abandon the two established political parties altogether but enough of them did to ensure the establishment of labour parties to agitate for gas-and-water socialism. And the availability of Marxist literature from places as far away as Chicago and New York provided self-taught workers and ‘ragged-trousered philanthropists’ with the wherewithal to develop a Marxist imaginary and to found revolutionary parties like the Socialist Party of Canada in 1902 and the Social Democratic Party in 1910. Into this richly textured culture of dissidence, especially in western Canada, Woodsworth lived and moved in his early years. He had gone west with his parents in 1882 to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, from where his father, also called James, ranged far afield to Vancouver Island and

46 Allen Mills

even the British Isles, in his position as superintendent of missions of the Methodist Church in the Canadian North-West. His vocation was to establish churches among white se lers and to convert the ‘Indians’ on the newly established Prairie reserves. Sometimes young James accompanied his father. James, fils, was from his youngest days a person of intense moral seriousness and of a soulful sense of duty. The eldest of six children, with the frequent absences of his father, Woodsworth had many adult responsibilities placed on him. Using a modern turn of phrase, he grew up too quickly. In 1900, dutiful perhaps to a fault, he followed his father into the church. Yet confessional affiliation, far from sustaining his belief, produced instead a crisis of faith. No sooner had he entered the ministry than he wanted out. While at Wesley College in Winnipeg and Victoria College in Toronto in the 1890s and later in 1900 in England he had been deeply impressed by theological modernism, social radicalism, the social gospel, and the challenges of an industrial and urban civilization. He came to doubt many of the fundamental beliefs of Christian doctrine and Church discipline, not to mention, politically, the Laurier Liberalism of his father. Until he finally le the Methodist ministry in 1917, Woodsworth sublimated his ‘appalling apostasy,’ as he once put it (1902), in various social service activities that nonetheless preserved a patina of religious activity. Famously, in 1907, he became superintendent of All Peoples’ Mission in Winnipeg’s North End where he became familiar with the new immigrants from Europe and the city’s poor and its labour movement. Later he worked for social welfare agencies and the government of Manitoba. He had moved from the pastoral professions of the church to the helping professions of the early welfare state. Soon he would embrace the profession of politics. In December 1916 Woodsworth spoke out against Canada’s participation in the First World War and was fired from his government position. He returned to the Methodist ministry, repairing to a charge in the idyllic surroundings of Howe Sound and Gibson’s Landing, in British Columbia. There he lasted only a year. An unappreciative stationing commi ee refused to re-appoint him. And so Woodsworth finally abandoned the church. He went to Vancouver and found work on the docks and lived for a while with Ernest Winch, the trade union leader. Here he entered into the intense contemporary debates about labour politics, Marxism, and the new industrial unionism of what would become the One Big Union. In the spring of 1919 he was involved in the Winnipeg General Strike. On a speaking-tour of the Prairies he arrived

The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics 47

in Winnipeg a er the strike had already begun. He spoke movingly on behalf of the workers and later, a er its editors had been arrested, he edited the strike newspaper. Though a voice for moderation and industrial conciliation he was nevertheless arrested, imprisoned, and charged with seditious libel. His case never came to trial. The strike was so cataclysmic and subversive that it has generated a veritable co age industry of historical analysis and interpretation ever since. Was it a general strike but in pursuit of the more ‘conventional’ trade union demands for higher wages and union recognition? Was it a syndicalist initiative where the workers sought to appropriate the means of production and the political apparatus of the state? Was it a putative proletarian revolution along Bolshevik lines? Or was it an impetuous Luxemburgian moment, of the gathered masses ‘speaking through the window,’ except that on this occasion there were an insufficient number of socialists inside the legislature to hear? For Woodsworth the strike re-enforced a position he had already articulated in Vancouver in labour newspapers in late 1918 and early 1919: that is, that the pre-eminent priority of the le was for an electoral party of socialism; and that political action should take precedence over the economic struggle which should be le alone to pursue the course of ‘normal’ free, collective bargaining. The definitive decisions of Woodsworth’s later life followed logically: he threw himself into the political arena, joined the newly founded British Columbia Federated Labour Party, and ran in the provincial election of 1920. Unsuccessful the first time, he accepted the invitation of the Independent Labour Party of Manitoba to run for Parliament in December 1921 in Winnipeg Centre and he was elected to the House of Commons. Transfigured by a sense of the galloping progressiveness of the times – the Russian Revolution had overthrown one empire in 1917 and the end of the First World War had overcome at least two others – it was easy for Woodsworth to believe that he was swimming with the tide of history. The laden fruit of the tree of progress though did not immediately fall to the ground. In 1921 only he and William Irvine from Calgary East were elected to the House of Commons as labour representatives. What was new was the sudden explosion of farmer radicalism with the election of sixty-five Members of Parliament from the Progressive Party. Parts of its platform Woodsworth agreed with. But the Progressives were mainly liberals whose world view centred on the importance of free trade which Woodsworth believed in too but not as the sole criterion of the good society. Only a rump of agrarian

48 Allen Mills

radicals cooperated with Woodsworth and Irvine in what came to be called the Ginger Group as they navigated the unpredictable waters of a minority parliament with the cra y Mackenzie King ever on the lookout to swallow any loose fish. By 1926 it looked as if Woodsworth and A.A. Heaps, his new labour colleague from Winnipeg, might indeed be two such fishes but they resisted King’s lures to enter the Liberal government although, in return for their support in a crucial vote, they won from him a commitment to introduce Canada’s first old age pension program. Away from the House of Commons Woodsworth travelled the country tirelessly by rail advocating the idea of a socialist commonwealth and a new inclusive democratic party of the le . The onset of the Great Depression seemed to offer new ground for sowing his radical message. Delegates gathered first at Calgary in 1932 and then a year later at Regina to found the CCF and write its first manifesto. It was still a small party. There were a few trade union representatives and some radical agrarians mainly from Alberta and Saskatchewan. There were delegates from provincial labour and socialist parties. The most significant new presence at Regina was a cadre of intellectuals from the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR), a Canadian version of the British Fabian Society, founded in 1932 and owing much of its initial existence to the encouragement of Woodsworth who was its first honorary president. One of the League’s members, Frank Underhill, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, wrote the first dra of the Regina Manifesto and other members like Frank Sco , professor of law at McGill University, and Eugene Forsey, a constitutional expert and the co-author in 1935 of the LSR’s Social Planning for Canada, were other influential delegates at Regina. Woodsworth le Regina as the leader of a rudimentarily national party of democratic socialism, an unprecedented organizational achievement. The Manifesto was not untouched by Marxism but mainly it was the product of Christian socialist and British Labour Party sources. It was decidedly anticapitalist and imagined a wholly publicly owned economy presided over by a national planning board in O awa. On international ma ers it criticized the imperialism of the great powers and was strongly pacifist and isolationist. Woodsworth entered the 1935 federal election with great hopes but the outcome was disappointing. The CCF returned only seven MPs and it gleaned only 8.8 per cent of the popular vote. As well as the depredations of the Depression, the rise of the dictatorships in Japan and Europe preoccupied the new Parliament although with li le evident ameliorative consequence. The

The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics 49

outbreak of war in September 1939 brought both a personal and a political crisis to Woodsworth. Fundamentally Woodsworth was a pacifist who found it well nigh impossible to see any legitimacy in the use of force even by agencies of collective security like the League of Nations. When Canada declared war against Nazi Germany, Woodsworth was the only Canadian MP to speak out against it. His party did not support him and he resigned his leadership. The remaining three years of his life were a time of declining health and gathering disillusion. Woodsworth’s abiding legacy, we now see, was to leave in place a durable national party of the le commi ed to democratic methods. In the years before the Regina Convention he had been the mentor to and the linkage between the many pockets of radical politics all across the country. He had given shape to a new coordinated formation and he was its only conceivable leader. If Woodsworth, then, was crucial to the historical formation of a Canadian democratic le -wing parliamentary party, how does he fit into our contemporary times and circumstances? How does his example provide insights into the dilemmas and contexts of present-day progressive politics and social activism? Woodsworth died over sixty-five years ago, and the changes wrought in Canada and the world since then make it difficult to situate him easily within the present time. How does he continue to speak to contemporary conditions? First, Woodsworth’s historic priorities or policies may not be those of the present generation. His was a powerfully formative voice in the definition of a home-grown Canadian socialism at the precise moment of this country’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial society. Now Canada has moved to another type of economy and entered a post-industrial, cybernetic, and digital age, although one still shaped by the logic of capitalism. Also, when Woodsworth a empted his original definition of socialism, he did so largely in contradistinction to Marxism and official Communism. Like other radicals of his generation, he was impressed by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and curious about the Soviet experiment. Indeed, he made his own visit to the Soviet Union in 1931. His judgment was that the Soviet Union had some important things to teach Canadians, especially the benefits of central planning. But he also used the occasion to reiterate his fundamental loyalty to a parliamentary, gradualist road to socialism. Anyhow, the signposts and different roads to socialism are in our own day very different: the Soviet Union is no more, a once Maoist China has embraced a market economy of sorts, albeit one that is juxtaposed with an ostensibly socialist, one-party state of sometimes terrifying authoritarian

50 Allen Mills

proclivities; and actually existing socialism has, at least for the moment, suffered a fatal eclipse, although reviving somewhat recently in Latin America. At the same time democratic socialism in Canada has transmogrified into social democracy with an emphasis on government regulation rather than ownership, a tendency to entertain neoliberal social theorems of balanced budgets and the ‘Third Way,’ and with an overwhelming preoccupation with the tactics of winning elections. Then there is the ma er of the ‘mythic’ or iconic status of Woodsworth. Here what I am referring to is the way in which among the Canadian le Woodsworth possesses a sort of immaculate legacy as someone who transcends history and who somehow continues to exhort his followers to hew to some putatively correct political line. In the 1970s, young delegates at NDP conventions, usually long-haired and hippy in appearance, proudly displayed bu ons on which were emblazoned the slogan: ‘Woodsworth Lives.’ In such youthful longing Woodsworth was eternally alive, a lion to be let loose in party debate to devour the running-dogs of the NDP’s leadership who were, doubtless, leading the party to moderation, and ruin. This kind of hero worship can be indulged in only if the actual record of history is overlooked. There is that wonderfully macabre story at the beginning of Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forge ing (1980) where he muses on the famous photograph of Klement Go wald, the Czechoslovak Communist leader, speaking victoriously from a balcony in 1948 a er his successful Communist coup. Gathered around him are his colleagues, including one who will be liquidated in 1952 for his so-called anti-revolutionary activities. Later reproductions of the famous photo will have air-brushed him from the picture. Kundera could not resist blackly recounting that just before the photo was taken the soon-to-be-executed traitor had loaned his fur hat to Go wald. It was a cold February day in Prague. The hat remained in the picture for ever even as its owner did not! So if Woodsworth ‘lives’ and, if his legacy is relevant to present times, is it because his reputation has been bowdlerized and the problematical and contentious things he did and said expurgated and forgo en? If the Canadian le has heroes, how perfect must they be? Can the legacy and influence of Woodsworth be celebrated even as there is recognition of his contradictions and solecisms? Several of Woodsworth’s biographers have gone out of their way to overlook some of the controversial parts of the historical record. This is true even of

The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics 51

Kenneth McNaught’s otherwise fine academic biography, A Prophet in Politics (1959). Now, the obvious bears iteration: Woodsworth lived in an earlier time and place and these particularities coloured his outlook. Thus Woodsworth voted in 1923 for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from Canada and in 1938 for the exclusion of Japanese. If the received opinion of him is that he was profoundly sympathetic and tolerant of all forms of political dissent, it will seem perplexing that in 1934 he put the Ontario Council of the CCF into a sort of receivership because of its dalliance with Communists in united-front organizations. Earlier, roughly before and during the First World War, Woodsworth had been a believer in various eugenic theories and had recommended sterilization for some types of behaviour. Though progressive on gender and sexual ma ers – for example, he advanced the case for feminism, birth control, and the idea of companionate marriage – he did nonetheless observe of what he called ‘buggery’ that it was a sexual perversion that would in time be cured by a ‘surgical operation’ (1928: 2573). And Woodsworth’s recommendations on Aboriginal affairs are today li le different from those of the Conservative Party, that is, that Indigenous peoples should abandon their separateness and be assimilated into Canadian society. In the rest of this essay I will consider three principal aspects of Woodsworth’s thought and practice and juxtapose them with some of the important issues of politics in our world today. First, there is his account of community; second, his views on domestic political action; and, finally, the international system and what we now call the global order. First, his view of community. The earliest, large piece of writing that Woodsworth undertook was his book on immigration, Strangers within Our Gates (1909). It is a work that protectors of Woodsworth’s reputation would prefer that he had not wri en.3 In Strangers he expounded a version of nativism, of a normative hierarchy of acceptable, less acceptable, and even totally unacceptable immigrant cultures and what he called ‘races,’ a collection of themes that Coleman (in this volume) calls the standard of ‘white civility.’ Woodsworth worried over the extent of cultural and racial diversity that characterized Canada’s pre– First World War immigrant population and contended that the government should impose an explicit policy of assimilation on those already landed and the exclusion altogether of ‘inferior’ and unsuitable immigrants. While throughout Woodsworth’s oeuvre there are many statements that are sympathetic and respectful of cultural difference, these

52 Allen Mills

are usually trumped by his emphasis on cultural unity, homogeneity, and conformity. According to Woodsworth, part of the new world that was dawning in Canada was the emergence of a national ideal, a common, social language of communication, what he called variously in 1917 as a social conscience, community fellowship, a social ideal, a disinterested public opinion, united action, a common interest, a community spirit, and a disinterested and efficient citizenship (Woodsworth, 1917). Later, in 1924, he spoke of unassimilated, diverse groups in Canada, especially in the West: ‘Ultimately these various cultures may blend into something new and higher. At present, they are almost mutually exclusive. The problem is further complicated by our vast distances, geographical barriers, and provincial institutions ... Canada has a ained constitutional unity before she has developed a national ideal’ (1924: 41). In both quotations Woodsworth spoke the language of a pan-Canadian unity; in both he expressed his suspicion of difference and his fear that social pluralism perpetuated a parochial, self-serving inwardness and an exclusionary and retrograde group mentality. The other significant dimension of Woodsworth’s view of community was his disdain for the traditional and the customary. As a restless socialist bent on building a new world, he believed there was nothing compellingly advantageous in the existence of institutions and traditions as such. They were valid only as long as they were functional and useful to the socialist cause and as long as they instantiated a relevant, contemporary ideal. If not, they should be discarded. New wine should not be put in old bo les. There were many examples of this a itude on Woodsworth’s part but the one that was most telling was his curt, dismissive comment on the conversion of Orthodox churches in the Soviet Union into state antireligion museums: ‘The death of the church may prove no great loss’ (1931: n.p.). Fuse together these two emphases on unity and antitradition and what emerges is an account of community that sees li le virtue in cultural diversity or in traditionally derived cultural identities. This made Woodsworth especially insensitive to French culture in Canada and to local, regional, and provincial identities. He saw socialism as devolving from a strong centralized, homogenizing state that would oversee a pan-Canadian secular culture. Diversity was inherently divisive, conflictive, and confounding. And it was antisocial as well. Community, then, for Woodsworth was all about unity and homogeneity and conformity. Speak English, preach equality, and believe in the new and the

The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics 53

progressive. The subsequent embracing of a policy of multiculturalism has, it is clear, taken Canada in very different directions from those envisaged by J.S. Woodsworth. Woodsworth’s account of community also makes it difficult for later devotees to recruit him to the cause of contemporary Aboriginal politics in support of Indigenous self-government, be it the more mainstream type of a Nisga’a Treaty, say, with something resembling separate municipal or province-like powers for First Nations, or the more radical position of a Taiaiake Alfred (1999) or a James Tully (1995) in favour of Indigenous self-determination and possible outright political and judicial sovereignty. These versions of limited identities, continuous in some part with Charles Taylor’s idea of ‘deep diversity’ (1993), do not fit at all into Woodsworth’s ideal of a uniform, pan-Canadian identity. Equally, they are at odds with Woodsworth’s antitraditionalism. For it is clear that part of the new political consciousness of Indigenous peoples is the rediscovery and celebration, in their own right, of traditional religion and historic forms of life and governance. To apply Tully’s evocative phrase, Woodsworth does not offer a vision of Canada as a ‘strange multiplicity’ (1995), of competing, diverse, incommensurable cultures, jurisdictions, and indeed, potentially, autonomous and self-governing nations. And now, what of his views on domestic political change? In the autumn and winter of 1918–19 Woodsworth wrote a series of articles for the BC Federationist, a labour party newspaper, about the proper goals and strategy of the newly formed Federated Labour Party (FLP). It was a time of febrile speculation and agitation on the le . The Russian Revolution was in its prepossessing infancy; syndicalist ideas were abroad; the British Labour Party had just brought out its famous manifesto: ‘Labour and the New Social Order.’ The war was over, the soldiers were coming home, and social and political ferment was in the air. Though shaped by the times Woodsworth’s conclusions in these articles remained remarkably consistent for the rest of his life. In them he embraced the program of the British Labour Party and called for the founding of a Canada-wide labour party: ‘the ultimate object of the party [must be] the collective ownership of the means of wealth production [which] would involve a complete revolution of our whole economic and social structure’ (Woodsworth, 1919: 3). This revolution, he continued, was to be pursued peaceably and by democratic electoral action. Asserting a strong consequentialist ethic Woodsworth went on to say that the program of the FLP should be flexible and practical. It

54 Allen Mills

should take account of various contingencies and political situations: ‘A party in the minority cannot effectively advocate far-reaching measures that are possible when the party is returned with a majority’ (ibid.). Finally, he asserted that the advocacy of immediately practicable policies was to be seen not as ‘a compromise of principle or a relinquishment of ultimate aims, but rather an advance as far forward as, under the circumstances, seems possible’ (ibid.). This succinct account provides all that we need to know about Woodsworth’s basic view of change: socialism was the goal; he favoured transformational change, but it was to be a ained non-violently; and a totalizing change, he believed, need not preclude immediate, modest changes. As well, limited and small measures of change were not destructive of principle or long-term goals (Mills, 1991: 72–92). Though Woodsworth knew of the ‘impossibilist’ arguments of local SPC’ers, that gradual change might draw the sting of workers’ opposition to capitalism and ultimately re-enforce the hegemony of the capitalist, he clearly rejected this way of thinking. In so many words, he asserted that every measure of progressive or statist change automatically contributed to the winning of the socialist commonwealth. What informed Woodsworth’s thinking on change was a notion of moral risk as ‘opportunism’: the pursuit of short-run gains that were certainly a ainable had a moral priority over long-run goals that were likely less a ainable. All of this was happily wrapped in a strong metaphysical belief that the course of history was on the side of labour because the triumph of socialism was, anyway, imminent and inevitable. Altogether Woodsworth prescribed an overwhelmingly electoral and gradualist path to social and economic change. He was familiar with other models, be they revolutionary/Bolshevik or syndicalist or straightforwardly trade unionist, but these he consciously rejected or subordinated to a parliamentary and electoral road to socialism. Thus Woodsworth pioneered what was for its time in Canada an original a empt to think through the theoretical and strategic coordinates of democratic socialist change. If he did not get it right in every respect, this should not be surprising. Who indeed has got it right? Nevertheless it is notable that he never did provide a precise calibration of the relations of long-term ends to short-term means; and he was never sufficiently clear about the criteria that distinguished acceptable political compromises from unacceptable ones. It is as if he believed that any change was be er than none at all. He did mull over whether, for example, a proposal for a Bank of Canada under R.B. Benne in the

The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics 55

early 1930s was or was not progressive but such doubts were usually resolved positively: he basically asserted that all statist or putatively ‘progressive’ measures were part of a progress towards socialism. Is this view plausible today? More recent le -wing scholarship has led to an emphasis on the notion that gradualist compromise reinforces the stability and equilibrium of a welfarist and regulated capitalism and thus preserves the basis of a private, profit-oriented economy and vitiates the project of socialism. And, what of the larger claim that he typically made: that socialism was historically imminent? Even at the height of the Depression and especially a er the disappointing results of the 1935 federal election Woodsworth too began to have doubts. Yet history has now moved almost seventy-five years further on and the triumph of socialism is still far away. There is li le of economic socialism in the platforms and practices of NDP governments in Canada and the direct success of the NDP, nationally, seems to be confined to irregular cycles of influence over mainly Liberal minority governments that produce at best social democratic compromises. These have allowed Canada to evolve beyond a classically liberal society but they are not socialism. Woodsworth himself initiated this pa ern in 1926 when he negotiated with Prime Minister King over Canada’s first old age pension program, Tommy Douglas did it with Lester Pearson to deliver a national medicare program and the Canadian Pension Plan in the mid-1960s. David Lewis, the then leader of the NDP, continued the pa ern between 1972 and 1974 with an improvised understanding with the Liberal government of Pierre Ellio Trudeau over the Foreign Investment Review Act, a bill to create a national petroleum agency and budgetary measures for the ‘average taxpayer.’ And in the spring of 2005 Jack Layton, NDP leader, completed a similar exercise with then Prime Minister, Paul Martin, for greater social spending in the budget. Questions spring forth. Are there ascertainable standards of legitimate socialist compromise? Is the project of socialism as a blueprint for an alternative society at an end? Is the overly parliamentary and elitist route to socialism the source of the problem? Are reformist liberalism and social democracy all that there can be? Is transformational change an Enlightenment conceit that the le should learn to do without? Perhaps progressive change is simply one good thing a er another but without any evident ‘historical’ pa ern or ultimate destination? The shi from Woodsworth’s account of national politics to international and global ma ers discloses a somewhat different thinker and

56 Allen Mills

actor. It is as if there were two sealed chambers in his personality, one that dealt with domestic ma ers and the other with world affairs. If Woodsworth’s parliamentary persona was pragmatic and practical, albeit commi ed to a vision of an alternative society, his reflections on the international order of the interwar years show him much more as a moral absolutist and unbending man of principle. It is from this last aspect of him that Kenneth McNaught (1959) deduces his description of Woodsworth as a ‘prophet’ in politics; that is, someone who was dismissive of immediate, pragmatic consequences and who was instead a ‘forth-teller’ of the principles of a long-term human transformation, in this case of a political order purged of all measures of coercion or imperialist exploitation. If Woodsworth on domestic political change was truly within the system, his commentary on international affairs placed him very much outside it. A fundamental element of Woodsworth’s world view was his conception of the role of technology in bringing change. Mechanization and its economic co-relate, industrialism, were in his view revolutionizing the economy and the world. The machine made an imperative of large-scale production and brought an inevitable trend towards trusts and monopolies, what Woodsworth called the ‘co-operative’ organization of the workplace (Mills, 1984). Globally the machine was overcoming distance and integrating the planet. Woodsworth lived through the coming of the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, and the airplane. He had a glimmer already of the world as an all-inclusive community and, though he never used the word, he was evidently talking of some idea of ‘globalization.’ As Woodsworth said, in 1934: ‘Today the world is one vast neighbourhood’ (p. 492). It was impossible, he went on, for any individual or nation state to remain detached and disengaged from the wider world. International institutions were necessary as also were international and multilateral solutions to conflict between states. Early on Woodsworth had deduced that the growth of free trade and the mobility of capital investment would threaten the living standards of workers in Canada and other developed industrial nations as production was moved off-shore to low-wage economies. As an antidote he proposed a role for the International Labour Organization as a guarantor of minimum international standards of labour protections and social entitlements. Today the important standard of environmental protection would be added as well. All of this sounds very characteristic of Woodsworth dealing with domestic ma ers: he is practical, reform-minded, and aware of the

The Historical Woodsworth and Contemporary Politics 57

integrative forces at work in the world. But a strain of perfectionism in his views on international affairs pulled him eventually in a very different direction and led him to adopt impractical conclusions. An initially global ethic of engagement in the world was eventually subordinated to isolationism and disengagement. Two things account for this. First, there was his pacifism with its uncompromising rejection of all forms of force, and, second, there was his theory of imperialism. These together led to his rejection of the League of Nations though it was, it should be said, never an outright rejection. He knew that something like the League was necessary but as long as the existing League was dominated by the great capitalist and imperialist powers of Britain and France Woodsworth held that it would be stillborn and illegitimate. Here the major influence on his thought was J.A. Hobson (1858–1940), the English political economist. It is true that by 1930 Woodsworth was beginning to see merit even in an unreformed League of Nations and especially he believed this a er the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. But, as he explored more urgently the idea of the League as a guarantor of peace by collective security, he took cold feet and concluded instead that the League itself might become an instrument of force. Woodsworth, to repeat, was a pacifist. In his mind all force was wrong even when it was undertaken in the name of a common global good of peace and order. Violence used even by an international police force of sorts – what is called ‘peacemaking’ today – was unjustified. And so by 1935–36 he washed his hands of the League and retreated to an isolationism that contradicted all that he had said about the imminent and immanent integration and solidarity of the world. Consequently Woodsworth favoured a thoroughly hands-off policy by Canada towards the military defence of the new democratic le -wing government in Spain a er February 1936; and, of course, his position in September 1939 on the declaration of war against Germany was one of complete isolationism. Europe and much of the rest of the world, and civilization too, might go down but Canada should leave ma ers alone. Woodsworth would not countenance Canada’s participating in the one war of the twentieth century that many thought was worth fighting. If Woodsworth had been a consistent pragmatist, he would have seen that there was a subtle, practical difference between what he called the ‘beasts’ of Paris and London and the ‘beast’ of Berlin (Mills, 1991: 223). Political positions can have cruel consequences. The late 1930s cried out for distinctions that were politically tough and intellectually subtle. Realistic, nuanced, intermediate distinctions might have made a difference

58 Allen Mills

in stopping Nazism before war began. By the late 1930s Woodsworth wanted no part of such calculations. And so Woodsworth can be summed up as saying that political practicality may work domestically but it has less purchase internationally. Why this divergence? Perhaps it is that for all of his ability to apprehend abstractly the onset of an increasingly integrated international order Woodsworth was still firmly locked into the template of the nation-state system. In his mind significant politics was still a nationally based activity. Woodsworth accepted, I think, that the national state of Canada was the locus of an impressive measure of public order by the 1920s. Here I do not mean to say that Woodsworth did not notice that skulls had been smashed in Winnipeg in 1919 and would be smashed in Regina in the On-To-O awa Trek of 1935. Quite the opposite. What I mean is that implicitly Woodsworth accepted the sovereign triumph of the Canadian state as a system of order and coercion. A er all, a socialist state would utilize such traditional orderliness in its own future regime of directive central planning. Planners needed the habit of obedience as much as capitalists. And so in this implicit way Woodsworth overlooked the constant coercive threat that lay behind the state in Canada. Towards the federal government in O awa and its future role in socialist change he was a statist and not an anarcho-pacifist. He accepted the domestic policeman and the institutions of incarceration and confinement that lay at his back. But this was not how he thought about the international order. Here Woodsworth noticed all too easily the existence of the chaos and disorder of the global system, a condition that even the League of Nations was beyond overcoming. The League was a collectivity of sovereign states. Under such a system it was all too easy to foresee the use of physical force as the normal way of doing business. Under the League’s doctrine of collective security individual nations were required to join together to physically resist aggressor nations. Even an international policeman was too much for the pacifist in Woodsworth. And so in the end he opted to sit on the sidelines. Is there a way out of the iron cage that Woodsworth put himself in when considering global affairs? Is there an acceptable voluntaristic, consensual, and non-violent participation in the international order? If he were alive today he would, no doubt, be surprised by the exceedingly large number of NGOs that are active in the global community, many operating through the Internet and most of them dealing with aid and development issues. Amnesty International and Médecins sans frontières are only the most noted examples of as many as 40,000

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NGOs operating internationally, agitating over everything from global warming, nuclear disarmament, government corruption, minority protections, the rights of Indigenous peoples, famine relief, economic development, global inequality, and so on. No doubt Woodsworth would be an enthusiastic supporter of this universe of manifold volunteerisms. Mention of the subject of civil society groups justifies perhaps a digression from the main line of argument at this stage in order to examine another curious wrinkle in Woodsworth’s legacy. In Canada the multiplying of single-issue interest groups and extra-parliamentary organizations has been stimulated by the inception of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, something that Woodsworth had some role in popularizing. The Charter was the particular constitutional project of Pierre Ellio Trudeau. In the interwar years Woodsworth pioneered the idea of an entrenched charter, judicially interpreted, as a means of protecting basic democratic freedoms like free speech and free association, and also as a means to assure French Canadians of their cultural and linguistic rights. Frank Sco was an early convert to Woodsworth’s idea and Sco in turn convinced Trudeau of its rightness a er they became acquainted during the anticonscription agitation in Montreal during the Second World War (Djwa, 1987). Through these contingencies and the later circumstances of Liberal leadership politics and Joe Clark’s inability to count votes in December 1979, Canada re-elected Trudeau in 1980, and two year later the Charter was proclaimed. Woodsworth’s influence moves in mysterious ways! The Charter has sanctioned a new kind of politics, one far removed from the normal venues of elections, political parties, and legislatures. Courts can now declare as unconstitutional statute laws that have been duly promulgated by democratically constituted parliaments. Some parts of the Canadian le were averse to this initiative in 1982, though Ed Broadbent and the federal NDP were not. By now the balance of opinion on the le has been that more good than harm has come from the Charter. Advocacy groups have sprung up around issues to do with women’s rights, abortion rights, and same-sex issues, among others. The 1988 decision in the Morgentaler case and judicial decisions that eventually led to the recent establishment of same-sex marriage are thought of as the high-water marks of what has come to be called ‘Charter politics.’ Ongoing criticisms of Charter politics on the le emphasize its narrow, disconnected conception of issues and its non-participatory model of action. With Charter politics the issue that is pursued is invariably a single one; and the venue of deliberation is mainly the court room with

60 Allen Mills

its heavy emphasis on traditional and professional norms of behaviour. Politics in this model becomes sectional and non-participatory. Charter politics does not require of its devotees that they tally their positions with a wider public good or with a sense of the connectedness of their special issue with other public values and policies. Charles Taylor (1992) has made just such a critique of Trudeau’s Charter and its political consequences and has offered in its place a ‘republican’ model of politics that emphasizes such virtues as patriotism, social solidarity, community allegiance, collective action, and popular participation. Here again, Woodsworth would, all other things being equal, no doubt give support to Charter politics as one of the ways justice is sought and a ained (he did a er all understand the principle of flexibility in strategic political calculations). But he would, I think, advise strenuously against too great an emphasis on judicial and non-party politics. Party electoral politics were for him the great potential mobilizer of a society-wide rational standard of the common good. He did not foresee a be er or different vehicle for this than the political party and its will to win state power. With his conception of community and his avowal of the cooperative commonwealth there is a sense in which Woodsworth can be seen as anticipating the kind of politics that Taylor avers in his republican argument. Of course, as we have seen, Woodsworth’s idea of community did not have much room for diversity and on that Taylor would part company from him. Also, Woodsworth was not always a strong supporter of a politics of direct popular engagement. But, that said, there is more than a li le overlap between what the two of them are saying. A er that digression let me return to the main direction of my argument, namely, Woodsworth’s alienation from the international order of his time and the subsequent difficulties it poses for a progressive engagement with the global institutional order of the present. No doubt he would approve of the establishment of an International Criminal Court and, with his anti-militarism, he would support treaties to prevent nuclear proliferation and to ban the use of land mines. But what would he make of the United Nations, founded just a er his death and successor to the League of Nations but an international body as well that continues to entrench the inviolability of the nation state and institutionalizes in its Security Council the permanence and priority of the great powers, and capitalist-imperialist ones at that? And what of U.N.-supported interventions like the Korean War and the first Gulf War? Would he view ‘The Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine as a thinly

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veiled invitation to step onto a U.N.-sanctioned slippery slope to war? And what of his positions on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and regional military alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and North American Air Defence system? And what of global trade bodies like the World Trade Organization? Woodsworth was a decided free trader but how about his position on the North American Free Trade Agreement? Woodsworth, in considering national domestic issues, was an achingly practical politician. On global ma ers, though, he sanctioned an a itude of a plague on all your houses, or at least on most of them. Is he accurately imagined, then, marching outside the perimeter fence of the G8 meeting remonstrating for a total end to capitalist-imperialist global exploitation as the necessary precondition of any legitimate international order? Is it a Woodsworth-sanctioned view to reject any global organization that has the United States and the other great imperialist powers as its members? And on the question of pacifism, what are the implications of a Woodsworth-like rejection of all force? His pacifism and anti-imperialism would have kept Canada out of Afghanistan and Iraq but it would also have prevented armed intervention on behalf of the Bosnian Moslems or the Kosovars or the Rwandan Tutsis in the 1990s. The logic of his position is that Canada should give a wide berth to any security missions in Darfur, in Sudan, and Zimbabwe and Myanmar too and to avoid any intervention in places where what is called a ‘robust’ mandate would need to be applied. And, to repeat, there could be no action on the policy of ‘The Responsibility to Protect.’ Posing all these questions leads me to think that with his scrupulous pacifism and anti-imperialism it is hard to see how a Woodsworthian would participate in any state-derived initiative internationally, apart from civilian aid. His position seems to come down to one of creative disaffiliation towards the international order, with voluntary work through NGOs as the only vector of involvement. Will that do? Contemplation today of the example and legacy of Woodsworth, I have concluded, generates as many questions as answers. The twentieth century was rife with revolutions that went awry. At the same time, a more temperate parliamentary, socialist strategy, while substantial enough in its eventual reforms, has not been as radically transformative as Woodsworth and others of his time expected, nor has it been impervious to the revanchism of neoliberalism. Whatever socialist change has been brought about in Canadian society has not been enough to constitute a ‘revolution,’ as Woodsworth imagined.

62 Allen Mills

Here is confronted the opacity and incompleteness of radical social and political theory and action. Since 1789, and particularly since 1917, the le , worldwide, has struggled with perhaps the most significant conundrum of modern politics and activism: how to make transformations that are total and liberatory and yet consensual and humane. How do whole societies with their millions of citizens structure and arrange their affairs to a ain mass liberation and transformation? Even a er the evident failures of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, there continue to be those who hold that there can be no alternative to total, cataclysmic insurrectionary change. Revolution in this sense will always appeal to the axiological reasoning of impatient radicals, Marxist or Islamist, who can only see the shortest journey between two points as always a straight line. Others of a more sensitive and sceptical moral disposition prefer non-violent and gradual change, zigzag, bit-by-bit and piece-by-piece, worrying, rightly as Woodsworth believed, over the consequences of forcing the agenda of history by coercive means. But how do gradual steps necessarily add up to a definitive winning of a peacefully ‘revolutionary’ and transformative goal? According to Woodsworth, if there is to be a revolution, it must be peaceful. This at least is very clear. So the revolution must be non-violent and gradual and cumulative and, in quick time, transformative. This is still an unclear prospect. There are parts of Woodsworth’s legacy that are decidedly problematical, not just some particular positions he adopted on specific issues like immigration and same-sex rights and the prospects for Aboriginals but his overall theoretical account of politics as well. The relationship of reform to his prophetic/revolutionary stance is especially opaque and unexplained, I suggest. That said, what is provided in Woodsworth is an instructive instance of the pains, the perplexities, and also the possibilities of concrete political and social action, responsibly, intelligently, and carefully undertaken in the name of a large and humane ideal, all the while suffused with a deep moral sensitivity. Considering Woodsworth also reveals a framework of how to understand with greater political maturity the extent of the indeterminacy that radical, progressive agitation entails. The damnable perplexity of humanity’s pressing predicament is that the problems confronting the human race are of such gargantuan proportions that only a transformative and systemic measure of change can offer any prospect of avoiding disaster. What to do? Does musing on the life of Woodsworth provide definite answers here? I doubt it. But at least the questions can be be er conceived and

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the questions recognized as not having easy or straightforward answers although answers there clearly need to be. The essays in this volume contribute impressively to such a process of inquiry.

NOTES 1 Kenneth McNaught’s biography of Woodsworth, A prophet in politics (1959), is still a useful source of information on him. The later one by Allen Mills, Fool for Christ (1991), supplements the biographical record and also considers material that McNaught overlooked. 2 Eric Tucker (in this volume) talks further about possible inadequacies in Woodsworth’s paradigm of political action and mass mobilization. 3 For two perceptive interpreters of this aspect of Woodsworth’s thought, see Daniel Coleman and David Chariandy (in this volume).

REFERENCES Alfred, T. (1999). Peace, power, righteousness: An Indigenous manifesto. Don Mills: Oxford University Press. Djwa, S. (1987). The politics of the imagination: A life of F.R. Sco . Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Kundera, M. (1980). The book of laughter and forge ing. New York: Knopf. McNaught, K. (1959). A prophet in politics: A biography of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mills, A. (1984). Cooperation and community in the thought of J.S. Woodsworth. Labour / Le Travail 14, 103–20. — (1991). Fool for Christ: The political thought of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Taylor, C. (1992). Can Canada Survive the Charter? Alberta Law Review 30, 427– 47. — (1993). Reconciling the solitudes: Essays on Canadian federalism and nationalism. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Tully, C. (1995). Strange multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an age of diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodsworth, J.S. (1902). Le er to C.B. Sissons, Sissons Papers, March. — (1909). Strangers within our gates, or coming Canadians. Toronto: Young People’s Forward Movement Department, Missionary Society of the Methodist Church. — (1917). Nation-building. The University Magazine 16(1), 85–99.

64 Allen Mills — (1919). BC Federationist, 7 Feb. — (1924). Mobilizing progressive opinion in Canada. Canadian Forum 5(5), 40–1. — (1928). Hansard, 1 May, 2573. — (1931). So this is Russia. Toronto Star Weekly, 5 Dec. — (1934). Hansard, 12 Feb., 492.

3 Labour Rights in an Interregnum: The Ambiguous Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth1 eric tucker

Gramscian-Inspired Underpinnings2 The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Gramsci

The author of this quote of course is not J.S. Woodsworth but his contemporary, Antonio Gramsci, writing from his prison cell in 1930, reflecting on the conditions of his time – of their time. I will shortly elaborate on those conditions in Canada and on Woodsworth’s approach to labour rights, but first I want to draw a parallel with our time, for we too, I argue, are living in an interregnum – in a time when the old is dying and the new cannot be born – and for this reason it is particularly appropriate that we reflect on the legacy of J.S. Woodsworth when thinking about the pursuit of labour rights at the turn of the twenty-first century. For although the dying world of the interwar years is different from the dying world of our time – years of seemingly endless war – as are the possible futures, we still confront the fundamental problem of thinking about how to respond to the ‘morbid symptoms’ that appear during a crisis in the liberal order and how to find ways to live otherwise (McKay, 2005). Before proceeding, however, it will be helpful briefly to articulate the key Gramscian concepts used in the discussion. The first is hegemony, which refers to a mode of rule when the leading classes are able to maintain their privileged position by organizing the consent of subordinate groups to their leadership. In part this is achieved ideologically – by aligning the predominant values and beliefs of subordinate groups with

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those of the privileged – and in part materially – by taking into account the interests of subordinate classes and finding ways of accommodating them to a degree they find acceptable. Put simply: ‘Hegemony, then, is about establishing a certain set of ideas as dominant in that they are freely accepted as normal, mainstream or “common sense.” It is also about creating material conditions conducive to the acceptance of the dominant ideas’ (Haiven, McBride, & Shields 1990: 3). Hegemony, however, is not a natural condition, but a project that must be continually pursued if it is to be maintained. O en the project is only partially successful or collapses entirely, and a ri develops between the beliefs and programs pursued by the leading classes or historic bloc and the aspirations of subordinate or subaltern classes. Indeed, it is helpful to take crisis rather than hegemony as the starting point for Gramscian analysis (Martin, 1998). Gramsci used the concept of passive revolution or revolution-restoration to describe the response of the bourgeoisie to a weakening of its hegemony, but it is one of his most complex and obscure ideas (Showstack Sassoon, 1987; Simon, 1982; White, 1990). Essentially, it encompasses a set of responses used to retain and reorganize political and economic dominance when it is challenged from below. Because passive revolution can take different forms it is useful to distinguish among them, by mapping the forms along a continuum of coercion and accommodation. At one end, ruling classes may respond to a challenge to their hegemony by becoming increasingly coercive and authoritarian by, for example, imprisoning working-class leaders and a acking their organizations and institutions. This was the situation that Gramsci faced personally in Fascist Italy and to which he was referring immediately before he spoke of the interregnum and its morbid symptoms.3 It is difficult, however, to sustain dominance over time through coercion alone, and so accommodations may be offered that address some demands coming from below that are functionally compatible with the current social formation. This form of passive revolution may also be accompanied by active efforts to keep subordinate groups weak and divided and to co-opt their leaders. In short, some kind of new deal will be on offer, but as Showstack Sassoon has stated, its ultimate aim is the inclusion of subordinate classes ‘under the hegemony of the political order without any expansion of real political control by the mass of the population over politics’ (1987: 210). The adoption of the Wagner Act model of collective bargaining in North America during the 1930s and

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1940s can be seen as a spectacularly successful example of the passive revolution project leading to the restoration of capitalist hegemony. It is also possible at moments of disjuncture and disalignment that a counter-hegemonic project will be launched that aspires to achieve a more fundamental change of the social order. This requires both a vision of a different possible order and the mobilization of subordinate classes to participate in struggles towards its achievement. The realization of such a project involves more than forming the government, for as Gramsci (1971) observed, in the West, the state is only an outer ditch behind which stands a sturdy structure of civil society, which refers to the ensemble of cultural and social practices and institutions through which class relations are lived, reproduced, and legitimated on a daily basis. Because civil society is the sphere in which hegemony is exercised, social transformation will occur through a war of position, which takes place on the terrain of civil society and in the realm of ideology. The form and outcome of these conflicting political projects is a product of all the forces in the field. For example, oppositional movements may spur a turn to coercion, lead to a new deal within the existing order, or result in a social transformation. Labour rights, including both the individual and collective rights of workers, are crucial in capitalist regimes of all kinds. In hegemonic regimes, labour rights will be designed in a manner that accommodates the interests of workers to a degree they find acceptable given their values and expectations at that time, although there is likely to be continuing conflict over incremental changes. When hegemony is weakened, as during an interregnum, labour rights are liable to be redefined in law or administered differently than in the past, depending on the political project that predominates. Thus if there is a coercive turn labour rights are likely to be rolled back, particularly if they facilitate worker collective action, and they are also liable to be administered weakly to deny workers effective protection from nominally unlawful abuses. As well, employer demands in such periods are more likely to be underwri en by state and, in some cases, achieved through direct employer use of coercive force. If however a more liberal passive revolution is launched, opportunities for reforming and strengthening labour rights and their administration are likely to present themselves. Finally, there is a question about the possibility of labour rights reforms being linked to a transformative project. Can the struggle for labour rights avoid the reform-restoration dynamic of the passive revolution and be part of the

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counter-hegemonic war of position? It is the politics of labour rights in an interregnum that is the main concern of this essay. Situating Woodsworth Historically The Labour Rights Regime of Industrial Voluntarism J.S. Woodsworth’s engagement with labour rights began towards the end of the First World War, when he took up work on the docks of Vancouver and joined the Federated Labour Party (McNaught, 1959; Woodsworth, 1928). It was indeed a time of crisis. The period prior to the war was marked by waves of labour unrest set in motion by the transformation of work relations associated with Canada’s second industrial revolution. For a new generation of capitalists bent on increasing productivity through mechanization and gaining greater control over the labour process, it was essential to weaken or, if possible, eliminate the power of skilled workers organized in cra unions and to prevent the rise of new industrial unions representing the mass of semi-skilled operatives who they were hiring into the workplaces they were busily transforming. Two strike waves (1899–1903 and 1912–13) swept across the country in those years (Cruikshank & Kealey, 1987), and the government’s response to this industrial relations crisis produced a new regime of industrial legality that my colleague Judy Fudge and I labelled ‘industrial voluntarism’ (Fudge & Tucker, 2001; also see Craven, 1980). This regime combined and applied in a finely calibrated manner elements of coercion and conciliation that accommodated responsible unions that respected employer property and contract, while a acking unions that challenged employer control or the narrow legal parameters for worker collective action. In either case, employers remained free to refuse to recognize or bargain with their employees’ unions, or, indeed, to fire workers who joined unions, without being cast as irresponsible and subject to legal coercion of any kind. Within this regime, there was also li le scope for direct state regulation of terms and conditions of employment, although a few exceptions were beginning to be made to address some of the more dysfunctional consequences of liberal ordering, such as occupational health and safety laws, workers’ compensation, and minimum wages for women. These labour rights typically did not greatly interfere with employer interests and usually were weakly enforced (L. Kealey, 1998; McCallum, 1986; Russell, 1991; Thomas, 2009; Tucker, 1990). In short, while labour

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and employment law provided some amelioration, these goals were subordinated to the dominant objective which was to constitute and defend the capitalist labour market as the key mechanism for determining working conditions. The Crisis of Industrial Voluntarism Even prior to the First World War, industrial voluntarism was weakly hegemonic, but it was during the war and in its immediate a ermath that it entered a deep crisis. The Great War witnessed a surge in union growth and strike activity as workers not only demanded wage increases to keep up with inflation but also they sought to extend democracy to the home front, including the workplace. While some embraced a socialist or radical vision of a transformed social order, many insisted at the very least that employers recognize and bargain with their trade unions. The government responded by recalibrating the contours of coercion and consent, on the one hand targeting enemy aliens and labour radicals for greater repression, while on the other promoting more cooperation between employers and responsible unions. By war’s end a crisis was brewing as a growing number of Canadian workers had become radicalized and were prepared to act collectively in pursuit of a fairer and more democratic economic, social, and political order that included collective bargaining rights. Arrayed against them were most Canadian employers commi ed to a restoration of the pre-war regime in which they enjoyed the prerogatives of ownership and freedom of contract backed by the state (Heron, 1998; McCormack, 1977; Naylor, 1991). This was the background to the 1917–1920 strike wave, culminating in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, which in Gramscian terms might be seen as a moment when three political projects sharply collided: an a empt to coercively reimpose the old order; a passive revolution in which progressive elements in the state hoped to lock in some of organized labour’s wartime gains; and a counter-hegemonic movement that aimed to democratize the economic and social order. As we know, the first political project triumphed. The strike was ultimately defeated by the deployment of police and militia and the arrest of strike leaders, including J.S. Woodsworth who had taken over editorship of the strikers’ newspaper with F.J. Dixon, a er its previous editor, William Ivens, was arrested in an earlier sweep. Woodsworth was charged with seditious libel but the Crown chose not to prosecute his case a er Dixon

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successfully defended himself against the same charge in a prior trial early in 1920. Other strike leaders were not so lucky as a number of British nationals were convicted of seditious conspiracy while many so-called foreign (non-British leaders) were deported (Bercusson, 1990; G. Kealey, 1989, 1992; Kramer & Mitchell, 2010; Mitchell, 2004). Although these actions did not restore the legitimacy of industrial voluntarism, they ended labour’s revolt, leaving in its wake a weakened and divided labour movement that, for the most part, adopted a defensive and conservative strategy, holding on to its base of skilled workers, and abandoning efforts to organize the new industrial working class. In this context, those in government who favoured a policy of actively promoting labour rights, including protection of worker freedom of association, an eight-hour day, and other principles that had been endorsed in the labour articles that formed part of the Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War, were in a minority and so a new deal was not offered to promote collective bargaining. As well, neither the federal nor the provincial governments evinced much interest in expanding minimum labour standards, except in the area of female minimum wages (Fudge & Tucker, 2000; Leroux, 2003; McCallum, 1986; Russell, 1991). Woodsworth and Labour Rights, 1921–1939 This was the world in which J.S. Woodsworth entered parliamentary politics with his election to the House of Commons in 1921 as a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). He was a democratic socialist at a time when the prospects for transformative political change were becoming more remote. Indeed, it was not even clear that the old world was dying – to a great extent it had been restored by force and was being stabilized by what might be described as a weak passive revolution in which the leaders of more conservative elements of the labour movement cooperated. But the legitimacy of that order was still in question and pockets of resistance survived. The Ontario election of 1919 produced a populist government led by the United Farmers of Ontario (UFO) that governed with the support of the ILP; the United Farmers of Alberta won the 1921 provincial election; the Progressive Party won the second-highest number of seats in the 1921 federal election, and labour radicalism remained strong in the Nova Scotia coal fields. The threat posed by these political and labour challenges, however, was quickly contained. The ILP imploded and the Ontario UFO/ILP

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government was defeated in 1923; the UFA in power became increasingly conservative; the Progressive Party was ineffective, and the militant Nova Scotia miners were defeated – with the use of more coercion – a morbid symptom of the times (Frank, 1999; Naylor, 1991; Thompson & Seager, 1985). The success of the restoration project, however, was short-lived and came crashing down with the Great Depression. Although the government initially responded with more coercion to hold back the movement of radicalized employed and unemployed workers, by the mid-1930s more liberal elements among the ruling elites recognized that a new deal was required (Fudge & Tucker, 2001). Thus, it is fair to say that Woodsworth was engaged in the politics of labour rights during two moments of an interregnum, first a restoration and then a period of turmoil when new hegemonic and/or counter-hegemonic projects were launched. Allen Mills (1991) identifies five models of change in Woodsworth’s thought and practice, but for the purposes of our discussion of his involvement in labour rights we can focus on three: ameliorativism, gradualism, and reconstruction. Woodsworth’s first priority when he entered politics in the a ermath of the Winnipeg General Strike was ameliorative – to limit the state’s use of coercion against workers and citizens. Major targets were the 1919 amendments to the Criminal Code (Section 98) and the Immigration Act (Section 41) passed in anticipation of the Winnipeg General Strike. The Criminal Code amendment expanded the scope of seditious conspiracy by deeming associations that advocated the use of force to bring about change unlawful, made it an offence to be a member of such an association, and created a legal presumption that a person who a ended a meeting of an unlawful association or distributed its literature was a member. As well, the law repealed part of the old law that deemed certain acts not to be seditious (e.g., rouse support for reform by lawful means). The Immigration Act amendments aimed to facilitate the removal of persons from Canada by expanding the grounds for deportation to include activities such as being affiliated with an organization opposed to organized government or defending the unlawful destruction of property. As well, the amendments also expanded the class of persons liable to be deported to include both British and non-British subjects who had acquired domicile (Katz, 1970–71). Woodsworth introduced bills to repeal these provisions beginning in his first year in the House, but got nowhere. An opportunity to exercise a

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greater degree of influence arose as a result of the 1925 elections that le Mackenzie King’s Liberals dependent on the support of the ILP’s two members, Woodsworth and A.A. Heaps, to stay in government. Woodsworth and Heaps extracted a promise from King to repeal these amendments, and the government subsequently passed such a bill in the House of Commons. The Conservative-dominated Senate blocked it, however, and it took several more a empts before these repressive measures were finally repealed in 1928 (Immigration Act) and 1936 (Criminal Code) (McNaught, 1959; Roberts, 1988). Another of Woodsworth’s ameliorative priorities was to reduce the role of the RCMP and, in particular, to limit its use in industrial disputes and its surveillance of labour organizations. In 1922 he proposed that the RCMP’s operations be confined to the unorganized territories (Canada, 1922: 829ff ). He reiterated his concern on numerous occasions, including in 1925, citing his own experience of being under surveillance in 1919. When Labour Minister James Murdock defended the RCMP’s activities, asserting that there were ‘certain gentleman in Winnipeg in 1919 who were worth watching,’ Woodsworth replied, ‘And I was supposed to be one of them, a ma er of which I am very proud’ (Canada, 1925: 5043). The deployment of troops against striking miners in Cape Breton in 1922 and again in 1923 also became an occasion for Woodsworth to attack the coercive turn against labour. In particular, he challenged the government to justify its use of force to defend the property rights of the coal operators when it consistently denied that it had legal authority to protect the personal and civil rights of the miners who, according to Woodsworth, were being subjected to intolerably harsh conditions (Canada, 1924: 2892–3). Woodsworth returned to this theme again in the 1930s when the government responded to new strike waves by a revitalized labour movement with repressive measures: ‘It would seem as if in Canada the protection of property was much more important than the protection of human rights and even life itself’ (Canada, 1937: 2289). In addition to an ameliorative politics aimed at limiting the use of coercion, Woodsworth was also engaged in a politics of gradualism that aimed to strengthen labour rights. This agenda was multifaceted, including the development of both collective bargaining rights and minimum standards. During the 1920s, Woodsworth promoted collective bargaining by pressing the government to fully implement the laws on the books and the policies it officially supported. The legislative centrepiece of industrial voluntarism was the Industrial Disputes Investigation

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Act (IDIA), which compelled workers and employers to undergo a process of conciliation before resorting to industrial action, but its application was limited to public utilities – industries seen to be essential to the Canadian economy and so falling within the federal jurisdiction. Although the jurisdictional limits of the IDIA were unclear, the federal government tended to take a narrow view of its powers, preferring to stay at arm’s length from most labour ma ers, at least until employers and local officials perceived industrial conflict to be a threat to law and order (Fudge & Tucker, 2001; Russell, 1990). As a result, Woodsworth was continually frustrated by the government’s claim that it lacked authority to investigate or conciliate labour disputes that he brought to their a ention. It was this reticence that he contrasted so sharply with the federal government’s apparent willingness to use coercion to protect the property rights of employers: ‘If the men riot and destroy property there is immediately a great cry and it is said that we must stand for law and order. Surely the most important duty of law and order is protection of the lives and welfare of the men, women and children of this country ... What is the use of safe-guarding law and order when we neglect the conditions that inevitably produce a breach of law and order – unless people are content to become abject slaves ... In my opinion the department [of labour] has a real duty to protect the interests of the workers, their standards of living, and their right to organize’ (Canada, 1937: 653). As the above speech indicates, not only was the federal government unwilling (and to a degree unable) to extend the application of the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act, but it also was not prepared to protect workers’ freedom of association or move towards a regime in which employers would be compelled to recognize and bargain with trade unions. Instead, in the period immediately a er the First World War the government offered support for the establishment of non-union representation plans or industrial councils. This was, a er all, a scheme that Mackenzie King was closely associated with through his work for the Rockefellers and his 1918 book, Industry and Humanity (reissued in 1973). Yet once the threat of unionization receded, few employers evinced much enthusiasm for the scheme, and the federal government made li le effort to promote it. Woodsworth repeatedly pressed the government to at least implement worker representation on industrial councils within its civil service, but to no avail.4 The Great Depression was the occasion for a resurgence of trade union growth and organizing among the unemployed, leading to a renewed

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challenge to the regime of industrial voluntarism. Most Canadian governments initially responded by stepping up repression, including a crackdown on the Communist Party of Canada, and the use of coercive force against striking and unemployed workers (Endico , 2002; Penner, 1980; Waiser, 2003). But the depth and duration of the crisis caused some politicians to rethink their assumptions about the viability of coercion and the regime of industrial voluntarism, and a new hegemonic project began to take shape among elites. Influenced by American New Deal labour policy and lobbying by the Canadian Trades and Labour Congress (TLC), a number of provinces enacted legislation to protect workers’ freedom of association, while three, Alberta, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia, went one step further and also introduced compulsory recognition and bargaining (Fudge & Tucker, 2001). Woodsworth worked in conjunction with the TLC on its freedom of association campaign, and in 1937 he introduced an amendment to the Criminal Code making it an offence for an employer to interfere with a worker’s right to join a trade union by firing, refusing to hire, or intimidate, but the bill did not get discussed in the House of Commons. Woodsworth reintroduced the bill the following year and this time the federal government allowed debate. Both the minister of justice and the minister of labour expressed support for worker freedom of association, but characterized the bill as a colourable a empt to deal with property and civil rights, a ma er of provincial jurisdiction, and rejected Woodsworth’s argument that what he proposed was no different than criminal law protection of property rights. The following year, however, the federal government accepted Woodsworth’s amendment, noting that most provinces had enacted legislation making it unlawful for employers to dismiss an employee for trade union activity. Perhaps in the government’s eyes this indicated that the principle of workers’ freedom of association had become so broadly accepted that it was now appropriate to treat its violation as a public wrong worthy of criminal law protection. More pragmatically, the Liberal government probably made the political calculation that it had li le to lose and something to gain by passing a law that would satisfy its labour supporters but that was unlikely to give rise to many charges given the difficulty of prosecuting under its terms (Fudge & Tucker, 2001). Woodsworth also supported the development of a minimum standards regime that applied to all employees, whether or not they were union members. Like freedom of association, the principle that nations should regulate hours of work, provide a living wage, prevent

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unemployment, and make provision for old age security was embraced by the signatories to the Treaty of Versailles, including Canada, in 1919. These protections were further elaborated on at the International Labour Conference held in Washington later that year, where six conventions were adopted. None of these conventions were initially ratified by Canada, based on the argument that the federal government lacked jurisdiction to implement them (Stewart, 1926). In the 1920s, Woodsworth pressed the federal government to secure for Canadian workers the protections that were promised to them in the postwar world, but was continuously stonewalled by the government’s insistence that it lacked jurisdiction, as these were ma ers of property and civil rights (e.g., Canada, 1923: 1643– 6; 1925: 59– 62). Moreover, during a period when the labour movement was weak politically and organizationally, there was li le need for the federal government to make concessions to secure its power. Woodsworth achieved his most notable triumph as a result of the 1925 election that le the minority Liberals dependent on Woodsworth’s and Heaps’ support. The two were able to extract a promise from King to enact an old age pension scheme, which King followed through on. Although the Senate blocked the first bill, the 1926 election returned a Liberal plurality and this time the bill went through (McNaught, 1959). No further worker protections were enacted until 1935 when, in the depths of the Depression and facing the prospect of an election, Benne ’s Conservative government signalled a willingness to move towards a new deal for labour by ratifying three International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, regarding minimum wages, hours of work, and weekly rest, and then passing legislation to implement these commitments. Woodsworth gave qualified support to the legislation, despite his scepticism that it would withstand constitutional scrutiny and his belief that the government was motivated purely by electoral considerations. In the end, Benne ’s legislation failed to save his government, which was roundly defeated by the Liberals later that year, and the bills were later struck down by the Privy Council on the basis that they intruded into areas of provincial jurisdiction (A orney-General for Canada, 1937).5 Woodsworth had long sought to have the British North America Act amended to expand federal authority, but found li le support for such a move, although an agreement was reached in 1940 to give the federal government constitutional power to create an unemployment scheme (Struthers, 1983). The level of development of minimum standards by the provinces remained fairly low prior to the

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Second World War, but did include health and safety legislation, nofault workers’ compensation schemes, and some minimum wage and hours of work laws – o en limited to women. In sum, we might say that the legacy of J.S. Woodsworth in the field of labour rights during an interregnum is primarily a politics of amelioration and gradualism. At moments when the use of coercion was increasing, particularly in the early 1920s, but also at times in the 1930s, Woodsworth sought to embarrass the government by holding it up to ideals embraced by liberal democracies. Then, when opportunities arose to achieve positive reforms, such as in 1925 and in the second half of the 1930s, Woodsworth promoted legislation that strengthened social protection and worker freedom of association. In a real sense, his politics of labour rights helped to lay the legal, institutional, and ideological foundation on which a new hegemonic liberal regime, industrial pluralism, and the welfare state, were ultimately constructed during and in the years immediately following the Second World War. That new regime consisted of a statutory collective bargaining scheme that protected workers against unfair labour practices and compelled employers to recognize and bargain with certified bargaining units; a set of minimum standards that addressed health and safety, hours of work, minimum wages, employment discrimination, and social wage provisions for injured, unemployed, disabled, and retired workers. Unlike industrial voluntarism, industrial pluralism proved to be a more durable and strongly hegemonic regime (Fudge & Tucker, 2000, 2001). It is unlikely, however, that Woodsworth would have wanted to see his legacy summed up precisely in these terms, for as a commi ed democratic socialist he understood that the politics of amelioration and gradualism were not the solution to the underlying problem that working people faced, which he identified as capitalism itself. Woodsworth’s ultimate goal was not reform of the liberal order, but its transformation. He clearly articulated this view at the conclusion of his address in reply to the 1935 Speech from the Throne in which the Benne government announced its plan for a Canadian new deal: ‘Years ago, I remember reading the older socialist economists who pointed out that we had to face certain inherent contradictions in the capitalist system ... We have reached the point when such contradictions are evident ... I think the Prime Minister was right, in words at least, when he said the old order is gone ... We are facing one of the world’s great crises, and while we a empt to do these things, which some of us feel pre y sure cannot be accomplished under the system, we might as well frankly face the

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larger issues ... [T]he issue that will face the people of Canada is this: capitalism on the one side and a new social order on the other ... Democratic socialism, if you like’ (Canada, 1935: 89). This brings us to the third strand of Woodsworth’s politics identified by Allen Mills, the politics of reconstruction. Woodsworth’s legacy in this regard is twofold. First, Woodsworth’s legacy is a socialist one, premised on his view that there is a limit to the amount of amelioration and reform possible within a liberal-capitalist society and that the achievement of a more just social order requires a social transformation. This is particularly important to emphasize because we live in a time when many who would trace their political lineage back to Woodsworth have largely abandoned any politics of transformation, limiting themselves to a politics of amelioration and gradualism that accepts the inevitability, if not the desirability, of a globalizing capitalist order that seems to offer workers less than it did during the three decades immediately following the end of the Second World War (Carroll & Ratner, 2005; Mooers, 2000).6 Second, Woodsworth’s legacy is marked by the absence of a clear conception of what a politics of reconstruction or transformation entailed and how it was distinguished, if at all, from the politics of amelioration and gradualism. Woodsworth rejected revolutionary Marxism and firmly believed that socialism could be brought about by legal means and through parliamentary politics, but even within this evolutionary framework he failed to draw a connection between the reforms he advanced and the socialist future he envisioned (Mills, 1991).7 This failure was arguably linked to his understanding of the deeper forces driving social change and its implications for political activity. For Woodsworth, as for many socialists associated with the Second International, the development of socialism was not a project of worker self-emancipation, but rather would be the outcome of the development of economic forces and the election of a social democratic government (Pierson, 2001). As Mills has argued, Woodsworth believed in a kind of ‘technological determinism’ (1991: 225) premised on the view that the economic advantages of monopolies would lead to their growth and that they would ultimately be brought under public control.8 The implications of his position for a politics of reconstruction, however, were ambiguous. On the one hand, Woodsworth believed firmly in the need to educate and convert people to the idea of socialism. For example, in his early reflections on his work as a stevedore, Woodsworth, wrote, ‘When will the revolution begin? It has already begun – where all revolutions begin – in

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the minds and consciences of the people’ (1928: 28). Thus, educative work was crucial. In a 1936 address, Woodsworth stated, ‘Making converts – yes, a er all that is our job – leading people to seek a new way of living, the cooperative way through which alone a true world of brotherhood may be established’ (quoted in Young, 1969: 180).9 On the other hand, while the focus of socialist political activity was to elect a social democratic government, which would engage in social engineering overseen by experts,10 Woodsworth lacked a clear understanding of how gradual reforms it enacted would lead to a social transformation. Labour Rights in Our Time The Crisis of Industrial Pluralism As noted, industrial pluralism was a strongly hegemonic regime that accommodated the interests of a much larger segment of workers than had previous regimes of industrial legality. Nevertheless, its benefits were unequally distributed, favouring the largely male workforce in the resource, mass production, and transportation industries, while the predominantly female workforce in highly competitive industries and the private service sector fared less well. Moreover, the minimum standards regime provided a low level of protection and security and tolerated discriminatory employment and pay practices during much of the postwar era. The extension of collective bargaining to the public sector in the late 1960s provided the foundation for a new wave of union growth that also benefited a significant number of women, but it always operated according to a more restrictive set of rules than those governing private sector labour relations (Briskin & McDermo , 1993; Fudge, 1991). Although different groups of workers occasionally challenged these limitations from below, especially to oppose the gender inequality institutionalized in industrial pluralism, this has not been the major cause of the regime’s deep crisis. Far more significant has been the erosion over the past thirty years of the economic foundation that supported the so-called postwar accord. Just as was the case during the second industrial revolution, employers have engaged in a series of efforts to restructure the workplace in order to increase productivity and maintain profitability. There has been massive downsizing in many heavily unionized industrial sectors, including plant closures, layoffs, and contracting out. Similarly, in the public and broader-public sectors,

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governments and public institutions have privatized and contracted out services that formerly were provided by their own unionized employees. A concomitant feature of this shi has been a growth in less secure employment forms, including own account self-employment, and part-time and temporary work. These and other changes have led some commentators to characterize the transformation as the feminization of work, by which they mean that the poorer conditions that characterized female employment are becoming the new employment norm.11 Government policies have also shi ed, although there has been a considerable degree of divergence between jurisdictions and areas of labour policy. In general, there has been a shi from welfare state policies that promoted high levels of employment and aggregate demand to a neoconservative agenda that seeks to reimpose market regulation, and is prepared to use coercion to achieve that result. In the area of collective bargaining, a number of commentators have pointed to a shi from consent to coercion beginning in the 1970s (Panitch & Swartz, 2003). This is demonstrated most clearly in the public sector where governments have a acked existing collective bargaining rights through a variety of measures. Workers and unions defying these measures have faced massive fines, loss of office for union leaders, suspension of union dues, and termination of employment (Swimmer & Bartkiw, 2003). Private sector collective bargaining laws have not been subject to a legislative assault of the sort seen in the public sector, but in general their effectiveness has declined through both active and passive deregulation. The most significant active measure has been to undermine the ability of unions to organize new workplaces by shi ing from card count certifications to mandatory elections in several provinces, including Ontario and British Columbia (Riddell, 2004). Equally important, however, has been the failure to modernize the collective bargaining regime in order to address the growing mismatch between the realities of the labour market and the structure of collective bargaining laws. For example, the growth of precarious employment and employment in small business makes it much more difficult for unions to organize and effectively represent a growing proportion of the labour force. The decline in the effectiveness of labour law is reflected in the decline in private sector union density from around 30 per cent in the 1980s to less than 20 per cent in 2004 (Jackson, 2004). As well, the difference between what unionized and non-union workers earn (the so-called union advantage) has decreased since the 1980s, suggesting a decline in union bargaining leverage (Fang & Verma, 2002).

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There have also been divergent strands in the development of minimum standards. On the one hand, equality rights have been advanced, at least in some jurisdictions, through pay and employment equity laws. On the other hand: employment standards in other jurisdictions have been weakened to accommodate employers’ demands for greater employee flexibility; eligibility requirements for unemployment insurance have been raised, the duration of benefits has been shortened, and their value reduced; and workers’ compensation benefits have been reduced, limits have been placed on the recognition of work-related stress and chronic pain, and economic incentives have been put in place for employers that have promoted aggressive claims management, resulting in more non-reporting of injuries and lack of adequate recovery time. Moreover, as with collective bargaining, there is a growing mismatch between the realities of the labour market and the design of minimum standards laws that is reducing their effectiveness, even in the absence of legislative rollbacks (Bernstein et al., 2006). The Politics of Labour Rights in Our Time The old regime of industrial pluralism is dying and we are entering a period when the leading classes are engaged in the project of creating a new order in which they will be able to appropriate for themselves a larger share of the social wealth. This project involves an increase in coercion but is also deeply ideological, aiming to reorient popular values and convince the mass of the population that ‘there is no alternative.’ It is appropriate, therefore, to think of this in Gramscian terms as a passive revolution, in which change is being engineered from the top down, at a time when subordinate classes are weak and divided, using carefully calibrated applications of coercion and selective efforts to recruit oppositional leaders into the process of change (Feltes, 2001; Haiven et al., 1990). We are, in short, in a period that is sufficiently similar to the historical conjuncture that Woodsworth faced through much of his early parliamentary career to make a rethinking of his labour rights legacy pertinent. Few would deny that the politics of amelioration, understood as the effort to resist the coercive turn, are still vitally important, especially during a period when civil liberties are being curtailed in the name of defending ourselves against terror (Daniels, Macklem, & Roach, 2001).12 Of course, the labour movement as a whole, and even its more radical elements, is not currently viewed as posing a substantial threat to the

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social order, as was the case in the a ermath of the Winnipeg General Strike, and its leaders are not facing prosecution for sedition or deportation for being members of subversive organizations. Nevertheless, there is a coercive turn in labour relations that has taken the form of depriving workers of collective bargaining rights and imposing substantial penalties, including incarceration, on trade unionists who defy the law (D. Fudge & Brewin, 2005). The question, therefore, is not whether to engage in the politics of amelioration but how. Broadly speaking, we can identify two paths that the politics of amelioration have taken: legal and direct action. Apart from speeches in legislative assemblies, the legal path has led the labour movement into the courts to challenge the constitutionality of the coercive turn and into international forums to show that these state actions violate Canada’s international commitments. Until recently, these efforts failed to produce much amelioration. For the first twenty years of the Charter’s existence, the labour movement failed in its a empts to constitutionalize a right to bargain collectively or to strike in the face of restrictive legislation, while its complaints to the International Labour Organization produced legal victories, but few tangible results.13 The combination of Charter challenges and invocation of international law norms, however, has recently produced some more positive outcomes. In Dunmore (2001), the Supreme Court of Canada held for the first time that the government had a positive obligation to protect some vulnerable workers, like Ontario’s farm workers, from retaliation by their employers for engaging in organizational activities. It did not, however, require employers to recognize and bargain with unions enjoying majority support. In reaching this decision, the court relied on international human rights law. In another case, R.W.D.S.U. Local 558 (2002), the court ruled that the common law of picketing should conform to Charter values and overruled a long-standing Ontario Court of Appeal decision holding that secondary picketing was per se unlawful and liable to be enjoined. It did, however, leave in place other economic torts that could readily provide the legal basis for limiting collective action in a wide range of situations (Fudge, 2004). Most recently, in the Health Services case (2007) the Supreme Court of Canada reversed course and held that the Charter right of freedom of association protects collective bargaining, at least to the extent of requiring the government to engage in a process of good faith bargaining with its unionized employees. In part it reached this conclusion on the ground that the Charter should be interpreted as recognizing at least

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the same level of protection as is provided in the international conventions that Canada has ratified. These are welcome developments and provide some protection against regressive state action, but it is important not to overstate what has been accomplished. Governments are not prohibited from weakening legislated labour rights or even stripping collective agreements, provided they first bargain in good faith with the affected unionized employees.14 The direct action path has involved mobilizations and collective action, including mass protests and illegal strikes, typified in Ontario by the ‘Days of Action’, in which the labour movement joined with social movements and community organizations to organize a rolling series of municipal-wide general strikes in response to the Harris government’s Common Sense revolution which among other measures restricted collective bargaining rights and cut social welfare. Another example is the 2004 hospital workers’ strike in British Columbia which threatened to escalate into a general strike a er the archly conservative Campbell government enacted highly coercive back-to-work legislation to end a lawful strike called to protect workers against the effects of health care restructuring. The efficacy of these actions, however, is controversial. The Days of Action neither accomplished its immediate, ameliorative objectives, nor became the springboard for the construction of a broad movement to resist the government’s conservative agenda (Munro, 1997), while the B.C. strike produced a compromise that provided some amelioration although according to some critics not enough to justify ending the action (Bickerton, 2004; Camfield, 2006). I will return to consider how we might think through the politics of amelioration in a moment, but first I also want briefly to consider the second strand of Woodsworth’s legacy, the politics of gradualism. Here, again, I think there is li le disagreement that the achievement of incremental reforms that enhance the opportunities and space for worker collective action and that protect workers from harsh labour market outcomes and the financial failures of their employers is desirable. Moreover, there is no shortage of reform proposals. For example, a research network concerned with precarious employment advanced the principles of parity of treatment regardless of employment form and plurality of regulatory arrangements to accommodate the differences in social location and economic condition between groups of workers (Cranford et al., 2005). More than a decade ago, Daniel Drache and Harry Glasbeek (1992) advanced a series of reforms to collective bargaining laws aimed at facilitating the spread of unionization and

Labour Rights: The Ambiguous Legacy 83

increasing union bargaining leverage. Many of these proposals can also be found in the resolutions of provincial labour federations and, from time to time, some of these demands have been met. But the larger picture is not a rosy one. As mentioned earlier, overall collective bargaining laws have become less favourable and minimum standards have tended to give more weight to employer demands for flexibility than worker demands for security and accommodation of the competing demands on their time. It is arguable that this is a temporary situation, the product of a particularly unfavourable conjuncture, but if my analysis is correct – that the old world of industrial pluralism is dying and we are in an interregnum during which a passive revolution to create a neoliberal order is being a empted – then our immediate expectations for the politics of gradualism must be modest, especially given the weakness of progressive forces. This leaves us, finally, with the politics of reconstruction or transformation. Here as we noted, the legacy of Woodsworth is two-fold. On the one hand, Woodsworth le a socialist legacy which clearly recognized that the gains that could be made through the politics of amelioration and gradualism were limited by capitalism and that the underlying problems could only be addressed through the construction of a new order – democratic socialism. On the other hand, we also saw that Woodsworth did not have a clear strategy for conducting the politics of reconstruction and, in particular, he did not articulate the connections between reconstruction and the politics of amelioration and gradualism. While the retrieval of Woodsworth’s socialist legacy may be largely a ma er of historical interest, clarification of the ambiguous relation between the politics of amelioration, gradualism, and transformation during an interregnum is very much a problem for our time. Here I offer a few modest observations that address this ambiguous aspect of Woodsworth’s legacy. First, Woodsworth’s implicit economism and his associated belief that the election of a social democratic government will be sufficient to achieve a socialist transformation have clearly been proven wrong. A more suitable starting point is the Gramscian idea that transformation will come about only through the construction of a counter-hegemonic bloc that confronts capital not only in the state but in civil society as well. Second, it is the strength and mobilization of subordinate classes that creates the social and political conditions favourable to the pursuit of the politics of amelioration, gradualism, and transformation. This, in addition to economic conditions, determines whether a restoration project will succeed, whether and on what terms

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a new deal will be put on offer, and whether a counter-hegemonic project can be successfully pursued. This change in starting points has significant implications for the pursuit of labour rights in our time, the most important being that regardless of whether the immediate struggle is resistance to a coercive turn or the pursuit of some reform, the long-term objective should be to strengthen the organizational capacity of subordinate classes and the promotion of an alternative vision of the future. Thus when pursuing the politics of amelioration, a purely legal strategy is undesirable because it is unlikely to advance either of these objectives. The removal of issues from streets or workplaces to domestic or international hearing rooms is not only demobilizing, but also is likely to result in the dispute being framed as a failure to live up to the old deal, at best valorizing and defending past reforms to a liberal order under a ack rather than promoting an alternative vision. Similarly, when developing proposals to reform labour rights, it is important to think of their relationship to long-term objectives. For example, whereas the postwar regime focused primarily on male workers in core industries (Forrest, 1997), today labour rights must be shaped to address the concerns of all workers and take into account their diverse forms of employment, economic conditions, and social location. As well, consideration needs to be given to how the substance and administration of labour rights will affect the possibilities for grassroots activism. For example, arrangements that take workplace grievances off the shopfloor and funnel them in a bureaucratic or legalized dispute resolution mechanism ought to be carefully assessed in regard to their impact on the development of workers’ mobilization capacities (Geoghegan, 1991; Panitch & Swartz, 2003). As well, demands for labour rights should be framed as much as possible in terms that challenge the legitimacy of employer control over property and the justice of the labour market. For example, when the Canadian occupational health and safety movement was strong and militant, one of its slogans was ‘our health is not for sale.’ The decommodification of workers’ health not only supported demands for immediate improvements in government regulation and enforcement, but also provided the basis for arguing that workers had a fundamental right to exercise control over production. It is less likely that workers can be mobilized when improved health and safety is reframed as a goal that should be pursued because it increases competitiveness (Storey & Tucker, 2006).

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In short, the labour rights legacy of J.S. Woodsworth for our times is an ambiguous one. We too are living in an interregnum, during a moment when subordinate classes are weak and divided and when elites are seeking to impose a new social, economic, and constitutional order.15 Woodsworth stood up courageously at a similar moment and opposed the passive revolution or revolution-restoration of his time, seeking to limit the use of coercion and to find opportunities for reform. Moreover, he did so in the name of advancing democratic socialism. This is the part of his legacy that needs to be retrieved. Yet his legacy was also flawed in that he failed to link the pursuit of labour rights to a broader understanding of the role of subordinate classes in creating the conditions that made resistance and reform, let alone transformation, possible. This is the challenge that Woodsworth’s legacy leaves us today.

NOTES 1 This chapter was wri en with the research assistance of Mark Dunn and supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I am grateful to Harry Glasbeek and participants in the Human Rights and Social Activism: Rethinking the Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth conference sponsored by the Department of Humanities and the Institute of the Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Harbour Centre, Vancouver, 22–24 September 2005, for their comments on an earlier dra . 2 As numerous commentators have noted, Gramsci’s writings are fragmentary and the use of terminology is o en ambiguous. For that reason, I have described the theoretical underpinnings of my analysis as Gramscian-inspired, rather than making the stronger claim that they are purely Gramscian. See, e.g., Bocock (1986), Boggs (1976), and Joll (1977). 3 ‘If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e., is no longer “leading” but only “dominant,” exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies’ (Gramsci, 1971: 275– 6). 4 For example, Canada (1923: 1654 –5; 1924: 2357–8). On industrial councils, see Grant, (1998), McCallum (1990), and Sco (1976). 5 See also David Schneiderman (in this volume). 6 See Gary Teeple (in this volume). 7 Also Allen Mills (in this volume).

86 Eric Tucker  8 See also Campbell (1999: 148).  9 There was at this time a growing interest in adult education which was supported from a variety of quarters and for a range of purposes. One of the leading organizations, the Workers’ Educational Association, established in 1917, had among its supporters and participants socialists who believed that scientific study of society by workers would lead them to embrace socialism (Benjamin, 1999; Radforth & Sangster, 1981/82: 82; Welton 1987). 10 See Horn (1980: 84 –99).  11 For example, see Vosko (2000). 12 Teeple, (in this volume). 13 Canada has had more complaints (70) filed against it at the ILO than any member nation. Moreover, those complaints have been substantiated in 44 of the 59 cases that have been decided. Legal victories, however, have produced few tangible results. Neither federal nor provincial governments have complied with the ILO’s rulings, and there is li le indication that they pay any political price for their defiance (D. Fudge & Brewin, 2005; also see Adams, 2006). For a discussion of Canada’s disregard for its obligations under international covenants protecting civil, political, social, and cultural rights, see Gwen Brodsky, (in this volume). 14 Tucker (2008); J. Fudge (2008). 15 Schneiderman and Teeple (in this volume).

REFERENCES Adams, R. (2006). Labour le out. O awa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. A orney-General for Canada v. A orney-General for Ontario, [1937] A.C. 326 (P.C.). Benjamin, A. (1999). The Workers’ Educational Association: A study in social change and resistance in Canadian working class culture. MA thesis, Concordia University, Montreal. Bercusson, D.J. (1990). Confrontation at Winnipeg: Labour, industrial relations, and the general strike. 2nd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bernstein, S., Lippel, K., Tucker, E., & Vosko, L.F. (2006). Precarious employment and law’s flaws: Identifying regulatory failure and securing effective protection for workers. In L.F. Vosko (Ed.), Precarious employment, 203–20. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bickerton, G. (2004). Public sector struggles continue. Canadian Dimension 38 (May/June), 3, 7.

Labour Rights: The Ambiguous Legacy 87 Bocock, R. (1986). Hegemony. London: Tavistock. Boggs, C. (1976). Gramsci’s Marxism. London: Pluto. Briskin, L., & McDermo , P. (Eds.). (1993). Women challenging unions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Camfield, D. (2006). Neoliberalism and working-class resistance in British Columbia: The Hospital Employees’ Union struggle, 2002–2004. Labour / Le Travail 57, 9– 41. Campbell, P. (1999). Canadian Marxists and the search for a third way. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Canada. (1922). Debates. House of Commons. — (1923). Debates. House of Commons. — (1924). Debates. House of Commons. — (1925). Debates. House of Commons. — (1937). Debates. House of Commons. Carroll, W.K., & Ratner, R.S. (Eds.). (2005). Challenges and perils: Social democracy in neoliberal times. Halifax: Fernwood. Cranford, C.J, Fudge, J., Tucker, E., & Vosko, L.F. (2005). Self-employed workers organize. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Craven, P. (1980). ‘An impartial umpire’: Industrial relations and the Canadian state 1900–1911. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cruikshank, D., & Kealey, G.S. (1987). Strikes in Canada, 1891–1950. Labour / Le Travail 20, 85–145. Daniels, R., Macklem, P., & Roach, K. (Eds.). (2001). The security of freedom. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Drache, D., & Glasbeek, H. (1992). The changing workplace. Toronto: Lorimer. Dunmore v. Ontario (A orney General) (2001) 3 S.C.R. 1016. Endico , S. (2002). Bienfait. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fang, T., & Verma, A. (2002). The union wage premium. Perspectives on Labour and Income 14(4), 17–23. Feltes, N. (2001). The new prince in a new principality: OCAP and the Toronto poor. Labour / Le Travail 48, 125–55. Forrest, A. (1997). Securing the male breadwinner: A feminist interpretation of PC 1003. Relations Industrielles 52, 91–113. Frank, D. (1999). J.B. McLachlan: A biography – The story of a legendary labour leader and the Cape Breton coal miners. Toronto: Lorimer. Fudge, D., & Brewin, J. (2005). Collective bargaining in Canada: Human right or Canadian illusion? Canada: NUPGE & UFCW. Fudge, J. (1991). Reconceiving employment standards legislation: Labour law’s li le sister and the feminization of labour. Journal of Law and Social Policy 7, 73–89.

88 Eric Tucker — (2004). ‘Labour is not a commodity’: The Supreme Court of Canada and freedom of association. Saskatchewan Law Review 67, 425–52. — (2008). The Supreme Court of Canada and the right to bargain collectively: The implications of the Health Services and Support case in Canada and beyond. Industrial Law Journal 37, 25– 48. Fudge, J., & Tucker, E. (2000). Pluralism or fragmentation? The twentiethcentury employment law regime in Canada. Labour / Le Travail 46, 251–306. — (2001). Labour before the law. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Geoghegan, T. (1991). Which side are you on? Trying to be for labor when it’s flat on its back. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. Edited by Q. Hoare, trans. by G. Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Grant, H.M. (1998). Solving the labour problem at Imperial Oil: Welfare capitalism in the Canadian petroleum industry, 1919–1929. Labour / Le Travail 41, 69–95. Haiven, L., McBride, S.J., & Shields, J. (1990). The state, neo-conservatism and industrial relations. In L. Haiven, S.J. McBride, & J. Shields (Eds.), Regulating labour: The state, neo-conservatism and industrial relations, 1–13. Winnipeg: Garamond. Health Services and Support – Facilities Subsector Bargaining Association v. British Columbia, [2007] S.C.C. 27. Heron, C. (Ed.). (1998). The workers’ revolt in Canada, 1917–1925. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Horn, M. (1980). The League for Social Reconstruction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jackson, A. (2004). Solidarity forever? Trends in Canadian union density. Studies in Political Economy 74, 125– 46. Joll, J. (1977). Gramsci. London: Fontana. Katz, L. (1970–71). Some legal consequences of the Winnipeg general strike of 1919. Manitoba Law Journal 4, 39–52. Kealey, G.S. (1989). 1919: The Canadian labour revolt. Labour / Le Travail 13, 11– 44. — (1992). State repression of labour and the le in Canada, 1914 –1920: The impact of the First World War. Canadian Historical Review 73, 281–314. Kealey, L. (1998). Enlisting women for the cause. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. King, W.L.M. (1973) [1918]. Industry and humanity: A study in the principles underlying industrial reconstruction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kramer, R., & Mitchell, T. (2010). When the State Trembled. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Labour Rights: The Ambiguous Legacy 89 Leroux, E. (2003). Un moindre mal pour less tavailleuses? La Commission du salaire minimum des femmes du Québec, 1925–1937. Labour / Le Travail 51, 81–114. Martin, J. (1998). Gramsci’s political analysis. London: Macmillan. McCallum, M. (1986). Keeping women in their place: The minimum wage in Canada, 1910–1925. Labour / Le Travail 17, 29–56. — (1990). Corporate welfarism in Canada, 1919–1939. Canadian Historical Review 71, 46 –79. McCormack, A.R. (1977). Reformers, rebels, and revolutionaries: The western Canadian radical movement, 1899–1919. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McKay, I. (2005). Rebels, reds, radicals. Toronto: Between the Lines. McNaught, K. (1959). A prophet in politics: A biography of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mills, A. (1991). Fool for Christ: The political thought of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mitchell, T. (2004). ‘Legal gentlemen appointed by the federal government’: The Canadian state, the citizen’s commi ee of 1000, and Winnipeg’s seditious conspiracy trials of 1919–1920. Labour / Le Travail 53, 9– 46. Mooers, C. (2000). Beyond le and right? The self-limiting politics of the ‘third way.’ In M. Burke, C. Mooers, & J. Shields (Eds.), Restructuring and resistance, 318–37. Halifax: Fernwood. Munro, M. (1997). Comment on Ontario’s ‘Days of Action’ and strategic choices for the le in Canada. Studies in Political Economy 53, 125– 40. Naylor, J. (1991). The new democracy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Panitch, L., & Swartz, D. (2003). From consent to coercion. 3rd ed. Aurora: Garamond. Penner, N. (1980). Canadian communism: The Stalin years and beyond. Toronto: Methuen. Pierson, C. (2001). Hard choices: Social democracy in the 21st century. Cambridge: Polity. Radforth, I., & Sangster, J. (1981/82). ‘A link between labour and learning’: The Workers Educational Association in Ontario, 1917–1951. Labour / Le Travail 9, 41–78. Riddell, C. (2004). Union certification success under voting versus card-check procedures: The evidence from British Columbia, 1978–1998. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 57, 493–517. Roberts, B. (1988). Whence they came: Deportation from Canada, 1900–1935. O awa: University of O awa Press. Russell, B. (1990). Back to work? Labour, state, and industrial relations in Canada. Toronto: Nelson.

90 Eric Tucker — (1991). A fair or a minimum wage? Women workers, the state, and the origins of wage regulation in western Canada. Labour / Le Travail 28, 59–88. R.W.D.S.U., Local 558 v. Pepsi-Cola Canada Beverages (West) Ltd, [2002] 1 S.C.R. 156. Sco , B. (1976). A place in the sun: The industrial council at Massey-Harris, 1919–1929. Labour / Le Travail 1, 158–92. Showstack Sassoon, A. (1987). Gramsci’s politics. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simon, R. (1982). Gramsci’s political thought. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Stewart, B.M. (1926). Canadian labor laws and the treaty. New York: Columbia University Press. Storey, R., & Tucker, E. (2006). All that is solid melts into air: Worker participation and occupational health and safety regulation in Ontario, 1970–2000. In V. Mogensen (Ed.), Worker safety under siege, 157–86. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Struthers, J. (1983). ‘No fault of their own’: Unemployment and the Canadian welfare state 1914 –1941. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Swimmer, G., & Barkiw, T. (2003). The future of public sector collective bargaining in Canada. Journal of Labor Research 24, 579–95. Thomas, M. (2009). Regulating Flexibility. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. Thompson, J., & Seager, A. (1985). Canada 1922–1939. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Tucker, E. (1990). Administering danger in the workplace. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — (2008). The constitutional right to bargain collectively: The ironies of labour history in the Supreme Court of Canada. Labour / Le Travail 61, 151–80. Vosko, L.F. (2000). Temporary work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Waiser, W.A. (2003). All hell can’t stop us. Calgary: Fi h House. Welton, M. (Ed.). (1987). Knowledge for the people. Toronto: OISE Press. White, J. (1990). The state and industrial relations in a neo-conservative era: A thematic commentary. In L. Haiven, S.J. McBride, & J. Shields (Eds.), Regulating labour: The state, neo-conservatism and industrial relations, 198–220. Winnipeg: Garamond. Woodsworth, J.S. (1928). On the waterfront. O awa: Mutual Press. Young, W.D. (1969). The anatomy of a party: The national CCF, 1932–1961. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

4 The Changing Struggle for Rights: A Critical Look at the Origins and Fate of Human Rights gary teeple

The presumed absoluteness and universality of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) hide a long and conflict-ridden history and continue to disguise the contradictions of a world in the midst of transformation. This brief critical history is an a empt to trace schematically the trajectory of the struggle for rights in a capitalist society and to outline the dilemma that marks their current status. In this history, J.S. Woodsworth played a prominent role, at least as it unfolded in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. At this time he was at the forefront of the struggle for political and social rights, and he argued then for an entrenched charter to ensure the right to free association and free speech, and for cultural and linguistic rights for French Canadians (see Mills, in this volume). Clearly a critic of the excesses and chronic dysfunction of capitalism, challenging the sanctity of private property, he grounded his criticisms, however, in the ideals of the social gospel (Young, 1969: 28); and although he was never at ease with institutionalized religion (McNaught, 1959: 21–2, 82–7), what he wanted was a mitigated capitalism with a Christian face (Mills, 1991: 253). Social reforms, in his view, would be won through parliamentary and not revolutionary means; competitive capitalism needed to be restrained not overthrown (MacInnis, 1953: 276). However important these social and political rights were, and are, Woodsworth did not see his work as part of a much larger global continuum. In that era it would have been difficult to grasp the implications of the continuing expansion of capital beyond the borders of the nation state and their effect in undermining the decades of work and the leverage mechanisms that national working classes and their representatives such as Woodsworth himself were able to employ. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now

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be er appreciate his importance in the history of the struggle for these rights. The thrust of my argument in this chapter is obvious if controversial: it is that the rights we have come to know as human rights are not human rights. To put it another way, all rights are human in the sense that only humans can possess or grant rights, but there are no absolute rights. Or, the rights commonly associated with the so-called International Bill of Rights1 are certainly rights, but they came into existence in stages as the reflection of the development of a particular mode of production (Marshall, 1963). Although they were declared universal and absolute, the very system that gave rise to them extended them to all citizens only reluctantly; and now as a global system, it can increasingly only pretend to respect the rights that were once the embodiment of its principles. The eras through which they evolved as national rights have ended, and the economic conditions they once reflected have been transformed. By rights, I refer to socially defined and enforceable claims or entitlements to the goods and services produced or used in a social formation2 (Macpherson, 1978). They are relationships that members of social units have towards each other with respect to the use and disposal of materially and socially necessary objects. Rights, by and large, define the way that a social unit allocates its resources. They identify ‘who gets what, when and how.’ Although this phrase constitutes the heart of the well-used definition of politics by Lasswell (1963), politics is about legislating formal approval to the way in which material resources are socially allocated and social relations regulated. Politics in part is the act of transforming informal entitlements or claims into codified rights. The set of rights that define modern capitalist society, it is generally accepted, fall into three groups: civil; political; and economic, social, and cultural rights. While o en understood only in a legal or political sense, they are actually the relational frameworks through which the allocation of almost all resources and the regulation of social behaviour take place in capitalist society. Their origins have been well documented but are worth reviewing here for the sake of the argument that follows. A system of feudal rights preceded the coming of modern civil and political rights. Pre-capitalist rights rested largely on entitlements to landed wealth, that is, the allocation of resources was based on rights to fixed holdings, held patently unequally by the aristocracy, clergy, and peasantry. The feudal system was characterized by wealth in land

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that was not alienable or moveable, and by production for use and not for exchange in a non-monied, non-market system of social redistribution not yet completely resolved into distinct social, political, and economic realms (Polanyi, 1957; Hilton, 1976). Resource allocation was determined by a set of openly unequal proprietary rights that permitted the peasantry to work for its own sustenance and the clerical and aristocratic classes to appropriate the peasantry’s surplus production and claim a levy on its labour. These la er rights were enforced by the law courts of the privileged and backed by the powers of the absolutist state. Both sets of rights constituted different claims to wealth in the form of use values derived from the land. The growth of privately owned wealth in the form of commodities occurred within this system of feudal rights, but in this form wealth was moveable, alienable, and exclusive – characteristics that gave rise to the formation of markets.3 Competition between owners of private goods and services in a market introduced the need for a set of rights implying the ownership of one’s own labour power and product of labour. The coming of the market, then, necessarily brought the demand for civil rights, rights belonging to the human as the atomized embodiment of private property, rights that reflected society as marketplace (Marshall, 1963). Most aspects of daily life in capitalist society have since been carried out within a framework of civil rights, of private property relations. These rights comprised a new basis to the social allocation of material necessities; they amounted to a distribution of goods and services in accordance with the principles of private ownership and commodity production and exchange. In short, allocation was to be made on the basis of supply and demand of individually produced commodities, resting on the right of private ownership, competition between producers, production for exchange, and the contractual relations that follow. The rule of law – here, the subordination of human relations as contractual relations to the same objective rules and regulations – was a natural outcome of the development of the market where the same rights as private rights were assigned to all. In practice, early corporations and market relations were assisted in their growth by absolute monarchies, the culmination of feudal relations, but in principle private property stood opposed to feudal rights. Feudal relations were blatantly unequal and crowned by monarchical divine right that was nothing less than arbitrariness personified and anathema to the full development of market relations.4 The market

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demands the rule of law, that is, the subordination of all possessors of private property to the same law and legal procedures; and the content of law in a market economy rests on individual sovereignty over things, the foundation of civil rights.5 As the market expanded from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, aided by feudal absolutism, the era of mercantilism reached a point in its development at which further growth was acutely hampered by feudal relations, structures, and institutions – namely, numerous small political, legal, and tax jurisdictions, the absence of a common currency and weights and measures, the lack of ‘free’ labour, li le or no infrastructure for commerce, an unaccountable state, and the persistence of religious institutions with political power. In order to continue their advance, the middle classes whose fortunes rested in the growth of the market had to force change, particularly in the state where the power lay to defend the system of feudal rights (Franklin, 1969: 11– 42). The bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth century, but above all those of the eighteenth century, ensconced in law formalized market principles as the prevailing forms of property. The first act of these revolutions was to destroy the system of rights that thwarted the advance of commerce. To do this, it was necessary to establish legislative supremacy for private property – by removing the colonial monarchy in the case of the United States and rejecting feudal relations wholesale in the case of France. These acts were accompanied by declarations of ‘the rights of man’ (the very civil rights that embodied market principles and therefore exercised only by those with capital or commodities to exchange) and of ‘the rights of the citizen’ (the right to be elected and to vote but vested only in those possessing a certain amount of capital). The property qualifications, among other restrictions, gave the lie to the proclaimed universality of these rights; from the point of view of the market, only those in possession of alienable assets of a certain size and therefore able to engage in commerce were considered eligible to assume such rights. It followed that they were merely the formalization of the privileges a ached to ownership of private property. Put another way: only those who were the embodiment of capital of a certain amount could possess civil and political rights. In these revolutions not only did the representatives of capital seize political power, but also they sought to establish a ‘national’ market in order to facilitate the expansion of what was to become ‘national’ configurations of capital, to create a society-as-marketplace free of the interlocking political, social, and economic rights that characterized

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feudal estates.6 The French Revolution is classic in this regard in what it accomplished in the first five years. During this time, feudal tenure over land and obligations for labour, internal tariffs and tolls, and the guild restrictions to cra labour were all abolished; the roads, canals, and harbours were improved and expanded; the metric system for uniform weights and measures and a common currency were introduced; the legal codes were standardized and the law was made consistent with contractual relations; and a patent system for private property was established. All these changes were imposed over a geographical territory by a newly structured government administration, military, and police (Supple, 1973; Hobsbawn, 1962). And they had to be imposed, o en by force, in order to establish the new means of allocating social resources. These revolutions, then, not only overthrew the remnants of a feudal past, but also ushered in the era of ‘nation-building.’ In effect, the making of the modern nation state was by and large the geographical extension of the market under the jurisdiction of one government and a particular group of capitalists. The coming of the sovereign ‘national’ state was the political expression of a stage of development when capital was imposing and consolidating its market relations over a certain territory.7 It was the instrument for expanding and promoting the conditions for the accumulation of capital within certain borders (Tigar & Levy, 1977; Friedmann, 1949: 377–90). This period in Western Europe, from the first bourgeois revolutions to the late nineteenth century, was the time when the representatives of geographical configurations of capital established their authority over contiguous territories by means of new political structures (republican democracies or constitutional monarchies), the promise of universalistic principles, and ‘citizen’ armies. (This is not to say that the process across the world was an even one.) Above all, the establishment of corporate rule meant the creation of a single integral market, a ‘national’ market for the expansion of a ‘national’ bourgeoisie. Within this market, civil rights constituted the framework for producing and distributing material necessities through exchange;8 and political rights, along with the coterminous rise of modern political parties representing different sectors of capital, provided the structure allowing these sectors alternating access to the public purse and policy (Beard, 1957: 44 –56). Production for exchange and market supply and demand, then, were the new means for producing and distributing the social product – tax deductions providing the economic basis of the state, which was to

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oversee market relations. The declarations of the ‘rights of man,’ the principles of society as marketplace, established in law the sanctity of private property and commercial relations. The privileges of private ownership became the prevailing rights, as civil rights, disguised as privileges in part by the proclamation of their universality. The ‘rights of the citizen,’ political rights, afforded the opportunity for different sectors of capital to gain hold of state resources and the power of policymaking. Despite such limitations, these rights possessed striking emancipatory traits in relation to feudal arbitrariness; and so, regardless of the lack of empirical universality, it is understandable how at that historical juncture the rhetorical universality of the rights of the market and corresponding political rights could be welcomed and declared as synonymous with humankind (Sorel, 1969: 221–75; Dishman, 1971). If the property qualification, institutionalized racism and sexism, and legalized bigotry, among other factors, gave the lie to this proclaimed universality, it was the rise of the working classes that brought it fully into the open. Here was a class that was a product of decaying feudalism and developing capitalism, yet whose essential interests could not be addressed within the confines of the marketplace. The source of its livelihood, its ability to work, was the only product it could bring to market; but the market in labour was always dependent on the vicissitudes of the markets in capital, goods, and services and so never able to guarantee the livelihood of all members of the working classes. The reproduction of labour, though central to the reproduction of capital, was not the goal of the system. The use of labour was necessary for capital reproduction, but its employment by capital constituted its exploitation not the advancement of working-class interests. Over many decades, civil and political rights had to be fought for by all those excluded from full membership in civil society: the working classes, slaves, religious groups, women, non-whites, among others. Without material property (or enough of it) no group or strata or class received civil or political rights as a ma er of course. Without these rights they were prevented from formal participation in the very society to which they actively contributed – an insupportable contradiction that gave rise to demands for ‘inclusion.’9 Rights that have to be fought for, however, cannot be inherently universal, absolute, or integral to the human being. The winning of these rights by classes and groups meant that they received the extension of the privileges of owners of real property cast as rights; privilege was universalized. For this reason, civil rights in particular have remained for the most part abstract

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unless there is financial means to realize them. And political rights have meant the choice of representatives of one sector of capital or another (Kuczynski, 1967). Although the struggle against the property qualification made it clear enough that civil and political rights were originally the privileges of particular classes, it is the struggle for ‘economic, social, and cultural’ rights that best reveals that the essential interests of the working classes cannot be met within the confines of a marketplace society, unlike the classes a ached to the expansion of capital. In a capitalist mode of production, the market is the chief means of allocating social resources; but it does this according to rules of competition that benefit the largest owners of the means of production, that make justice the ‘vindication of the outcome of unequal property relations,’ and that make politics a choice among contending interests of capital. For these reasons, the market cannot address the fundamental interests of the working class and provides no possibility for its political realization as a class. The labour market forces workers to compete among themselves; the competition drives wages down, o en below what is necessary to live, and produces perpetual employment insecurity. Employed, workers are subject to the tyranny of employer ownership of their labour power. Unemployed, they face the absence of the means to life itself, not to mention ‘exclusion’ from marketplace society. Given these realities for the working classes, they have no alternative but to engage in a continuous struggle for broadly defined ‘economic, social, and cultural rights’ that ameliorate their contradictory existence in a marketplace society. This persistent campaign indicates that the market cannot allocate resources in a way to provide for all – that it is chronically unable to address even the elementary needs of some of its members at the best of times, and periodically, the needs of a great many. These demands also mean that the working class must struggle against employers and petition the state for extra-market relief from the operation of the market itself to reproduce itself as a class. Although the malfunction and omissions of the market affect some all of the time and large numbers some of the time, in principle it concerns the whole of the working classes all of the time. In other words, if the market does address the needs of a majority of the working classes most of the time it is because there is a demand for their labour power, not because the system is structured to address the needs of working people. The satisfaction of the material needs of those precluded from the market can only be addressed through departures from market principles, such as charity, good will,

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the , or state intervention. Chronic and cyclical market failure obliges the working classes to struggle continuously for policies that provide the means to mitigate the effects of the market, to compensate for the lack of work, poverty wages, dangerous workplaces, or unethical employer demands.10 Acute and chronic dysfunctioning of the market has led to demands by the working classes for ever greater extra-market mechanisms to compensate. But this decommodification of labour power has the effect of lessening the disciplinary effect of the market. It gives respite from the terror of the labour market and tyranny of the workplace; and it lessens the fear of unemployment, old age, pregnancy, illness, and accidents, among many other exclusions, from market allocation of social resources. In principle, social rights contradict the operation of the market; in practice, social rights are tolerated by the powers that be for the sake of social order. The permanent inability of the market to satisfy the needs of all sectors of society has also led to increased demand for and use of political rights. The consequent progressive achievement of political rights by the working classes in turn led to increased calls for more state intervention in the form of policies to decommodify labour power and provide for those not employed or unemployable. This extension of political rights and their use to extract concessions brought to the surface one of the contradictions of a system that produces a class whose essential interests it cannot address. The greater the failure of the market and, ironically, even the greater the success,11 encouraged the increased use of political means to accommodate those denied the means to life. But the more state intervention to decommodify market processes, the fewer the avenues for private appropriation through the market, and the less capital available for private accumulation. Although political allocation of social resources contradicts market allocation, they can coexist, but only as compromise. To some degree, the state is a contested domain that can and has been used by labour and capital to advance respective class interests but only within a capitalist framework. This contradiction underlies a long history of struggles punctuated by many major labour strikes until a er the Second World War, when a complex set of conditions related to the Great Depression and the war and its outcome made the expansion of social rights across the industrial nations necessary. Throughout the postwar period, there was a steady extension of social and political rights that culminated in what came to

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be called the Keynesian welfare state. Although it varied greatly in delivery mechanisms and coverage, by the early 1970s the citizens of the industrial nations had achieved extensive protection from the effects of the market, including among other things, unemployment insurance, income guarantees, pensions, health care, food and shelter subsidies, child care support, and free primary and secondary education. Here were most of the goals for which Woodsworth had fought. This achievement was never established as permanent, however; the many institutions, programs, and services that make up the welfare state are the products of conflict between classes and other not disinterested forces. They have always been the objects of contestation, and so are always in flux – there are constant struggles to advance, defend, limit, or deny them. The context of the postwar era – the high demand for labour, the continuing ‘threat’ of socialism (given the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of China, significant Communist parties in Western Europe and le -wing trade unions), new technologies, and so on – provided the working classes with an opportunity to leverage social reforms more than ever before, through the expansion of political rights. The danger of extending political rights to the working classes lay in the underlying logic of these rights in their hands: majority rule implies a legislature and executive representing the interests of the majority – in this case, those without ownership of the means of production. It implies control by their own interests, without a commitment to the reproduction of the system’s framework, capital as private property. The logic of civil rights for all, moreover, implies the means to realize those rights. Given the already ‘socialized’ nature of capitalist production, civil rights for the working class can only be realized collectively, which translates into some form of cooperative ownership of already socialized means of production. And the logic of social rights points to the end of marketplace society and the commodification of labour power. The working classes in possession of political and civil rights constantly strive, even though o en unwi ingly and in internally contradictory ways, to realize these logical implications. Such real possibilities have never been far from the minds of the powers that be, a fact that certainly accounts in part for the begrudging nature of the expansion of these rights, but it is only in the postwar era that the conditions for their realization begin to materialize in a significant way. By the end of the 1960s, however, the extension of the services and programs that comprised the welfare state, including labour and

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collective bargaining rights, began to change from the ‘affordable’ compromise they had been to producing a noticeable impact on the rate of profit and the availability of capital for private accumulation. The exercise of political rights by the working class in the industrial world allowed it to extract more value in wages and salaries than what the market offered, that is, subsistence incomes and the unremi ing treadmill of working, eating, and sleeping. Furthermore, a new generation of university students and more militant workers began to question the structure of the status quo; and extra-parliamentary political protests against the Vietnam War were having significant consequences for political legitimacy the world over. At the same time, the demand for labour and the consequent rise in wages12 that accompanied the postwar reconstruction boom reached a point at which the rate of accumulation began to decline – wages and profits standing in inverse relation to each other. The whole aim of the system, accumulation on an increasing scale, came into question (Teeple, 2000: 51–71). The onset of economic stagnation in the early 1970s in the West moved certain key corporate representatives to examine the effects of the working classes exercising their political rights. Members of some of the most powerful transnational corporate interests created the Trilateral Commission in 1973, bringing together a group of ‘international businessmen, scholars, professional men and public officials’ (Sklar, 1980: 22). Among their first acts was to fund a study into what they called ‘the governability of democracies.’ The report, entitled The Crisis of Democracy (Crozier et al., 1975), assumed throughout that there was an inverse relation between the exercise of democracy and economic growth: ‘the governability of democracy is dependent on the sustained expansion of the economy’ (Wolfe, 1980: 298). In other words, ‘democracies’ that infringed on economic development were seen as problematic governments. Across the liberal democracies, the study suggested, there was an ‘excess of democracy,’ implicitly referring to the growth of social reform and the political protests that impinged on the ability of the state and the corporate sector to pursue the accumulation imperatives of the system. It baldly stated, ‘the vulnerability of democratic government ... comes ... from the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilized and participant society’ (Sklar, 1980: 3). Liberal democracy, in other words, was encroaching on the operation of the market, working against the interests of the corporate sector, by limiting the accumulation process, the essential goal of the system. To

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change this, the report recommended a number of policies that were to control political parties covertly and to bring about the progressive dismantling of the state sector in order to allow market forces to reassert more control over resource allocation. The suggested policies amounted to an early statement of neoliberal principles, but with a focus on measures to transform the perceived ‘high’ social expectations of citizens with respect to extra-market reforms. ‘Democracies’ work best, the authors insisted, when the citizenry is apathetic and passive (Wolfe, 1980: 298); the more politically involved citizens are, the more they demand from government programs to protect them from the market. Although the Trilateral Commission was to become a powerful advocate for the global market, many postwar political and technological developments culminated in the 1970s marking an unmistakable break between a world of international economic relations and a global economy. Well before the Second World War, the beginning of the end of the construction of the national market – the nation-state ‘project’ – was visible in the productive capacity of the industry of the day. Exclusive national (and colonial) markets were simply too limited to absorb the capital and manufactured output of the industrial nations. The Second World War, like the First World War, was the consequence of the growing incongruity between the limits of national and imperial markets and rising industrial capacity; capital was outgrowing the national political and economic framework that it had set up when it first established itself as an integral economic and political system in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The postwar rapprochement acknowledged this reality in the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 and the formation of the United Nations Organization in 1945. The former brought into being two of the institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, that would underlie the formation of the ‘global enabling framework’ for the operation of capital sans nationality, by establishing authoritative agencies to create and advance rules and regulations at the global level outside national interests, strictly speaking.13 The la er, the United Nations, was the patently undemocratic mechanism for establishing the political principles of national capitalism as theory and practice for the world.14 The U.N. Charter outlined the nature of international relations between nations as representatives of capital; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set out the principles that defined society as marketplace and the ideal political system as national liberal democracy (Teeple, 2005: 19).

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This postwar arrangement, then, brought to the fore the contradiction between the operation of markets and political practice. The rulemaking authority for capital was to be moved progressively to the global level, outside the jurisdiction of national political processes, while liberal democracy was defined solely within restricted national boundaries. A global liberal democracy to match the global economic mechanisms was never proposed. During the postwar years this separation of market agencies from national political practice was felt widely throughout the developing world in the form of obligatory policies, imposed by the IMF and World Bank, among other agencies, to dismantle the national economic role of the state, even to the point of imposing dictatorships in those countries that did not comply (Payer, 1974, 1982; Hayter, 1971). These same policies were not widely introduced in the industrial countries until the 1970s when the ‘global enabling framework’ began to assert itself over all nation states and their ‘democratic’ controls. It was precisely this new framework, coupled with the coming of the development of microprocessors and their industrial applications, which brought the global market, as opposed to international exchange, into being. This historical juncture was soon marked by a policy transformation in the Conservative Party in Great Britain and in the Republican Party in the United States leading to their respective elections in 1979 and 1980, and therea er throughout the Western nations, such that neoliberal policies were adopted and promoted in all capitalist countries. The construction and operation of the national market had long been completed and was beyond further development; it now remained to complete an integrated market at the global level in roughly the same way it had been done at the national level beginning some two hundred years earlier. This time the capacity of computer-based systems of production and distribution was to make it possible to render the world into a single integral economic unit. Increasingly, global industrial processes became continuous and interconnected across nations, demanding a world without barriers. The rules and regulations for capital – legal codes, patent protection, commercial contracts – had to find global or regional standards; national tariff and tax differences were gradually moved towards international harmonization; satellite communication systems were developed, spanning the world and allowing for constant and instantaneous global contact; trade union legislation was increasingly restricted and retrenched, allowing for the leveling of wages and salaries

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across the globe; infrastructure – roads, rails, airlines, harbours, electrical lines, telecommunications – were all progressively standardized; a system of global policing through military and police treaties and alliances encompassing all the capitalist nations was established; and above all, the privatization of all property not already private became the underlying principle and measure of government policy. Among other things, the process of privatization encouraged new measures to complete the ‘enclosure of the commons,’ now of the world and not merely of national territory; and so an unrelenting a ack began on peasant property and customary and Aboriginal rights wherever they remained (Foerstal, 1996; Bollier, 2003). Policy-making at this level was and is restricted to an international bureaucracy, government appointees (to oversee the remaining interests of national capital), and representatives of global corporations, the very raison d’ être of the system, whose wealth and power, global reach, and transnational framework place them beyond the control of any one country. These policies of the global market are asserted over national policies in the form of neoliberal demands to deregulate and privatize the state sector, including the institutions and agencies of the welfare state.15 That portion of resource allocation that had been taken over by the state in the postwar years began progressively to be shi ed back to the jurisdiction of the so-called market, this time the regional or global market. Yet, because the political and legal structures of the nation state persist and retain some efficacy within narrow limits, the working classes maintain a certain belief in national political systems, although a growing cynicism, apathy, and anger towards politicians over the dismantling of the welfare state reveal a declining legitimacy.16 It is not that global market demands have not been resisted at the national level by the citizenry (opinion polls invariably show the majority in favour of more extra-market means of social allocation), but this resistance – legal and illegal, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary – has done li le except possibly to slow the pace of retrenchment of state protection from the market.17 As long as the political strategy of resistance remains within the framework of capitalism and national liberal democracy, there is not much that a change of government could offer by way of changes in policy: to accept capitalism and liberal democracy is to accept the transformed boundaries of market forces and agencies. As long as the nation state remains defined by capitalism it can only suffer the policies demanded by global corporations or their regulatory agencies.

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A national political strategy to change the form of constitutional rule and the mode of production might offer some potential for national control, but to advocate such dramatic changes in one country is not so easy in practice and in theory questionable.18 The nation state is, a er all, in essence a territorially integrated market established by a particular group of corporations; it is principally an instrument for maintaining the conditions of national capital accumulation. The shi of the main site of accumulation to the global level leaves national principles, class structure, and institutions as reasons for and sites of resistance; but this resistance cannot be grounded in restoring the past because there is no future for national capital. Global capital and its agencies and representatives long ago recognized that with the growing dominance of the market at the global level, the efficacy of national political systems would gradually be eclipsed (Agee & Wolfe, 1978; Chomsky & Herman, 1979; Ganser, 2005). By the 1970s, liberal democracy was increasingly seen as an anachronism, as a political system that belonged to an age of national development. The growing dominance of the global market brought the progressive violation of all the rights associated with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. National civil rights of individuals and small corporations were increasingly usurped by the exercise of civil rights by transnational corporations; political rights more and more amounted to a choice of political parties with few or no differences; social rights were systematically cut back for years through blatant, covert, or deceptive acts of government; and the state sector was reduced by continual deregulation and privatization. Everywhere, the majority of rights treaties and covenants ratified by the members of the United Nations have been increasingly retrenched or violated or ignored (Mishra, 1990; Davey, 1995; Tolchin &Tolchin, 1983). The more this contradiction between national rights and globalization is perceived and understood by the citizens of the world’s nations, the more representatives of government will have to contrive the means to justify and legitimize the continued use of the national state for li le else than maintaining the conditions of global accumulation. To rationalize the continued existence of a state that seeks to deny the reformist demands of its citizens, or to reject the protests of injustices accompanying neoliberal policies, requires special a ention. Given the existing framework for global accumulation and the consequent narrowing role of the national state, the political options for maintaining control over a national citizenry are limited. Efforts can be made to foster the continuing fiction of liberal democracy as genuine

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democracy;19 there are some possibilities for change, a er all, that do not threaten the global system; and indeed some level of income security and medical care can be retained for the poorest, providing a degree of legitimacy for government. Electoral reform, such as proportional representation, can be promoted to sharpen debating skills over ma ers that in no way challenge the system. Certain constitutional changes can also be proposed – around multiculturalism, gender, or religious rights, for example – that present no threat to the accumulation process but may divert a ention away from the central issues or even increase divisions in civil society, thwarting the possibilities of unified resistance. And curbs can be placed on political and corporate corruption that has popular appeal but no significant effect on the limits of the political or economic systems. Few of these changes, however, have an effect on increasing protection from the effects of the market. In any event, if election results are not quite what is wanted, they can be bought or manipulated or changed by violent means by those who represent the dominant interests, as recent U.S. history reveals (Gumbel, 2005). The ruling powers have never had illusions about the nature of liberal democracy as has so much of the liberal democratic le 20 (Chomsky, 1991; Herman & Brodhead, 1984). A heightened nationalism or patriotism can also be manufactured. The best example of this is probably the state of Israel; there are few other countries where the citizens are as uniformly accepting of an exclusivist definition of the nation. Israel and the United States, moreover, are more or less alone in possessing an official or quasi-official patriotism resting on a notion of god-given rights. Given the complexity, heterogeneity, and racism of American society, however, the a empts by successive administrations to promote U.S. foreign policies as sanctioned by a god or to create an elevated sense of national superiority resting on some sort of historic destiny or embodiment of freedom and democracy has not managed to rally the whole of the ‘nation.’ In an age of global relations and regional treaties, nationalism is increasingly difficult to promote. The militarization of society can also be a means to control the citizens in a state that can no longer respond to social needs. Here again, Israel stands out as the pre-eminent example of a militarized modern society, sometimes called the New Sparta. The United States is a close second if one includes all sorts of military service and that part of the working classes that is employed in the military industrial complex and the police/prison system. The militarization of society, however, requires the perception of a clear and credible external threat or a strong

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sense of national destiny or responsibility, both of which are lacking in most of the industrial countries. Ultimately, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the defence of global market dominance over national political jurisdictions and allocation of social resources demands authoritarian rule and sizeable budgets for the military and police. And since the pre-eminence of the global market is at bo om simply class rule that benefits only certain strata and classes, it becomes increasingly difficult to defend by lawful or legitimate means. Here lies the main reason for the need for pretexts, contrived justifications, for overriding the national and international systems of non-corporate rights belonging to the age of the capitalist nation state. There is in effect li le choice but to create a threat: the ‘Cold War’ fear of communism served in the past, and now, as many have suggested, such a fear has been reinvented in the form of terrorism. As defined by the Bush administration, the ‘war against terror’ is to be a war with no clear end point, of ‘uncertain duration,’ against an ‘elusive enemy over an extended period of time’ (‘The National Security Strategy of the United States,’ 2002: n.p). A war declared against an enemy that is not defined and for a period of time that is described as indefinite, that requires the mobilization of national resources and yet has had no apparent success anywhere a er several years, is a war that has all the appearances of a pretext. But for transnational capital, there is li le alternative to undermining the power of the national state and the necessity to advance global market relations and protect the status quo. There can be no return to the liberal democracy of the post–Second World War era because the conditions that allowed for the developments of that period no longer obtain; and the conditions that might allow for a global liberal democracy are not there. Without resistance, the sole alternative is the one happening before us – a descent into arbitrariness and authoritarianism. The signs are pervasive (Daniels et al., 2001; Olshansky, 2002; Chang, 2002).21 On the pretext of terrorism, with the events of 9/11 being the defining moment (Griffin, 2004, 2005; Mars, 2004; Tarpley, 2005; Ahmed, 2002), almost every nation, following a missive from the United Nations Security Council, introduced emergency legislation that gave to governments arbitrary powers that override the provisions of the rule of law. Leading the way, within weeks of 11 September 2001, the U.S. Congress passed the Patriot Act and so opened a new era in U.S. history in which arbitrary searches, arrests, and imprisonment can take place, and citizens can be brought before military courts, and tried and sentenced

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without any of the usual legal safeguards, including habeas corpus. Privacy can be violated with impunity – phone calls tapped, library habits monitored, and mail and Internet surveyed. Despite police activity under this act, very li le by way of confirmed terrorist plots have been uncovered to date. The labelling of organizations as terrorist has taken place in secrecy, with li le or no debate or rationale given; and the very definition of terrorism remains highly problematic. Since most of this is now well known, there is no need to review the increasing examples of legislation that give similar emergency powers to governments around the world to employ on the basis of an asserted threat of terror. There are at the same time few alternatives for the citizens of the world, except to resist. And the signs of growing understanding and resistance are everywhere. To a large degree, however, resistance remains within the structures of national political institutions, revealing both a structural/institutional framework that remains formally intact, albeit with changed content, and a persistent if waning popular legitimacy in a system that can no longer do by way of reform what it once could.22 Still, to demand that the system live up to its own principles is a radical demand in light of the fact that it cannot or will not honour these principles, or honours them only in the breach by minimizing or violating them.23 When this is understood the nature of the resistance will necessarily change, and the goals will be modified from demands to respect human rights to the struggle to realize their underlying logic. Given the Christian ideals of J.S. Woodsworth, he would very likely join this struggle.

NOTES 1 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are the three main components of what is o en referred to as the International Bill of Rights. 2 It should be noted here that the concept of property carries two meanings: a legal or philosophical sense referring to a relationship to things, and a reference to the thing itself. Macpherson uses the concept in the first sense, and this meaning is synonymous with the concept of right. The concept of property, unqualified, then, refers to rights in general, and should not be confused with private property which refers to exclusive rights belonging to an individual or fictitious individual as corporate entity.

108 Gary Teeple 3 In theory, the market is defined by competing multiple producers, distributors, retailers, and buyers, and the outcome of the competition is supposedly the most efficiently produced commodity. Such a free play of competitive forces, however, is the last thing that any producer or retailer (or corporation) wants, and these people do everything in their power to prevent the market defined in this way from working. The ideal for the corporation is some form of monopoly, oligopoly, or cartel in which competition is absent or restricted and profits are maximized through the use or abuse of the restricted or negated competition. La erly, the market has come to be a euphemism for corporate control. 4 Arguably, in theory there was a reciprocal dimension to feudal relations wherein the Church and nobility provided health care, education, armed protection (and access to God, through the Church) to the lower classes. The position taken here is that in practice, this reciprocity was significantly undermined, if not entirely negated, because of the control over property exercised by the Church and nobility. 5 Civil rights are not granted to all in civil society; at first they were granted only to those with sufficient capital to be independent commodity producers. Gradually, they were extended to workers, minority religions, slaves, and women as each of these struggled for recognition as having a stake as embodied capital within the framework of the market. By the same token, civil rights are today granted for the most part only to members of civil society over the age of majority, the age when they become legally responsible for their existence as embodiments of private property. 6 An estate is a feudal class that embodies social, political, and economic rights as privilege, unlike modern social classes that are defined not by rights but by wealth, education, and/or relation to ownership of the means of production. 7 Arguably, nowhere was there a widespread integral national character in place before the creation of the national market. Everywhere a national character had to be systematically created by ideological means – the invention of national anthems, flags, holidays, historic moments; and by material means – the creation of a currency, ‘citizen’ armies, roads and railways, canals and harbours, and later, airlines, national broadcasting, and social reforms to address class conflict. Usually this character followed for the most part the characteristics of the metropole or metropoles in which was found the dominant capital: London and Manchester for England, Paris for France, New York for the United States, Toronto and Montreal (a er London) for Canada, and so on. 8 Freedom of speech, for instance, was initially confined to Parliament as freedom to discuss and criticize government policy; it was a right a ached to those representing capital, to those directly affected by state policy.

The Changing Struggle for Rights 109  9 Inclusion in society as marketplace means to be rendered into the embodiment of private property, as labour power or capital, not as a human being, and to be granted rights as a solitary sovereign individual. 10 The chronic failure of the market also obliges capital to make continual appeals to the state for support. So extensive has been this appeal and the state response that capitalism has been called ‘socialism for the rich.’ Throughout the history of capitalism, far more state support has gone to the corporate sector than to the working classes. Capturing the state by one faction of capital or another through periodic elections provides an alternating chance for these factions to have access to the public purse and policy-making power and the possibility of more or less social reform for the working classes. 11 Union activity and success typically rise and fall roughly in concert with the rise and fall in the demand for labour. 12 This rise extended wages beyond what was necessary for reproduction to produce the so-called social wage – the ‘fiscal foundation of the welfare state.’ 13 Of course, U.S. interests prevailed and still do, but to argue that the ‘global enabling framework’ is only about U.S. dominance is to miss the point that the U.S. is the pre-eminent, not the sole, representative of capital in this framework. The framework is for all capital and provides a competitive field for capital at the global level outside direct national political interference. 14 One of the first tasks of the United Nations Organization was to help dismantle the colonial system and to retain the newly independent nations within the orbit of international capital. 15 David Schneiderman (in this volume). 16 It is interesting to note that in general the le retains a strong allegiance to the idea of the nation-state, far greater than that of the thinking right. This is probably because most of the le in the industrial world does not admit to the shi of power to the global level and has not shaken off a belief in the possibilities of reforming the national system. 17 Eric Tucker (in this volume). 18 This is not an argument for not fighting for such transformational change in one country if the circumstances are favourable – Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia being notable examples – but it is to say that (1) global capital requires coordinated global resistance and (2) any strategy for national control of global capital contradicts the reality of the global economy. 19 The creation of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983–84 by the U.S. Congress is a significant example of such efforts. Among other things, its role is to funnel U.S. funds to political parties and organizations that support American aims and interests.

110 Gary Teeple 20 It cannot be said that the representatives of capital ever respected the political principles of liberal democracy if the accumulation process were threatened. The history of dictatorships in most of the Third World is testimony to this fact. But this is not to say that liberal democracy is without some efficacy or that struggles over national policies within liberal democracy should be discouraged. With advancing globalization, the limits of such struggles will become self-evident. 21 See also Cole and Dempsey (2002), Leone and Anrig (2003), Schulhofer (2002), Brown (2003), Hentoff (2003), Deller et al. (2003), and Mandel (2004). 22 Both the structures and the legitimacy of liberal democracy are becoming exposed with globalization because capital, as the foundation of the nation-state, begins to erode so too do all the characteristics of the nation. The national character is progressively lost – especially with the decline of national blocs of capital, public or private. The sell-off of state corporations, services, and institutions leaves the role of the national state minimized, and with the offshore purchase of national private corporations, the sense of nationhood that they together engendered is undermined. When governments sell off most of their holdings, including water, energy, and postal services, and even the prison system, among other things, the people are increasingly le without a sense of country. The national character dissipates in the face of a global market. The sense of nationality at this point also may take on an aura that suggests that it is merely imagined, as if created out of the realm of ideas, but all that has happened is that the foundation of nationalism, the promotion of a national character based on the social and cultural life of the metropole of the dominant capital, has begun to disappear with globalization. 23 Gwen Brodsky (in this volume).

REFERENCES Agee, P., & Wolfe, L. (1978). Dirty work: The CIA in Western Europe. Secaucus: Lyle Stuart. Ahmed, N.M. (2002). The war on freedom: How and why America was a acked, September 11, 2001. Joshua Tree, CA: Tree of Life. Beard, C.A. (1957). The economic basis of politics. New York: Vintage. Bollier, D. (2003). Silent the : The private plunder of our common wealth. London: Routledge.

The Changing Struggle for Rights 111 Brown, C. (Ed.). (2003). Lost liberties: Ashcro and the assault on personal freedoms. New York: New Press. Chang, N. (2002). Silencing political dissent: How post-September 11 anti-terrorism measures threaten our civil liberties. New York: Seven Stories. Chomsky, N. (1991). Deterring democracy. New York: Hill & Wang. Chomsky, N., & Herman, S. (1979). The Washington connection and Third World fascism. Boston: South End Press. Cole, D., & Dempsey, J. (2002). Terrorism and the constitution: Sacrificing civil liberties in the name of national security. New York: New Press. Crozier, M.J., Huntington, S.P., & Watanuki, J. (1975). The crisis of democracy: Report on the governability of democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York: New York University Press. Daniels, R.J., Macklem, P., & Roach, K. (Eds.). (2001). The security of freedom: Essays on Canada’s Anti-terrorism Bill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Davey, J.D. (1995). The new social contract: America’s journey from welfare state to police state. Westport: Praeger. Deller, N., Makhijani, A., & Burroughs, J. (Eds.). (2003). Rule of power or rule of law? An assessment of U.S. policies and actions regarding security-related treaties. New York: Apex. Dishman, R.B. (1971). Burke and Paine: On revolution and the rights of man. New York: Scribner’s. Foerstal, L. (Ed.). (1996). Creating surplus populations. Washington: Maisonneuve Press. Franklin, J.H. (Ed. and Trans.). (1969). Constitutionalism and resistance in the sixteenth century. New York: Pegasus. Friedmann, W. (1949). Legal theory. London: Stevens. Ganser, D. (2005). NATO’s secret armies: Operation Gladio and terrorism in Western Europe. London: Frank Cass. Griffin, D.R. (2004). The new Pearl Harbor. Northampton: Olive Branch. — (2005). The 9/11 Commission report. Northampton: Olive Branch. Gumbel, A. (2005). Steal this vote. New York: Nation Books. Hayter, T. (1971). Aid as imperialism. Harmondsworth: Pelican. Hentoff, N. (2003). The war on the Bill of Rights and the gathering resistance. New York: Seven Stories. Herman, E., & Brodhead, F. (1984). Demonstration elections. Boston: South End Press. Hilton, R. (Ed.). (1976). The transition from feudalism to capitalism. London: NLB. Hobsbawn, E.J. (1962). The age of revolution 1789–1848. New York: Mentor Books. Kuczynski, J. (1967). The rise of the working class. New York: McGraw-Hill.

112 Gary Teeple Lasswell, H. (1963). Politics: Who gets what, when and how. New York: Meridian. Leone, R.C., & Anrig, G. (Eds.). (2003). The war on our freedoms: Civil liberties in an age of terrorism. New York: Century Foundation. MacInnis, G. (1953). J.S. Woodsworth: A man to remember. Toronto: Macmillan. Macpherson, C.B. (1978). The meaning of property. In C.B. Macpherson (Ed.), Property, 1–13. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mandel, M. (2004). How America gets away with murder: Illegal wars, collateral damage and crimes against humanity. London: Pluto. Mars, J. (2004). Inside job. San Rafael: Origin. Marshall, T.H. (1963). Citizenship and social class. In T.H. Marshall, Sociology at the crossroads and other essays, 67–127. London: Heinemann. McNaught, K. (1959). A prophet in politics: A biography of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mills, A. (1991). A fool for Christ: The political thought of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mishra, R. (1990). The welfare state in capitalist society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Olshansky, B. (2002). Secret trials and executions: Military tribunals and the threat to democracy. New York: Seven Stories. Payer, C. (1974). The debt trap: The IMF and the Third World. Harmondsworth: Penguin. — (1982). The World Bank: A critical analysis. New York: Monthly Review Press. Polanyi, K. (1957). The great transformation. New York: Beacon. Schulhofer, S. (2002). The enemy within: Intelligence gathering, law enforcement, and civil liberties in the wake of September 11. New York: Century Foundation. Sklar, H. (1980).Trilateralism: Managing dependence and democracy. In H. Sklar (Ed.), Trilaterialism: The Trilateral Commission and elite planning for world management, 1–58. Montreal: Black Rose. Sorel, A. (1969). Europe and the French revolution. Translated and edited by A. Cobban and J. W. Hunt. London: Collins and the Fontana Library. Supple, B. (1973). The state and the industrial revolution 1700–1914. In C.M. Cipola (Ed.), The Fontana economic history of Europe, 340–53. London: Collins/ Fontana. Tarpley, W.G. (2005). 9/11 synthetic terror: Made in USA. Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press. Teeple, G. (2000). Globalization and the decline of social reform. Aurora: Garamond. — (2005). The riddle of human rights. Aurora: Garamond.

The Changing Struggle for Rights 113 The National Security Strategy of the United States. [Electronic version]. (2002.) The New York Times, 20 Sept.: n.p. Tigar M.E., & Levy, M.R. (1977). Law and the rise of capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Tolchin S.J., & Tolchin, M. (1983). Dismantling America: The rush to deregulate. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, A. (1980). Capitalism shows its face: Giving up on democracy. In H. Sklar (Ed.), Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and elite planning for world management, 295–307. Montreal: Black Rose. Young, W.D. (1969). The anatomy of a party: The national CCF, 1932–1961. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

5 Social Rights Are Human Rights: Furthering the Democratic Project hugh shewell

Government exists to provide for the needs of the people, and when it comes to choice between profits and property rights on the one hand and human welfare on the other, there should be no hesitation ... in saying that we ... place ... human welfare ... first. – J.S. Woodsworth

Woodsworth’s words seem as relevant today as they were eighty-five years ago. As frequent witness to the oppression of the working class and jailed as a sympathizer and presumed instigator of the Winnipeg General Strike he was no stranger to issues of human rights and the protection and promotion of democracy. I am interested in his insistence on the role of government in the assurance and maintenance of human welfare. I am further interested in the idea that human welfare represents a set of rights that constitute social rights and that these rights are human rights. Without these social rights fully acknowledged as human rights and the state accepting a legal obligation to promote and fulfil these rights we of the liberal-democratic West considerably weaken our claim to be democracies. Social Rights and Human Rights The idea of social rights is embedded in a notion of social justice and the fact that capitalism produces inequality both of wealth and social class. Yet, today any discussion about inequality and its redress is frequently ignored. Even a commi ed liberal thinker like Michael Ignatieff is struck by the absence of any discussion of inequality in contemporary political debate: ‘I’m no Marxist, but I am astonished that social and economic

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inequality, the focus of so much socialist passion when I was a student, has simply disappeared from the political agenda in Canada and most other capitalist societies’ (2000: 19). But, according to Ignatieff, social and economic inequalities cannot be addressed through ‘rights talk’ since rights are about individualism (p. 25). In his view, rights cannot address issues of inequality nor can capitalism be held accountable for social inequality. Inequality is a problem of democracy. In this essay, I take issue with the general argument put forward by Ignatieff. First, rights are not limited to the individual (Macpherson, 1985), and second, inequality is about rights and an assertion of a certain set of rights, social rights. Third, social and economic inequalities are precisely about capitalism and its relationship to democracy. Thus, while part of the problem is democracy, more generally, the problem is about how we understand and think about democracy. In the remainder of this chapter, I examine human rights and liberal-democratic governance in the past half-century and discuss what can be done to elevate and restore human rights, in particular, social rights, to Canada’s national agenda. Tommy Douglas, the former Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) premier of Saskatchewan and the first leader of the federal New Democratic Party, once remarked that in Canada – as in all liberal democracies – we have civil and political democracy but we do not have economic democracy. Here, he referred to the fact that private property and the entrenchment of a private economy are characteristics of liberal democracy. Ma ers related to the redistribution of wealth are not fully in the public sphere and subject to our collective, democratic wishes. The economy ultimately serves private, not public interests, and the fair and just redistribution of wealth is therefore not possible. While the concepts of economic democracy and social rights cannot be equated they are most certainly related. Surely, implicit in what Douglas said is that a democracy is not a complete democracy without full recognition of social and economic entitlements for all citizens. The demand for greater state intervention in ma ers related to social welfare both before and a er the Second World War coincided with a changing understanding of what democracy was or ought to be about. Woodsworth lived in the waning years of protective democracy, the earliest form of liberal democracy developed primarily to regulate the competing interests of the propertied, capitalist class (Macpherson, 1977). Under this form of democracy the working class was viewed as simply functional to the production of wealth (Macpherson, 1964; Marshall, 1981). During the mid-nineteenth century protective democracy

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underwent a gradual transformation, especially in England where, by the late nineteenth century, the vote had been extended to men in all social classes and, then, by the first half of the twentieth century, to women as well. The political democratization of the liberal state was important for two reasons. First, it followed that with the extension of the franchise to the working classes, a political party representing their interests would eventually be formed. Second, regardless of the formation of such a party, the added voice of working-class men and women to the political fray meant that issues related to greater social equality and social welfare were much more ma ers of public debate and discourse. Thus, the political democratization of liberal capitalism meant that workingclass interests now had to be considered. Those interests, especially in the early going, were centred on state protection from the vagaries and destructive tendencies of industrial capitalism and included everything from the right to unionize, workplace safety, and security in times of unemployment including illness, retirement, and layoff (Teeple, 2004). Following the Great Depression and the Second World War in Canada these kinds of demands on the state gained a broad base of popular support, so that by the 1960s there was a modest welfare state in place (Guest, 1997). Democracy, it was thought, had to be more than about a utilitarian protection of property rights and the promotion of free market economies. Democracy should have some moral purpose: together with responsibilities there should be rights and benefits of citizenship (Macpherson, 1965, 1973). Thus, by the 1960s the idea of a right to welfare had entered welfare state discourse (Marshall, 1981). T.H. Marshall was among the first academic writers to propose the idea of social rights in a series of lectures in 1949 entitled, ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ which he subsequently published in 1950 as an extended essay (Moscovitch, 1991). He returned to this idea in ‘The Right to Welfare’ (1965). In ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ he identified three elements or sets of rights of citizenship in a democracy: civil, political, and social. The first two of these he acknowledged were largely realized. It was the third, the social element, that was not. This Marshall described as ‘the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society’ (1963: 74, cited by Pinker in Marshall, 1981: 10). Marshall, a liberal, believed in equality of citizenship but did not believe that other forms of inequality could or should be extinguished. In other words, he distinguished between equality of citizenship and

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the rights accorded to all members of society by virtue of that status and inequalities that were produced by the market society or conferred in other ways. In ‘The Right to Welfare’ Marshall pursued this thinking noting that by welfare he meant ‘the broad sense given to it in the term “welfare state” ... meaning health, education, economic and social welfare’ (1965: 83). Marshall was more equivocal when he discussed the right to economic and social welfare, and I shall return to this issue shortly. The right to health and education was to him more straightforward since there was ‘a ... more intimate blending of rights and duties’ associated with health and education than with economic and social welfare (p. 90). Society as a whole has a vested interest in the provision of these services because, as in the case of education, for example, it ‘is not only something to which every citizen has a right; it is a process by which citizens are made. As such it is something that every society can promote in its own interest’ (ibid.). Similarly, Marshall argues, ‘it is just as important for a society to have a healthy population ... so the right to health, like the right to education, is blended with duties.’ Not only are environmental and public health essential to the health of a society, so is personal health for the obvious reasons of labour reproduction and productivity: ‘Your body is part of the national capital’ (p. 91). In addition, health and education can be enjoyed and accessed by all members of society: they are not contingent on need or some kind of personal shortfall. Marshall concluded his discussion of the right to health and education by noting that these were prime examples of social rights as different from Locke’s notion of the ‘natural rights’ of man. These la er rights, he observed, conferred on each individual the ultimate right to privacy and to protection by and isolation from the state. In contrast, the twentieth-century idea of social rights confers on the individual a new relationship with the state: ‘The modern rights to education and health are ... not merely recognized by all as being social in origin, but are part of the mechanism by which the individual is absorbed into society (not isolated from it) and simultaneously draws upon and contributes to its collective welfare’ (ibid.). Universal access to health and education as a right were – and are – functional to social stability and prosperity. Unlike social welfare (income security and social services) everyone partakes and benefits. With respect to welfare more narrowly conceived (i.e., economic security and social services), Marshall (1965) hesitated on two counts: First, he found it difficult to reconcile the need for income security as a social right

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with the personal freedoms he associated with the marketplace. This was in part because he could not see how – as he did for health and education – society benefited overall from a citizen exercising a right to social welfare. In other words, he could not see how it could be made the duty of a pauper to exercise a right to income security in the same way as health and education were duties to be exercised as well as benefits to be received. If someone wants to be poor – that is, chooses not to engage in the market as the primary source of personal welfare – then what obligation does the state have to support that person since she or he is merely exercising her or his personal freedom? Would not the state be interfering in the free market? Second, because the market is the primary source of individual welfare, not everyone needs the state to offer a modicum of economic security or the support of social services. For example, according to Marshall, society has no universal need to have ‘happy old people.’ In his view, because the universality principle cannot be said to apply to income security and welfare services, it is difficult to argue that they should be considered a social right. Instead, Marshall asserted, they fall under what might be considered moral rights and, in a decent, compassionate society, a political will must exist to ensure their provision. What Marshall failed to appreciate was that economic security as a right can be shown to be beneficial to the health of the society, to a person’s general absorption into the society, and to the advancement of democracy. Despite his failure to see the relationship between, for example, individual income security and individual and societal health, Marshall infused into the thinking and writing about the welfare state the idea that the la er was a natural development of a democracy and that a citizen could rightfully come to expect social benefits of citizenship. This view prevailed – though not without opposition – until the early 1970s when new economic crises gave rise to a severe critique of Keynesian economics ushering in neoliberalism and a return to more classical, liberal economic thought. By the 1980s the retrenchment of welfare state measures was under way and the democratic gains of the post–Second World War period were under considerable threat. Abramovitz and Blau (1985) responded to the neoliberal threat to postwar welfare state social democratic gains by re-arguing that social benefits be understood as a right. Citing Esping-Andersen (1982) they argued that the welfare state must exist to provide, among other things (e.g., health and education), basic economic security. At that time – the Reagan-Thatcher era – income security benefits provided in the United

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States, in particular, and to a lesser degree, the United Kingdom and Canada were largely based on conditional benefits.1 For the most part, the only right that existed in relation to social benefits was procedural right, that is the right to apply for benefits, to be treated fairly according to the rules of eligibility, to have the right of appeal, and so on (Abramovitz & Blau, 1985). This remains the case. What has changed since the rise of neoliberal politics has been a continued elimination and/or targeting of benefits. In Canada, for example, the federal Unemployment Insurance program was considerably reformed during the 1980s and 1990s so that eligibility for benefits became more difficult and the period of entitlement considerably reduced (Guest, 1997). Indeed, in 1996 new federal legislation changed the name to Employment Insurance, a name perhaps intended to remind recipients of their primary responsibility to pursue their welfare in the marketplace. Provinces like Ontario introduced work-for-welfare schemes – previously prohibited under the federal cost-sharing program, the Canada Assistance Plan – aimed at all but the most unemployable recipients (Lightman, 1997; Shewell, 1998, 2001; Snyder, 2003). In addition, Ontario, British Columbia, and other provinces slashed their social assistance (welfare) rates, and many determined that lone parents on welfare – most of whom are women – were no longer to be considered unemployable and were subjected to more rigorous rules of establishing and continuing eligibility (Guest, 1997; Shewell, 1998, 2001; Snyder, 2003). According to Abramovitz and Blau, social benefits provided under the welfare state banner were rarely guided by human need. Instead, the growth and responsiveness of the welfare state was largely dependent on ‘administrative discretion, prevailing economic and political conditions, and the underlying purposes of the welfare state’ (1985: 52). Administrative discretion – meaning the rules and regulations surrounding the provision of benefits – they argued, was usually tied to labour market a achment, issues of public morality and even political belief. The most dominant of these was labour market a achment since most income security benefits were usually conditional on the applicant/recipient being readily available to work or engaging in preparation for employment. Strongly related to labour market a achment was the role of political and economic conditions. Only when faced with a political crisis generated by deteriorating economic conditions does the state generally respond to human need, though it is not so much human need to which it responds, but rather the threat to the state and economic order. Conversely, social benefits are tightened or withdrawn

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in more stable periods or when it is perceived that they act as a disincentive to labour productivity (Abramovitz & Blau, 1985: 55– 6). As Abramovitz and Blau’s analysis suggests, social benefits emerge out of the competing tensions within liberal democracies, between on the one hand the ethos of equality and on the other the inequalities of wealth and class produced by the capitalist mode of production. They go on to argue that social benefits can form the basis of an organizing strategy to demand that social benefits be a right of citizenship: the idea is that people have social rights as both ‘an end and a means’ (1985: 58). As an end, social rights would provide at least a modicum of social and economic security to all citizens of a nation. As a means, they would provide a stepping stone to enhance the ideals of full democratic equality and to shi the balance of rights away from private property and capital. They would do this by forcing the hand of capitalism since ‘it is unlikely that the capitalist ... system could afford – economically and politically – to assure everyone a right to social benefits ... In this respect, the concept of social benefits as a right has political utility because it reveals the limits of the existing political order’ (p. 59). Thus, instituting social benefits as a right would not transform capitalism but, as a structural reform, would upset the status quo to the extent that its eclipse would be inevitable (Gorz, 1964: 8, cited in ibid.: 59). As it turns out, Abramovitz and Blau were too optimistic about the possibilities of galvanizing public support for social rights. This was especially true in the United States where, despite a history of populism, the values placed on individualism and religious faith continue to prevail (Saunders, 2005). There was more success in Canada, albeit lukewarm, when the 1992 Charlo etown Constitutional Accord proposed a modest social charter to be entrenched in an amended Constitution Act. For various reasons – not definitively associated with the Charter – the Accord was defeated in a national referendum. Since then there has been li le public discussion about social rights in Canada. With the exception of health care, the federal government has backed away from its more interventionist stance during the postwar years in deference to the provincial governments’ insistence on exercising their sole jurisdictional rights in welfare ma ers. Arguably, the rise of provincial governments in asserting their jurisdictional powers under the constitution coincides with the rise of neoliberalism and a return to values associated with individualism and privacy: in short, a more atomized, fragmented society. In contrast, a strong federal presence in general welfare ma ers has, historically at least, meant a greater commitment

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to the broader collective good including the possibility of a fuller recognition of social rights. Thus far I have discussed the idea of social rights in terms of the social and political contexts in which they emerged. But what is the connection between social rights and human rights? In order to discuss this connection, I will define more completely what is meant by social rights. Fabre defines social rights as ‘standardly rights to adequate minimum income, education, housing, and health care’ (2000: 1). Teeple defines them rather more broadly and connects them to the gradual extension of democratic rights to the working classes as I described earlier.2 Teeple identifies social rights as those benefits and services that arise in part from ‘chronic class conflict and the consequences of systemic economic inequalities’ but more ‘from the inability of capital relations to embrace all aspects of societal reproduction and the ensuing need for state subsidization or the “socialization” of the associated costs’ (2004: 15). Social rights, Teeple states, ‘include a range of subsidized health services, state-financed primary and secondary education, social security mechanisms (such as disability and old age pensions, and unemployment and occupational accident insurance), employment standards, and trade union rights, including the right to strike’ (p. 14). He then categorizes social rights under four general areas of government activity: the labour market, the workplace, labour reproduction and maintenance, and support to ‘unproductive’ populations. Importantly, social rights necessarily interfere with individual freedom, privacy, and property rights, the cornerstones of liberalism and capitalism (p. 15). They are – if given – concessions by the dominant, ownership (propertied) class to the working class and, as such, are countervailing rights.3 Within the lexicon of liberal democracy they are not absolute rights but qualified, depending principally on the political will of the governing party. At the same time, there is an obvious link between social rights and the basic human rights proclaimed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 to which Canada, a liberal democracy, is a signatory. The UDHR is an affirmation of the three sets of rights – political, civil, and social – and arose in response to recent history up to the middle of the last century including the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, Fascism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. To a large extent the social rights enunciated primarily in Articles 22 to 26 represent an ethical underpinning of the evolving welfare state. In this sense, they are meant to mitigate

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the excesses of capitalism and class struggle and to provide a ‘human face’ to capitalism in contrast to the perceived faceless monolith of socialism (Teeple, 2004: 17–18). The human rights that are construed as social rights are the following: • The right to social security (Article 22) • The right to work and a range of related rights including the right to unionize (Article 23) • The right to rest, leisure, and paid vacation (Article 24) • The right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond an individual’s control; motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance (Article 25) • The right to education which shall be free at the elementary level and made accessible at other levels (Article 26) In the framing of its articles the UDHR is implicitly a liberal document. While civil and political rights (the fundamental tenets of liberal philosophy) are stated as unequivocal rights, social rights are qualified. Article 22 appears to be a governing clause for those that follow. It states: ‘Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality’ (UDHR, cited in Teeple, 2004: 216). The subsets of rights specified in the UDHR were subsequently incorporated into two international covenants – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Significantly, the signatories to the covenant on political and civil rights are to guarantee their enforceability while those to the covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights are ‘obliged only to work towards its fulfilment “progressively” as “their maximum available resources” allow’ (Teeple, 2004: 18). Here then is the bias of the powerful Western democracies like the United States that were instrumental in pu ing forward the UDHR.4 Today, when Canada insists that other nations – mostly poor and found in the so-called underdeveloped parts of the world – adhere to

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and promote human rights it is, I think, referring only to civil and political rights. To do otherwise – that is, to insist on respect for the social rights of the Declaration – would be to invite both national and international accusations of hypocrisy since Canada fails to adhere to social rights. To evade fulfilling these basic human rights Canada, like other Western nations, has openly or tacitly invoked the subject clause. In other words, the economic conditions, according to the dominant class, have never been conducive or ‘right’ for the ongoing fulfilment of these rights. The plea of economic incapacity, of an inability to afford these rights now or in the future, masks a fundamental ideological rejection by the dominant class of social rights in a liberal-democratic state. Despite the declared adherence to Article 22 and to the governing clause of the International Covenant, it may be said that the failure in practice to do so constitutes a violation of human rights (Teeple, 2004). This failure similarly impedes the full realization of civil and political rights since, without full and adequate social security, it is far more difficult for impoverished citizens to exercise these rights. In effect, democracy is diminished. Democracy and Liberal Democracy How do we explain Canada’s persistent violation of human rights through its failure to accord social rights? To answer this question it is helpful to discuss the nature and meaning of democracy and – more particularly – liberal democracy because in understanding both we can begin to understand why Canada does not pursue social rights with any determination. The early liberal state did not immediately grant civil and political rights to all persons in society since not all persons were thought of as being fully equal or, for that ma er, as members of society (Macpherson, 1964, 1965). Initially, elections and the competitive party system were restricted to the elite men of property, of capital and substance (Macpherson, 1965). The freedoms granted to and trumpeted by them however, could not reasonably be withheld from the middle and working classes. They rightfully claimed that they too had interests to be defended and advanced in the marketplace. By gradually extending these rights to all men and eventually to women, the liberal state, as Macpherson put it, ‘fulfilled its own logic. In so doing it neither destroyed nor weakened itself; it strengthened both itself and the market society. It liberalized democracy while democratizing liberalism’ (1965: 11).

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Liberal democracy has at its fundamental raison d’être, property rights and the production of private wealth through the exercise of those rights. Its origins essentially are elitist not populist. At its core there is a profound value placed on the protection of property and private wealth. The problem is that the democratization of the liberal state eventually allowed for counter-tendencies to arise in opposition to property rights. Democracy in its purest meaning is about equality and about rule by the oppressed (Macpherson, 1965). The dominant ownership class had – probably still has – a deep distrust of democracy seeing in it ‘mob rule’ and the reckless overthrow of one class by another. But from their own perspectives the working classes saw democracy ‘not just as a way of freeing themselves from oppression, but of freeing the whole of humanity, of permi ing the realization of the humanity of all men’ (p. 13). In this sense, democracy is about human equality, and ‘not just equality to climb a class ladder, but such an equality ... where no class was able to dominate or live at the expense of others’ (p. 22). This is, in part, the Marxist view and has at its core the idea that people are only free if the conditions in which they live allow for their full human development. Liberal democracies generally are characterized by structural, class inequality. The fact of class division detracts from their claim to be fully democratic since, without a classless society, it cannot be said that liberal democracies permit their citizens to become fully human. The inherent contradiction of liberal democracy is that it is by definition capitalist, and capitalism cannot function without exploitation through a class structure. Indeed, liberal democracy is like any other political system: it is a system of power. As such it enforces a set of relations: in this case, the class relationship between capital and labour (Macpherson, 1965). The results of this relationship are social and economic inequalities that considerably diminish the realization of people becoming fully human. Liberal democracies, as already noted, have a empted to redress some of these inequalities through welfare state measures. While these measures reduced inequality to some extent they did not fully compensate for the effects of exploitation and did not prove stable in the long run. Rather, as the past twenty years have demonstrated, they have been subject to political struggles and to the economic priorities determined by the dominant ownership class. Writing in the context of the Cold War, Macpherson (1965) observed that if liberal democracies were to prevail over other systems that laid claim to being democratic they would have to deemphasize their

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‘possessive market morality’ and fully embrace human rights. In this he was clearly alluding to social rights. By the late 1980s it was clear that liberal democracies had not embraced a human rights agenda: rather, quite the opposite. Facing uncertain economic futures the Western, liberal democracies were engaged in significant economic restructuring and reformulations of their welfare states (Guest, 1997; Teeple, 2000). In this era of uncertain economic growth the Western democracies were faced with trade-offs. At the time it was predicted that as economic health declined business interests would pressure the state to redirect its primary functions towards the restoration and sustenance of economic well-being and demand that governments accept a trade-off between economic health and increasing political and civil rights. This would be necessary because while these sets of rights – ironically, the cornerstones of property rights – are accorded to the broader populace they form the basis for the demand for claims against the state, claims that business would say the state could no longer afford. Consequently, the democratic gains of the 1960s and early 1970s would wither. Ordinary citizens would be admonished to reduce their democratic expectations of the state and to tighten their belts. A tightening of civil liberties would follow (Macpherson, 1985). All this would happen to preserve property rights and economic freedom for those for whom it really ma ered: the dominant bourgeoisie for whom the liberal state existed in the first place. The end result of this analysis is that human rights would become ‘in fact and in prospect, subordinate’ and would ‘necessarily take second place to the desires of peoples or rulers for other things: for national self-determination, for a place in the sun, for military security, for hegemony, for the maintenance of inequality within nations and ... inequality between rich and poor nations’ (Macpherson, 1985: 31). It is fair to say that much of this predictive analysis has subsequently played itself out in Canada and elsewhere. By the early 1990s Canada had entered into free trade with the United States and Mexico. Unbridled corporate, global capitalism had fully emerged together with the dominance of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. All this has led to a resurgence of everything and more that was wrong about nineteenthcentury industrial capitalism: economic and cultural imperialism; unparalleled profits and greed; extraordinary wealth with shameful extremes of poverty; the celebration of the possessive, market society, and the spawning of global terrorism. Political and civil rights have been curtailed if not de jure then certainly de facto. Social rights are simply ignored.5

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Social Rights as a Constitutional Right What then can be done to elevate and restore human rights – in particular, social rights – to Canada’s national agenda? Certainly there must be a relentless pursuit of full human rights by both democratic socialists and conscientious liberals (Macpherson, 1985). In addition, the federal government must, as Brodsky6 argues, reintroduce legislation akin to the former Canada Assistance Plan (CAP). However, such legislation, while an important step, would not be sufficient to ensure the restoration and enhancement of social rights although it would reduce what Brodsky refers to as the current accountability gap. There are several problems associated with relying solely on federal legislation to promote and provide for social rights and benefits. First, while the CAP was an important mechanism for injecting funds and for providing incentives to the provinces to develop and expand their social services, it failed to resolve the issue of welfare jurisdiction. A level of acrimony developed between the provinces and the federal government over this issue. Because the CAP relied principally on the use of the conditional grant,7 the provinces complained that O awa infringed on their constitutional powers over welfare services. Second, the CAP was a voluntary arrangement. It involved a spirit of cooperation and compromise to work: ultimately there was nothing to compel a province to participate in the program or the federal government to maintain its involvement (Irving, 1987). Importantly, while the CAP succeeded in promoting the development of social programs, it failed to ensure adequate rates of social assistance: national poverty rates remained high for the duration of its existence (Finkel, 2006; Guest, 1997). Third, the CAP was vulnerable to repeal because of interconnected ideological and economic forces and the same could be said of future legislation. Finally, although there is currently some protection under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms with respect to the social rights of an individual, this protection is not clearly defined and requires artful legal argument to achieve – or not – a relatively minor affirmation of these rights.8 Overall, however, the courts have failed to understand or contextualize, for example, issues of poverty under sections 7 and 15 of the Charter as affecting identifiable groups that can be collectively categorized as ‘the poor.’ Poverty experienced collectively has not been recognized by the courts as an obstruction to equality or to those rights defined under sections 7 and 15. Where it has been acknowledged it has been tightly and individually circumscribed as a particular case not to

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be extrapolated to a general category, ‘the poor.’ Thus, on an individual basis a person might prove to the courts that her or his poverty has obstructed her or his rights under the Charter but such proof cannot be said to apply to all those who experience poverty.9 This said, the courts have made some progress in bringing international law and covenants to bear over the interpretation of the Charter, its use in extrapolating social rights from individual rights, and in enforcing a positive obligation on the state to promote and protect, for example, ‘the life, liberty and security of the person.’10 Notwithstanding the importance of federal legislation and the current Charter, in the long term we must also work towards entrenching social rights in the constitution as a more effective and expedient solution. In keeping with Marx’s theory of alienation we must find ways to realize our essential communitarian nature. We must realize that to be fully human is to be a member of a community and that community must be restored to the individual (Macpherson, 1985). To accomplish this – as Teeple alludes – there must be a transformation of capitalism to a mode of production based on community rights not property rights.11 In the meantime steps can be taken to move away from a liberal towards a democratic, socialist state. The most significant of these steps would be to make social rights a constitutional right. Social rights are based on the broad assumption that everyone has an interest in leading a ‘decent life’: that is, to lead a life free from want and suffering and to be generally happy. In a sense it is both utilitarian and Marxist. It is utilitarian in the sense that happiness is the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. It is Marxist in the sense that to be fully human a person must be free of exploitation, of want and suffering, and able to partake of all that life has to offer. Finally, as Fabre states, it also reflects Kant’s assertion that ‘people should not be treated merely as means but also as ends’ (2000: 17). Each person, therefore, has intrinsic moral worth. Fabre submits that related to this assumption are two essential and privileged conditions that must be fulfilled to lead the decent life: autonomy and well-being. Autonomy is the capacity, opportunity, and access persons have on a consistent basis to ‘controlling, to some degree, their own destiny, fashioning it through successive decisions throughout their lives’ (Raz, 1986: 369, cited in ibid.: 9). Well-being is to have good health, education, and social security thus enabling a person to take advantage of her or his autonomy. It is also to be free from want and suffering. Well-being enables people to function autonomously. These two conditions are privileged because in a society

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where there is economic inequality some are, by virtue of their general well-being, more able than others to exercise their autonomy and thus enjoy a decent life. Well-being, generally, though not always, is a priori to autonomy. If a person’s basic needs are not met her chances of exercising her autonomy are considerably reduced and consequently her opportunity to lead a decent life. But why should another person care? Rights are interest based. In a liberal society it is fundamental that individuals respect the rights of others for though we hold them individually, collectively we all have the same rights. Individuals then have rights against each other: they respect each other’s interest in a decent life and the two conditions necessary for its fulfilment. Therefore, we must respect these rights not only by not interfering with them (negative duty) but also by promoting them (positive duty). It follows that to promote autonomy and wellbeing it is necessary to provide the resources to achieve them and that to deny these same resources is to interfere with these rights (Fabre, 2000). It is necessary then that the state – in this case, the Canadian state – first ensures that all its citizens have the resources necessary for ‘minimal autonomy and well-being’ in order to lead a minimally decent life (Fabre, 2000: 23). Such resources would have greater priority than, for example, a tax credit to parents with children who play sports. Libertarians like Nozick (1974) claim that this kind of argument is a violation of self-ownership, of what Macpherson (1964) terms, possessive individualism. Any form of coercion including taxation for the purposes of the redistribution of wealth (money and goods) necessarily violates self-ownership. However this claim can be countered by arguing that self-ownership as a right cannot be realized if by exercising that right a person denies it to another. ‘Indeed, in order for everyone to be autonomous,’ Fabre writes, ‘the self-ownership rights of some have to be restricted. For if one exercises one’s self-ownership rights in an unbridled way, by refusing to give part of what one earns to the needy, one deprives them of the resources necessary for them to be autonomous’ (pp. 25– 6). It is necessary therefore that we care about the autonomy and well-being of others because not to do so undermines the very right of self-ownership and the ability of each person to be fully human. The state can and must ensure that the social rights that protect and promote autonomy and well-being are honoured. To do so it must entrench these rights in the constitution and, at the very least, they must include the right to a minimum income, housing, education, and health care (Fabre, 2000).

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Objections and Obstacles Objections There are three principal objections to guaranteed social rights: (1) that they infringe on personal and economic freedom; (2) that they are antidemocratic; and (3) that the state cannot be expected to fulfil rights for which it may not have the resources. The first objection – that social rights infringe on personal and economic freedom – I addressed in the concluding comments of the preceding section concerning autonomy and self-ownership. There are two issues associated with the second objection that social rights are antidemocratic. The first issue is centred on the liberal tendency to equate democracy solely with civil and political freedoms, those freedoms that evolved over time in support of the liberal state and the free market. Certainly, these freedoms now transcend the market to some extent; they have contributed to greater forms of equality for women and for the working classes, and we rightly place a high value on them (Macpherson, 1965: 57). Nevertheless, the substantial social and economic inequalities that result from the capitalist mode of production in liberal democracies arguably undermine the total fulfillment of even these freedoms and the complete realization of democracy itself. Democracies have a ributes in addition to civil and political freedoms. Those societies that claim to be democracies but are not liberal democracies can make legitimate claims to be called democratic if, for example, in their desire to be fully democratic they first place greater emphasis on social equality (ibid., pp. 3, 5). Indeed, in pursuing social equality they a empt to fulfil the fundamental ideal of democracy, something which liberal democracies fail to do. The second issue related to the second objection is one with which we in Canada are becoming increasingly familiar. It is that the inclusion of any justiciable rights in the constitution limits the power of the majority if those rights run counter to the majority’s wishes. In other words, every time a right is entrenched in the constitution it diminishes the power of popular, elected government. Social rights, in particular, are seen to infringe on the will of the majority since they would seem to limit the capacity of a government to make decisions and to spend – or not – in ways that it sees fit. One response to this issue is that in a democracy the majority cannot ‘have its preferences implemented in those cases where its preferences harm individuals’ interests in adequate minimum income, housing, education, and health care’ (Fabre,

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2000: 110). This is not an argument based simply on autonomy and well-being but is the test of any democracy that ensures that the rights of minorities are protected from a ack by the majority. Another response to the issue is that yes, entrenching social rights does or may constrain the democratic majority. Nevertheless, Fabre (2000) argues that the way in which social rights are entrenched does not necessarily preclude democratic decision-making. It is a question of how entrenchment is worded and how duties are assigned to ensure that these rights are fulfilled. Thus, democracy must be seen as a system of procedures that allows for the majority to have some say in how constitutional rights, including social rights, are exercised and respected. In this sense, the judiciary in responding to complaints to non-fulfilment of social rights might only be able to remind government of its duty but not instruct it as to how it must exercise it. With this concession, however, Fabre weakens her argument. If social rights are to be honoured, then it makes li le sense to entrench them in the constitution if governments may defer their fulfilment. Such an allowance reduces their importance and makes them merely an abstract ‘add on.’ The issue here is one of ideas and political struggle. Presumably the entrenchment of social rights in the constitution would reflect the democratic will of the majority by virtue of a national referendum.12 Once entrenched in the constitution they would signify a departure away from liberal democracy towards a more democratic state; that is, a state that would strive to achieve greater social equality. The third objection to guaranteed social rights, that the state should not be expected to enforce a right where it does not have the resources to do so, weakens when it is considered that the state is expected to and does enforce property rights even under difficult economic circumstances. The state consistently spends significant amounts on defence, police and security, and the legal and administrative systems and institutions that support these rights. It does so and we scarcely object, so connected are these rights to the functions of the liberal state in maintaining the conditions necessary for capitalism (Macpherson, 1977; Miliband, 1973). Indeed, the current Canadian constitution embodies the requisites of a liberal state. If we are to move away from its limitations and think of democracy in its fuller meaning, then social rights must be constitutionally entrenched so that we come similarly to expect social spending as an inherently legitimate function of the state. Thus, when circumstances dictate fiscal restraint we would expect the state to balance that restraint with the need to maintain social benefits as a right.

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Obstacles Besides these objections there are other obstacles associated with protecting social rights. One, related to globalization and its impact on national sovereignty, is that increasingly governments are reluctant to be seen to contravene property rights and are moving away from an ‘open constitutional culture.’13 Nation states are reverting to a form of protective democracy to facilitate international trade and investment agreements. Thus – and this is a second obstacle – nation states are evolving into local managers of global capitalism, placing the interests of the global market above national interests and ceding to neoliberal requirements to ‘deregulate and privatize the state sector’ (Panitch & Gindin, 2003).14 As a result not only is the state now averse to promoting welfare state measures (ibid.)15 but it fears to do so lest it be held liable under international agreements for subverting the right of investors to provide similar services on a for-profit basis.16 These are powerful obstacles, and they seem to minimize the possibility of entrenching social rights in the constitution. Still, there must be resistance to the forces of the neoliberal order,17 and so long as sovereign nation states continue to exist they must serve as one locus of popular organization and resistance. While Canada is subject to international trade and investment agreements, it is also subject to the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. This surely is an international agreement of legal weight, one which Canada is expected to honour, and Canada could signal its intention to do so through the entrenchment of social rights. In addition, just as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has altered Canada’s political and legal culture, so too would a charter of social rights change Canada’s social culture and Canadians’ expectations of the role of the state in providing for its citizens’ most basic needs. We are engaged in a struggle of ideas about the nature of freedom and democracy and the kind of social order that will best promote them. A social charter would be an important statement of resistance to the present antidemocratic forces for a neoliberal world order.18 Conclusion If liberal capitalism is to be transformed, entrenching social rights in the constitution is a necessary step. First, because they are human rights it is morally the correct thing to do. Second, entrenchment, I believe, necessarily raises the consciousness of people to the possibilities of a

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society beyond capitalism. Third, and finally, their entrenchment would advance the fuller meaning of democracy. J.S. Woodsworth’s legacy is his vision of a state in which the government would provide fully for the human welfare of its citizens. Through his mission work in Winnipeg he came to recognize that the problems experienced by individuals were simply manifestations of deeper structural and systemic issues endemic in a society based on a capitalist mode of production. His leadership of the CCF in 1933 at the time the party adopted the Regina Manifesto is a testament to his desire to witness a nation transformed into a full democracy characterized by freedom, equality, and social justice. It is to this vision that Canada must return and on which it must build its future. A charter of social rights entrenched in the constitution would be a key step in achieving this vision and in recognizing the enduring legacy of J.S. Woodsworth.

NOTES 1 Notable exceptions are Canada’s Old Age Security pension benefit and Family Allowance, both of which were universal income benefits and remained such until 1989, and the U.K.’s universal Child Benefit, introduced in 1979. 2 See Gary Teeple (in this volume). 3 Ibid. 4 The United States is not a signatory to the covenant covering social rights, apparently not wishing even to be obliged to work towards these rights. Only recently has it become a signatory to the covenant on political and civil rights due in part to its past and present history of racial discrimination and civil rights abuses (Teeple, 2004: 18). 5 For a discussion of these outcomes, see Chomsky (1996). 6 Gwen Brodsky (in this volume). 7 The conditional grant, first employed in 1913, is a constitutional strategy used by the federal government to circumvent issues of provincial jurisdiction; see Irving (1987). 8 Brodsky (in this volume) observes that one of the clearest cases in this regard – Gosselin v. AG Québec, [2002] – did not succeed. 9 Froc’s (2009) article on this ma er comprehensively analyses how the courts have understood poverty in relation to sections 7 and 15 of the Charter. I am not able in this chapter to do full justice to her article but her solutions in part lie in how the courts also understand the underlying principle of the rule of law in applying the Charter.

Social Rights Are Human Rights 133 10 Three notable cases have dealt with the issue of establishing rights through international law and through the values of the Charter. Perhaps the most significant is Baker v. Canada, [1999]. Mavis Baker was a Jamaican visitor who, because she had not applied for permanent residency in Canada, was to be deported. She appealed on humanitarian and compassionate grounds arguing that her Canadian-born children would be adversely affected. The Supreme Court of Canada allowed her appeal citing in part the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of a Child to which Canada is a signatory. In this case, Rowe (2008: 340) writes, the court ‘also confirmed a presumption that domestic laws, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), were in compliance with international law (Baker v. Canada, [1999]: para. 70).’ In Dunmore v. Ontario [A orney-General], [2001] the Supreme Court granted the appeal of Dunmore and other agricultural workers who, in 1994, had been granted the right to unionize under the provincial NDP government. In 1995 the new Conservative government repealed the NDP legislation thus denying the workers the right to unionize. Dunmore argued that the 1995 legislation violated sections 2(d) (freedom of association) and 15 (equality rights) of the Charter. In effect, the Supreme Court averred that the state has ‘positive obligations to protect vulnerable workers’ (ESCR-Net, Dunmore v. Ontario). Finally, in 2007 the Supreme Court granted in part the appeal of Health Services and Support Facilities who challenged the government of British Columbia’s Health and Social Services Delivery Improvement Act (2002) (Canada, 2007). The legislation voided certain provisions of the workers’ – mainly women – collective agreements. Health Services argued, and the court agreed, that the legislation impeded their rights under section 2(d) of the Charter. In its finding the court cited, in part, international law that includes collective bargaining in its definition of freedom of association. These cases have in gradual, incremental ways placed a positive obligation on the state to found and uphold rights under the Charter based in part on international law and have extrapolated collective, social rights from individual ones. 11 Teeple (in this volume). 12 I have in mind a process similar to that of the Charlo etown Accord, 1992. 13 David Schneiderman (in this volume). 14 Teeple (in this volume). 15 Ibid. 16 Schneiderman (in this volume). 17 Teeple (in this volume). 18 I am grateful to Professor Eric Tucker for his thoughts on this idea.

134 Hugh Shewell REFERENCES Abramovitz, M., & Blau, J. (1985). Social benefits as a right: A re-examination for the 1980s. Social Development Issues 8(3), 50– 61. Canada. Supreme Court of Canada. (2007). Health Services and Support – Facilities Subsector Bargaining Assn. v. British Columbia. 2 S.C.R. 391, [2007], SCC 27. Retrieved 18 May 2009 from h p://csc.lexum.umontreal.ca/ en/2007/2007scc27.pdf. Chomsky, N. (1996). Class warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. ESCR-Net. International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Dunmore v. Ontario (A orney-General), [2001], 3 S.C.R. 1016. Retrieved 11 May 2009 from h p://www.escr-net.org/caselaw/caselaw_show. htm?doc_id=401379. Esping-Andersen, G. (1982). A er the welfare state. Working Papers IX (May/ June), 36 – 41. Fabre, C. (2000). Social rights under the constitution: Government and the decent life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Finkel, A. (2006). Social policy and practice in Canada: A history. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Froc, K.A. (2009). Is the rule of law the golden rule? Accessing ‘justice’ for Canada’s poor. Canadian Bar Review 87(2), 459–513. Gorz, A. (1964). Strategy for labor. Boston: Beacon. Guest, D. (1997). The emergence of social security in Canada. 3rd ed. Vancouver: UBC Press. Ignatieff, M. (2000). The rights revolution. CBC Massey Lectures. Toronto: Anansi. Irving, A. (1987). Federal-provincial issues in social policy. In Shankar A. Yelaja (Ed.), Canadian social policy, rev. ed., 326 – 49. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Lightman, E.S. (1997). It’s not a walk in the park: Workfare in Ontario. In E. Shagge (Ed.), Workfare: Ideology for a new under-class, 85–107. Toronto: Garamond. Macpherson, C.B. (1964) [1962]. The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (1965). The real world of democracy. CBC Massey Lectures. Toronto: CBC Enterprises. — (1973). The maximization of democracy. In C.B. Macpherson, Democratic theory: Essays in retrieval, 3–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (1977). The life and times of liberal democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Social Rights Are Human Rights 135 — (1985). Problems of human rights in the late twentieth century. In C.B. Macpherson, The rise and fall of economic justice and other essays, 21–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, T.H. (1963). Citizenship and social class. In T.H. Marshall, Sociology at the crossroads and other essays, 67–127. London: Heinemann Education. — (1981). The right to welfare and a erthought. In T.H. Marshall, The right to welfare and other essays, 83–103. New York: Free Press. — (1981). Changing ideas about poverty. In T.H. Marshall, The right to welfare and other essays, 29– 49. New York: Free Press. Miliband, R. (1973). The state in capitalist society: The analysis of the Western system of power. London: Quartet Books. Moscovitch, A. (1991). Citizenship, social rights, and Canadian social welfare. Canadian Review of Social Policy 28 (Fall), 28– 43. Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state and utopia. Oxford: Blackwell. Panitch, L., & Gindin, S. (2003). Global capitalism and American empire. In L. Panitch & C. Leys (Eds.), Socialist register 2004: The new imperial challenge, 1– 42. London: Merlin Press. Pinker, R. (1981). Introduction. In T.H. Marshall, The right to welfare and other essays, 1–28. New York: Free Press. Raz, J. (1986). The morality of freedom. Oxford: Clarendon. Rowe, R. (2008). Baker revisited 2007. Journal of Black Studies 38(3), 338– 45. Saunders, D. (2005). Nasty, brutish – society’s net snaps. Globe and Mail, 2 Sept., A12. Shewell, H. (1998). Canada. In J. Dixon and D. Macarov (Eds.), Poverty: A persistent global reality, 45–73. London: Routledge. — (2001). Almost 12 people an hour leaving welfare: The marketization of welfare in Ontario and the decline of the public good. In J. Dixon and M. Hyde (Eds.), The marketization of social security, 167–86. Westport: Quorum. Snyder, L. (2003). Workfare. In A. Westhues (Ed.), Canadian social policy: Issues and perspectives, 3rd ed., 108–27. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Teeple, G. (2000). Dilemmas of social reform: Into the twenty-first century. 2nd ed. Toronto: Garamond. — (2004). The riddle of human rights. Toronto: Garamond. Woodsworth, J.S. (1922). Synopsis: Building democracy. Historica Minutes. Retrieved 11 May 2009 from h p://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:o1AY3 UzMc88J:www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do%3Fid%3D10201+Woodsworth, +J.S.+1922&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1.

6 Human Rights and Poverty: A Twenty-First Century Tribute to J.S. Woodsworth and Call for Human Rights1 gwen brodsky

The Canada for which J.S. Woodsworth and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) party struggled – a society in which everyone has an adequate standard of living, including access to adequate food, clothing and housing, health care, workers’ rights, and social programs are vigorous (MacInnis, 1953), is not the Canada of today. This is a moment in Canadian political history when government commitment to social programs is at a low ebb.2 It has become shockingly ordinary that people in Vancouver, and other major cities in Canada, have to line up at food banks, beg, steal, sleep in doorways and on church pews, and sell their bodies to support themselves and their children.3 This chapter is concerned with the disjuncture between Canada’s human rights obligations and poverty in Canada. Social programs are essential to realizing Canada’s human rights obligations. This essay maps out in general terms a practical and concrete proposal for legislation that would require greater governmental accountability for the establishment and maintenance of adequate social programs. If it is recognized that having adequate social programs is essential to the realization of human rights that inhere in all Canadians, it follows that there is a governmental obligation, not only to establish social programs, but to have effective accountability mechanisms to ensure stability, and consistency for social programs, and to guard against their erosion. It is not my intention in this chapter to take issue with the moral and religious foundations for the sense of social obligation that animated the social reformers of Woodsworth’s time. The underlying values and beliefs of human rights such as the right to an adequate standard of living, and associated governmental obligations, are respect for the inherent dignity of all human beings and a belief that

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there is a collective responsibility for the well-being of a society’s members.4 These values also lie at the heart of J.S. Woodsworth’s vision of a be er society (MacInnis, 1953). On the other hand, it is my intention to challenge the sufficiency of an institutional framework that does not give people any place to go besides the voting booth to hold governments to account for what must be understood to be human rights failures. Woodsworth would likely have shared this concern and interest in accountability had he lived long enough to see how social programs, like social assistance and unemployment insurance, having been hard-won, could then be stripped down and rolled back by governments indifferent to the needs of people. Social Programs and Human Rights The understanding that access to protections such as social assistance for persons in need is a right, and not a ma er of mere charity, has been evolving since the Great Depression of the 1930s. From then through the 1990s, the Canadian social safety net developed. Social assistance schemes, which exist in every province and territory, are emblematic of an understanding that there is a social obligation to ensure that everyone has an adequate standard of living that includes access to food, clothing, and shelter, as an incident of personhood and of social citizenship. The period a er the Second World War was also characterized by increased consciousness about human rights, within Canada, and globally. However, the consciousness within Canada that our social programs represent a fulfilment of governments’ human rights obligations is relatively recent. When social programs were being voluntarily developed and maintained by governments, there was not much imperative to focus on the obligatory nature of the programs. Historically, within liberal democracies such as Canada the emphasis in thinking about the rights-based obligations of governments to the citizenry has been on civil and political rights, such as formal equality before the law, fair trial processes, freedom of expression, and the right to vote in elections. Social and economic rights were assumed to be either irrelevant, not real rights, or merely synonymous with whatever social programs governments deigned to provide. However, this is changing. As social programs are eliminated and diminished, many Canadians believe that they are losing benefits and protections that they had regarded, perhaps unconsciously, as established rights that governments are not at liberty to abandon.

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As the impacts of more than a decade of cuts in social spending in Canada play out, it has become increasingly apparent that lack of access to adequate food and housing is integrally connected to violations of other human rights that everyone recognizes as real rights. Within Canadian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are involved in advocacy efforts to address discrimination and other human rights violations, there is a growing consensus that group-based inequality and poverty are profoundly connected, and must be addressed as such, in conceptions of rights and through activism. The high level of NGO participation in the 2006 United Nations review of Canada’s compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) is a significant indication of the consensus. More than twenty Canadian NGOs submi ed wri en briefs and many also participated in the oral hearings in Geneva in March 2006, ranging from the African Canadian Legal Clinic of Toronto to Justice for Girls of Vancouver. This is a marked increase in NGO participation from earlier periodic ICESCR reviews. It is notable that even NGOs such as Amnesty International (2006a) that in the past have concentrated strongly on traditional civil and political rights issues, now have poverty on their activist agendas. In conjunction with the ICESCR hearings in Geneva, Alain Roy, program director for Amnesty International Canada stated in the media: Economic, social and cultural rights must be fully incorporated into federal and provincial law says Amnesty International. They must be enforceable rights, not aspirational goals. To achieve this Canada must also support the adoption of an Optional Protocol that will allow individual complaints to the United Nations if these rights are violated. All human rights are linked, they cannot be divided ... The economic, social and cultural rights at the heart of every society must be strengthened if Canada is truly to be a country commi ed to supporting human rights. (Amnesty International, 2006b)

In recent years, NGOs in various parts of the world have undertaken initiatives before courts, tribunals, and U.N. commi ees advancing a vision of human rights that encompasses the idea that poverty is a human rights violation.5 Poverty and Human Rights The proposition that poverty is a human rights violation is multilayered (Brodsky, 2003; Brodsky & Day, 2002, 2006; Réaume, 2007; Norman, 2007).6

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In the lived experience of people who are poor, civil and political rights can be meaningless. Poor people have much less access to justice, and they are criminalized because of their poverty. They are less able to defend themselves against abuse, and less able to participate in or to influence political decision-making.7 For women, poverty and lack of access to social assistance and related services exacerbates every form of inequality that is associated with their subordinate social status. In practice, governments cannot effectively implement one set of rights without implementing the other. Without protections from the deprivations associated with poverty people do not have meaningful rights to life, liberty, and security of the person. Poverty is also an equality rights issue. Social programs have been an egalitarian force in society. Cuts to social programs exacerbate the inequality of vulnerable and marginalized groups. People who are reliant on state assistance to meet their basic needs are an unpopular group, subject to negative stereotyping, and they lack political power. People living in poverty are also predominantly comprised of individuals who are members of groups that are vulnerable to discrimination and marginalization in the political process: women, Aboriginal people, people of colour, and people with disabilities. Also, for each of these groups, lack of economic security has particular effects that magnify their inferior social status. Cost-cu ing agendas that deprive people of access to food, clothing, and shelter, and thereby exacerbate pre-existing group disadvantage and vulnerability to stereotyping and prejudice, run afoul of the norm of substantive equality. The insight that the enjoyment of social and economic rights is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of civil and political rights is not new in the arena of international human rights. From the outset, the interdependence and indivisibility of all human rights has been a foundational principle of international human rights. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948 by the member states of the United Nations Organization, recognizes the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living. Subsequently, in 1968, the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights was reaffirmed in the Proclamation of Tehran which recognizes the impossibility of protecting civil and political rights without realizing social and economic rights. Similarly, the 1993 Vienna Declaration (para. 5) states: ‘All human rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equitable manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional particularities ... must

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be borne in mind, it is the duty of the States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote, and protect all human rights as fundamental.’ The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCRC) and the ICESCR, adopted by Canada in 1976, both explicitly draw on the UDHR, and recognize that civil and political freedom and freedom from fear and want can only be enjoyed if conditions are created whereby everyone can enjoy civil and political rights as well as economic and social rights. Article 11 of the ICESCR obligates Canada to progressively realize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living including adequate food, clothing, and housing, using the maximum of available resources. Further, any deliberately retrogressive measures are subject to a requirement of ‘careful consideration’ and must be ‘fully justified by reference to the totality of the rights provided for in the Covenant and in the context of the full use of the maximum available resources’ (CESCR, 2003: 14). The equality rights of women, Aboriginal people, people of colour, and people with disabilities are also reflected in and reinforced by international human rights treaties. In the most recent human rights treaties adopted by Canada, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1982), the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (1969), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990), and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2007), there is no distinction made between civil and political rights issues and social and economic rights issues. Recognition of the importance of social and economic protections in the human rights schema can be found in the constitutional jurisprudence of various countries. In Grootboom,8 a South African constitutional case recognizing the human right of indigent people to housing, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, put it this way: ‘There can be no doubt that human dignity, freedom, and equality, the foundational values of our society, are denied those who have no food, clothing or shelter. Affording socio-economic rights to all people enables them to enjoy the other rights enshrined in ... [the Constitution]. The realization of these rights is also key to the advancement of race and gender equality and the evolution of a society in which men and women are equally able to achieve their full potential’ (Government of the Republic of South Africa v. Grootboom, 2001: para. 23). These ideas and observations about the linkages between poverty, race, and sex – and the necessity

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for an integrated approach to rights – are also applicable in the Canadian context.9 The values of respect for human dignity and integrity underlie all human rights guarantees. Giving effect to those values now means that governments in Canada must be understood to have an obligation to respond to the contemporary reality of widespread homelessness and the use of food banks. Canada’s Legal Human Rights Obligations In the Canadian legal system the primary human rights provisions that are relevant to inadequacies in social programs are: sections 7 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and section 36 of the Constitution Act (1982). Section 7 provides that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of the person, and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. The s. 7 right to security of the person has been interpreted by courts as applying to a person’s physical and psychological integrity. Section 15 is the equality guarantee.10 The courts have held that other Charter rights are meant to be read against the backdrop of the right to equality. At one time, in Canadian jurisprudence, particularly under the pre-Charter Canadian Bill of Rights,11 the right to equality was thought of as a purely formal right consisting of an entitlement to be treated the same by government without regard to presumptively irrelevant characteristics such as sex and race. Although the transition from formal equality thinking to a truly substantive conception of equality is uneven and incomplete, the dominance of formal equality has been eroded by the insight that inequality has group-based dimensions that are not always effectively addressed or even perceived under a policy of such ‘blindness.’ The courts have held that a purpose of section 15 is to ameliorate the inequality of disadvantaged groups in the society. There is also an evolving understanding that equality rights are necessarily resistant to characterization as either civil and political or social and economic, but rather are a hybrid, and that equality rights place positive obligations on governments to act to address conditions of material deprivation and inequality (Brodsky & Day, 2002). Section 36 of the Constitution Act, 1982 commits federal, provincial, and territorial governments in Canada to providing essential public services of reasonable quality to all Canadians.12 Although jurisprudence

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on section 36 is scant, the legislative record indicates that section 36 is intended to constitutionalize the government commitment to adequate social programs (Nader, 1996; Hogg, 2006).13 Inadequacies in social programs may also violate statutory human rights protections, which exist in every province, territory, and at the federal level. For example, the 2002 cuts to social assistance made by the British Columbia Gordon Campbell Liberals have had particularly harsh effects on single mothers. It is arguable that the social assistance regime violates the B.C. Human Rights Code prohibitions against discrimination based on the grounds of sex and family status (Brodsky et al., 2005). Since the coming into force of the Charter the volume of anti-poverty litigation has not been great, and the jurisprudence is underdeveloped (Brodsky, 2007). However, there have been some important victories, such as the striking down of the spouse-in-the house rule under welfare legislation, which has disproportionately negative effects on poor single mothers.14 Community-based advocates have also made effective use of human rights language and legal analysis in the context of public political protests about issues such as homelessness. For example, during a major protest about homelessness in Vancouver during the fall of 2002, the Woodward’s squa ers wrote the text of Article 11 of the ICESCR on the Vancouver Woodward’s building, as graffiti. In turn, the squa ers’ use of human rights language in graffiti and public statements was also picked up by the media.15 This was an important aspect of their successful protest against the provincial government’s decision to sell a building that had long been promised for social housing. In 2002, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the first anti-poverty case under the Charter to reach the highest court, Gosselin v. Quebec (A orney General). The issue in Gosselin was the constitutionality of a provision under Quebec’s welfare regime, which provided a reduced rate of assistance for adults under thirty years of age. The government contended that the reduced rate was intended to induce people to enter the workforce and to participate in employability schemes. Louise Gosselin, in a class action, claimed that Quebec’s scheme violated sections 15 and 7 of the Charter, and section 45 of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.16 Although a majority of the judges rejected the claim, the Court was very divided.17 Arbour J. wrote a particularly powerful dissent holding that cu ing the social assistance rate for young adults to $170 a month, which was well below

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subsistence level established by the government, constituted a violation of their constitutional right to security of the person and perhaps their right to life as well.18 Justice Arbour explained: ‘a minimum level of welfare is so closely connected to issues relating to one’s basic health (or security of the person), and potentially even to one’s survival (or life interest), that it appears inevitable that a positive right to life, liberty and security of the person must provide for it ’ (Gosselin v. Quebec (A orney General), 2002: para. 356). The majority of the Court chose not to decide in Gosselin whether the s. 7 right to security of the person could obligate a government to provide social assistance. Rather, the majority expressly le the question open.19 In the wake of Gosselin, s. 7 Charter jurisprudence continues to develop. A positive example of continuing developments in the jurisprudence is the 2008 case of Victoria (City) v. Adams.20 In Adams, Justice Carol Ross of the British Columbia Supreme Court recognized that creating shelter to protect oneself from the elements is critical to an individual’s dignity and independence, and established constitutional limits on governments’ ability to stop people from trying to shelter themselves, based on s. 7 rights to liberty and security of the person. Adams is a small but important step towards the advancement of social and economic rights for women and men. Adams was argued within a negative rights paradigm. The case was not about governments’ positive obligations to provide. It was about the freedom not to be prevented from making a shelter in a park. In Canada, there is no practical reason why someone who is homeless should be confronted with the hard choice between breaching a bylaw to take shelter in a park and facing a risk of becoming sick or dying because of lack of access to even a tarp or cardboard box. However, Adams contains important language about the right to housing as reflected in international law, and the role of international law as an aid to defining the scope and meaning of Charter rights. Justice Ross J. referred to a wide variety of international covenants and declarations that ‘establish the different dimensions of the right to adequate housing and enshrine it as a fundamental principle of international law.’21 Justice Ross also quoted the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada in Gosselin v. Quebec (A orney General), saying: ‘One day s. 7 may be interpreted to include positive obligations.’22 There are counter-examples. Charter jurisprudence concerning positive state obligations is in a state of flux, and as mentioned, is underdeveloped. At a time like this, precisely when the jurisprudence is still

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taking shape, it is particularly crucial that advocates maintain their clarity and convictions about what the rights should mean, because there is a need for strong and effective advocacy. The city was unsuccessful in its a empt to overturn Adams in the British Columbia Court of Appeal (Victoria (City) v. Adams, 2009).23 The Poverty and Human Rights Centre, an intervenor in the appeal, argues that section 7 protects the right to adequate housing. The Court acknowledged the argument, and determined that resolution of the appeal did not require that it be addressed. However, doubtless in time, the Supreme Court of Canada will be called on to revisit the question of whether it is constitutionally permissible for government to turn a blind eye to conditions that result in denials of constitutionally protected rights to equality, life, liberty, and security of the person. The Intersection between the Charter and International Human Rights Treaties There is a strong basis in international law, and in well-established principles of constitutional interpretation, to support the conclusion that the Charter and section 36 of the Constitution encompass positive obligations on governments to maintain social programs at levels adequate to ensure that everyone has access to an adequate standard of living, including food, clothing, and housing, and to provide mechanisms for the domestic enforcement of rights under international treaties that Canada has ratified. It is well established that international human rights treaties were an important source of inspiration for the Charter. The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized international human rights standards as a relevant and persuasive source for the interpretation of the Charter, because they reflect ‘the values and principles that underlie the Charter itself’ (R. v. Keegstra, 1990, para. 66). The Court has also treated other sources of international human rights law including U.N. resolutions, government positions in support of resolutions, customary norms, and decisions of international tribunals as relevant and persuasive authorities for the interpretation of the Charter.24 Where Canada has ratified a treaty, it is an established interpretive principle that the Charter should generally be presumed to provide protection at least as great as that afforded by similar provisions in international human rights documents that Canada has ratified.25 Questions about the interaction between the ICESCR and the Charter have frequently arisen before the U.N. commi ee to which Canada is

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required to report periodically, under the ICESCR (CESCR Commi ee). Before the CESCR Commi ee, Canada has repeatedly claimed that the Charter guarantees that Canadians will not be deprived of the basic necessities of life. The jurisprudence of the CESCR Commi ee, as well as submissions that have been made to it by official representatives of the government of Canada, are persuasive authority for an interpretation of the Charter that encompasses the right to an adequate standard of living.26 The Disjuncture between Canada’s Human Rights Obligations and Poverty in Canada Considering the content of the human rights treaties that Canada has signed, Canada’s official statements regarding its human rights obligations, combined with the intersection between the human rights treaties and the Charter, there should be no doubt in the minds of government officials that governments have a positive obligation to ensure that everyone in Canada has an adequate standard of living, and that even the poorest people have adequate food, clothing, and housing. Unfortunately, the conduct of governments indicates they have considerable doubt. Not only do governments have doubt, by savaging legislative schemes that they themselves have claimed are the means by which human rights obligations are fulfilled, governments have blatantly repudiated their human rights obligations. The story of the repeal of the Canada Assistance Plan Act (CAP) is a central and glaring example of the problem. As a signatory to the ICESCR, Canada is required to report to the CESCR, on a periodic basis, roughly at four-year intervals. In its reports, which are prepared jointly by the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, Canada reports on its progress in complying with the requirements of the ICESCR. In 1982 and again in 1992, Canada filed reports under the ICESCR claiming that the CAP was a means of implementing the right to an adequate standard of living and that it established minimum standards for social programs (Canada, 1982: 13; Canada, 1992: 8). However, in 1995 the federal government repealed the CAP. The significance of the about-turn that the repeal of the CAP represents cannot be overstated. While the CAP standards should not be falsely idealized because in practice access to welfare has never been adequate in Canada, the CAP provided more leverage for poor people than anything that exists in legislation at this time. As a condition of entering into a CAP agreement, the federal government and provincial governments

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jointly agreed to provide assistance to persons in need, without regard to the reason for the need, in an amount adequate to meet basic requirements. Further, the adequacy of welfare was a justiciable issue (Finlay v. Canada, 1993). Thus, the CAP established an enforceable right to social assistance in an amount adequate to meet basic needs.27 Through the mechanism of targeted intergovernmental cost sharing, the CAP also created a powerful economic incentive for provinces to fund civil legal aid services and other related social services such as women’s transition houses. Although the CAP was not a conventional human rights instrument, in effect, the CAP was an important mechanism through which governments protected the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living. The CAP also promoted women’s equality by mandating the provision of benefits and protections that are essential to women’s enjoyment of their right to equality. The CAP was a made-in-Canada human rights accountability mechanism. More than a decade of experience shows that the results of the repeal of CAP have been devastating for social programs, especially social assistance and civil legal aid, programs that are relied on exclusively by poor people (Day & Brodsky, 2006). Governments have come under harsh criticism for failing to take steps to ameliorate poverty, and for cuts to social programs, not only by the CESCR but also by the U.N. commi ees that oversee compliance with the ICCPR, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Negative impacts of cuts to social programs on women and Aboriginal people have been particularly noted. Most recently, on 7 November 2008, the United Nations Commi ee that oversees Canada’s compliance with the CEDAW called on Canada to establish minimum standards for the provision of funding to social assistance programs. In the area of housing, the CEDAW Commi ee expressed its regret that Canada lacks a national housing strategy and concern over the severe housing shortage in the country and urged Canada to step up its efforts to provide affordable and adequate housing options, including in Aboriginal communities, with priority being given to low-income women. However, so far, criticism from international treaty bodies has produced no discernible response from governments (Day, 2007).28 We have in Canada what might be called an ‘accountability gap.’ Governments have signed international treaties, constitutionalized human rights guarantees, and very shortly therea er scrapped the social programs along with the federal-provincial machinery that was an accountability mechanism for realizing human rights, namely, the CAP,

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the associated cost-sharing agreements, and provincial legislation that was mandated by the CAP-funded agreements. In the lifetime of the Charter, governments have also routinely instructed the courts that social and economic rights are not enforceable. In turn, this has had an undermining effect on judges’ perceptions of their mandate. Louise Arbour, former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, speaking in Canada in her new role as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed her concern about the ‘timidity’ of the Canadian judiciary in tackling claims emerging from the right to be free from want (Arbour, 2005). The CESCR Commi ee, in its May 2006 Concluding Observations,29 issued at the conclusion of the fourth and fi h periodic review of Canada’s compliance with the ICESCR, identified a number of a crucial issues. The Commi ee expressed particular concern about the lack of legal redress available to individuals when governments fail to implement the Covenant (CESCR, 2006: para. 11). The Commi ee also reiterated a concern, which had been previously expressed in 1998, that federal transfers for social assistance and social services to provinces and territories do not include standards in relation to Covenant rights, including rights to social security. The CESCR Commi ee recommended that Canada make Covenant rights enforceable within provinces and territories through legislation or policy measures and establish independent and appropriate monitoring and adjudication mechanisms (ibid.: para. 35). The CESCR Commi ee also recommended that Canada ‘take immediate steps, including legislative measures, to create and ensure effective domestic remedies for all [ICESCR] Covenant rights in all relevant jurisdictions’ (ibid.: para. 40). Viewed as a whole, the 2006 Concluding Observations of the CESCR underscore the point that it is time for governments in Canada to take seriously their obligations to provide accountability mechanisms for the enforcement of rights to social programs, in other words, to fill the human rights accountability gap. Conclusion: The Canada Social Transfer Turning to the question of what specific measures can be taken to fill the human rights accountability gap, there are various things that can and should be done, including ratifying the new ICESCR Optional Protocol by Canada which, if it is ratified by a sufficient number of countries, will permit individual complaints to the CESCR for

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Covenant violations.30 Reinstatement of the Court Challenges Program is also crucial because without it access to the courts will be illusory, even to resist a acks on public programs by corporate and other elite interests. Governments should also desist from trying to convince courts that the Charter is only a negative rights instrument (Brodsky, 2007). However, I want to focus on one very practical, timely, potentially effective initiative, that of reintroducing minimum standards for social programs, through the Canada Social Transfer (CST), currently, the primary vehicle for federal-provincial transfers. When the CAP was repealed in 1995, the federal government created the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST), a no-standards-a ached block transfer to the provinces. Subsequently, dollars for health were separated out, and standards, for health have been addressed through a new Health Accord.31 The precedent of the Health Accord has created a potential opening to do something similar for the other non-health social programs that are supposed to be funded through the CST. Through the CST, Canada could have much needed standards of adequacy and targeted dollars for programs such as social assistance, post-secondary education, and legal aid designed to bring Canada into compliance with its human rights obligations under the Constitution and under international human rights law. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to address arguments about provincial jurisdiction and the position of Quebec. Suffice to say that legal arguments against the use of the federal spending power to create pan-Canadian standards are very weak, and that the concerns of Quebec are be er addressed by making special arrangements with Quebec, than by balkanizing the rest of Canada.32 Done properly, reintroducing and providing improved standards through the CST could serve several important goals. First, it would make the CST what it should be, and what Canada officially claimed the CAP to have been, a mechanism for fulfilling Canada’s human rights obligations. Second, reintroducing the concept of adequacy would require governments to revisit cuts that they have made to social programs. Third, incorporating standards into the CST could be a way for governments to send a potentially powerful signal to courts and tribunals that Canada does not intend poor people to be constitutional castaways.33 The CST should also be structured to commit the federal government to providing adequate and ongoing funding, thereby addressing valid provincial government concerns about the unreliability of the federal government as a cost-sharing partner.

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Although a conservative Harper-style federal government regime would be very unlikely to warm to a role for the federal government as initiator of standards for social programs, there are some powerful moral levers that may appeal to others. The increased provincial innovation, which was the justification offered for the federal government withdrawal from standard-se ing in 1995 at the time of repeal of the CAP, has not materialized. Instead, programs have been cut, eligibility requirements tightened, and human rights treaty obligations have been flouted by the provinces.34 Going back to the 1998 ICESCR review, the federal government is on record with the CESCR as stating that if any provincial government ignored Canada’s human rights treaty obligations, ‘national political-legal machinery would be brought to bear.’35 In addition, also on the occasion of the 1998 review, Canada offered assurances to the CESCR that the Social Union Framework Agreement (SUFA) would be a vehicle that would ensure respect for Canada’s international commitments. However, to date the SUFA has not had this result.36 Moreover, successive federal government regimes have stood idly by, watching and even offering encouragement while provinces have derogated from human rights obligations that would have been legally enforceable under the CAP. Although intergovernmental collaboration to create new national social programs and to produce reliable standards for existing social programs in Canada is both desirable and theoretically possible, there has been no such development. It is time for the federal government to take the initiative. I am not suggesting that legislated CST standards should serve as a substitute for the Constitution or for a usable Optional Protocol to the ICESCR, but rather that there is a need for such standards to operationalize the human rights norms reflected in those instruments. Various accountability mechanisms are needed. As a fundamental guarantee of human rights, and statement of intergovernmental powers and obligations, the Constitution is one kind of human rights accountability mechanism. Legislated standards, tailored to conform to human rights norms, and enforceable by individual citizens, are another kind of human rights accountability mechanism, and they are a necessary companion to the Constitution. Some may be interested in securing an explicit amendment to the Constitution, to expressly articulate social rights to such things as a minimum income, housing, education, and health care, sometimes referred to as a social charter. Significant efforts to secure a social charter were made in the early 1990s (Bakan & Schneiderman, 1992). Se ing aside

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the question of whether embarking on a renewed process of constitutional reform at this time is strategic, these are not either/or proposals. Existing constitutional language is clearly susceptible to interpretations that encompass social and economic rights (Brodsky & Day, 2002). The virtue of more concrete constitutional language is that it might reduce the fact and influence of judicial uncertainty about whether such rights are real constitutional rights. However, there is no constitutional language that can eliminate the need for particularized governmentpromulgated standards for social programs, whether achieved through intergovernmental agreement or through federal legislation. Even if social charter – type amendments were made to the Constitution, the task of pu ing meat on the bones of explicit social rights, such as a right to housing, would remain. Inevitably, constitutional language is too general and abstract to substitute for the particularizing and operationalizing work that governments must do. There is a need for government to establish and maintain what I refer to as interstitial institutional standards and mechanisms, that is, standards and mechanisms that go back and forth through the membranes that separate governments from each other and from courts. The task of fleshing out detailed standards and accountability mechanisms requires the involvement of governments because this is not something that can or will be done by courts alone. Courts are in a position to provide guidance concerning the interpretation of constitutional principles. They are also needed to enforce legislation. However, governments, legislation, and intergovernmental agreements are necessary and central to particularizing and operationalizing social rights. A focus on the legislative framework for intergovernmental transfer agreements is essential given the complex nature of fiscal federalism in Canada, and the reality that such agreements have, in fact, become central to how governmental responsibilities to Canadians for social spending are shaped, understood, and discharged. The CST is an important vehicle for the transfer of funds, and it should not be overlooked. Moreover, the CST is an obvious legislative vehicle through which to establish interstitial standards and mechanisms explicitly grounded in human rights norms: to specifically designate funds for social assistance and post-secondary education and legal aid, to specify levels of adequacy, and to establish a complaint mechanism for non-compliance.37 In Securing the Social Union (2007) Shelagh Day and I recommend the establishment of a Social Programs Act, in which the authority and responsibility of the federal government with respect to the Canada

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Social Transfer is set out, along with the conditions that are a ached to the CST, and the procedures and mechanisms for holding federal, provincial, and territorial governments accountable for expenditures and adherence to standards. Securing the Social Union recommends that the Social Programs Act should: • Articulate the purposes of the Canada Social Transfer, grounding those purposes in Canada’s human rights obligations • Designate the programs and services on which transferred funds are to be spent by provinces and territories, specifically designating funds for social assistance, and related essential services, including civil legal aid • Contain standards for key programs • Establish stable funding formulas for the transfer • Create a monitoring and accountability mechanism that works for all levels of government and for Canada’s women and men • Recognize and define a separate and parallel arrangement with Quebec.38 There are others who support the view that government accountability for social program spending must be improved. Barbara Cameron has put forward a model for enhanced accountability in ‘Accountability Regimes for the Federal Social Transfer,’ a paper presented at the 2008 Annual Meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association, held in Vancouver, British Columbia. Many of the elements of the proposed Social Programs Act are reflected in the Child Care Act (Bill 303) which was introduced in the House of Commons as a private member’s bill by Denise Lavoie of the New Democratic Party in 2006. Bill 303 passed two readings in Parliament during 2006, and was supported by the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals. But moving forward requires commitment to improving the conditions of the poorest women and men, a federal decision to increase the dollars in the CST, some genuine federal – provincial/territorial cooperation, and a willingness to deal maturely with a special arrangement for Quebec. In this political climate of blatant government indifference to extreme disparities in wealth and income, heirs to the progressive vision that animated J.S. Woodsworth have a big responsibility. Programmatic reform, that is, striving to obtain decent social programs, as Woodsworth did, is one part of the responsibility. Another important task is to strive for the establishment of effective accountability mechanisms, in hopes

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of providing some stability, consistency, and buffer against the erosion of social programs, for periods, such as this, when governments so clearly need to be recalled to their obligations to people.

NOTES 1 This essay has evolved over a period of time. A version of it was presented at the J.S. Woodsworth Conference in September 2005. Some parts of it were wri en earlier for a May 2002 consultation of the Poverty and Human Rights Project, now the Poverty and Human Rights Centre. My proposal with regard to the Canada Social Transfer, which is briefly outlined at the end of this chapter, is fully developed in Day and Brodsky (2007). 2 As David Schneiderman points out (in this volume), Woodsworth’s vision elevates the principle of human rights above property rights. Schneiderman raises the very valid concern that Canada is moving in the direction of United States – style constitutionalism that privileges corporate interests, property rights, and deregulated markets over human needs and human rights, and away from the world that Woodsworth envisioned. The North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), to the extent that it privileges corporate interests and private property over human needs, as Schneiderman explains, is an example of this shi . 3 It is for those people, and because of my belief that people should have adequate food, clothing, and housing – not as a ma er of charity – but as an incident of personhood and social citizenship that I work with the Poverty and Human Rights Centre and various NGOs to promote compliance with the human rights commitments that Canada has made. The tag line of the Poverty and Human Rights Centre is ‘Poverty is a human rights violation.’ I am very aware that I am a beneficiary of the social safety net for which J.S. Woodsworth fought. Although I was not born into a wealthy family, I have received an excellent education, enjoyed access to health care, employment, clothing, housing. I have never had to seriously worry that I, or my parents, partner, close friends, grandparents, nieces, or nephews would be homeless or hungry. I have never had to steal or beg or prostitute myself to meet my basic needs or the needs of my loved ones. I have had the opportunity to pursue a multifaceted career as a lawyer, teacher, writer, and activist. But I am not under any illusion that I did it myself. I have received a lot of help, not just from other individuals, but from public institutions that serve as an equality-promoting social safety net. My goal is to see that those opportunities are made available

Human Rights and Poverty 153 to future generations. The following studies provide some indication of the problem: National Council of Welfare, 2006: 87; Pulkingham, 2006; Dieticians of Canada, 2005; Statistics Canada, 2005. 4 This is clear from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which is the foundational document for all international human rights instruments. The preamble begins: ‘Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people’ (emphasis added). 5 Briefs submi ed by the NGOs can be accessed on the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights website. Retrieved 13 June 2007 from h p://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/cescrs36.htm. 6 I have advanced an analysis of poverty as a human rights violation, elsewhere. Shelagh Day and I have summed up our position as: social and economic rights are civil and political rights (Brodsky & Day, 2002, 2006; Brodsky, 2003). Réaume (2007) argues that the value of human dignity requires the provision of certain dignity-constituting benefits. Ken Norman (2007) submits that the idea of substantive equality is best understood as being informed by an egalitarian theory of justice. 7 This proposition finds support by Hugh Shewell who argues (in this volume) that Canada’s failure to adhere to and promote social rights, embedded in international human rights instruments, ‘impedes the full realization of civil and political rights since, without full and adequate social security, it is far more difficult for impoverished citizens to exercise these rights. In effect, democracy is diminished.’ 8 Government of the Republic of South Africa v. Grootboom, [2001] (1) South African Law Reports 46 (CC). 9 Campaign 2000 (2006) notes that child poverty rates are disproportionately high among vulnerable social groups such as children in female loneparent families, recent immigrant families, and off-reserve Aboriginal children. 10 Section 15(1) states: ‘Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability’ (Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982).

154 Gwen Brodsky 11 Canadian Bill of Rights, 1960, c. 44. 12 Section 36 of the Constitution Act, 1982 states: ‘(1) Without altering the legislative authority of Parliament or of the provincial legislatures, or the rights of any of them with respect to the exercise of their legislative authority, Parliament and the legislatures, together with the government of Canada and the provincial governments, are commi ed to (a) promoting equal opportunities for the well-being of Canadians; (b) furthering economic development to reduce disparity in opportunities; and (c) providing essential public services of reasonable quality to all Canadians. (2) Parliament and the government of Canada are commi ed to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation’ (Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982, c. 11). 13 The legislative record is carefully analysed by Aymen Nader (1996). Nader views s. 36 as justiciable, as does Peter Hogg (2006). In general Canadian courts have taken an expansive view of what is justiciable, as indicated by these cases: re Amendment of the Constitution of Canada (1981), re Objection by Quebec to a Resolution to Amend the Constitution, [1982]; and Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Inc. v. Manitoba Hydro-Electric Board, [1992]. 14 Falkiner v. Ontario (Ministry of Community & Social Services) (2002). 15 The squa ers at Woodward’s received extensive press coverage. See, e.g.: Brodsky & Day, 2000; ‘Squa ers perform a public service,’ Vancouver Sun, 16 Nov., A25; ‘“We feel safe in that place,” squa er tells court,’ The Province, 21 Nov., A11; ‘Squa er’s rights: Homeless youth part of Vancouver squat for affordable housing,’ Sudbury Star, 28 Nov., n.p. 16 Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, R.S.Q., 1977 (Quebec Charter), section 45 provides that: ‘every person in need has a right, for himself and his family, to measures provided for by law, susceptible of ensuring such person an acceptable standard of living.’ 17 In an opinion wri en by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, five of the judges found no violation of section 15. In the majority, in addition to the Chief Justice were Justices Charles Gonthier, Frank Iacobucci, John C. Major, and Ian Binnie. In dissent, with respect to section 15 were Justices Michel Bastarache, Louise Arbour, Louis LeBel, and Claire L’HeureuxDubé. The main dissenting opinion on section 15, with which Arbour, LeBel, and L’Heureux-Dubé JJ. expressed their agreement, was authored by Bastarache J. LeBel and L’Heureux-Dubé JJ. also wrote separate section 15 opinions. A majority of the Court found no section 7 violation. The main section 7 opinion with which Iacobucci, Gonthier, Major, and Binnie JJ.

Human Rights and Poverty 155 agreed was wri en by McLachlin C.J. Bastarache and LeBel JJ. each wrote separate concurring opinions elaborating on their views with respect to the interpretive scope of section 7. Bastarache J.’s approach was a restrictive one, while LeBel J.’s was more generous. Arbour and L’Heureux Dubé JJ. would have found the regulation to be in violation of section 7 of the Charter. Arbour J. wrote the main dissenting opinion on section 7. L’HeureuxDubé J. expressed her agreement with Arbour J.’s reasoning and wrote supplementary reasons. With respect to section 45 of the Quebec Charter, there was a six-to-three split in the Court. A majority of the Court found no violation. The main opinion was wri en by McLachlin C.J. for herself, Gonthier, Major, Iacobucci, and Binnie JJ. LeBel J. wrote a concurring opinion. In dissent, were Bastarache and Arbour JJ. for whom Bastarache J. wrote one opinion. L’Heureux Dubé J. who was also in dissent, wrote a separate opinion, expressly endorsing the opinion of Robert J.A. in the Court of Appeal, who had relied extensively on international human rights law as an aid to the interpretation of the Quebec Charter. 18 Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé concurred with Arbour J. 19 Citing the ‘living tree’ doctrine of Charter interpretation, the majority endorsed the view that ‘it would be a mistake to regard section 7 as frozen, or its content as having been exhaustively defined in previous cases,’ and it stated that ‘one day section 7 may be interpreted to include positive obligations’ (Gosselin, 2002, supra n16 at para. 82–3). McLachlin C.J. emphasized that, as with section 15, the dispute on the Court was not based on theoretical approach but rather on evidence. The Chief Justice said: ‘The question therefore is not whether section 7 has ever been – or will ever be – recognized as creating positive rights. Rather, the question is whether the present circumstances warrant a novel application of section 7 as the basis for a positive state obligation to guarantee adequate living standards (Gosselin, 2002, para. 82). Similarly, LeBel J. although he was among the seven judges who did not find that a section 7 violation had been made out in this case, refused to shut the door on future section 7 claims (Gosselin, 2002, at para. 414). In the final tally, eight out of the nine judges indicated receptiveness to future section 7 claims. 20 2008 BCSC 1363 (‘Adams’). 21 Ibid., Adams, para 90. 22 See supra n19. 23 Victoria (City) v. Adams BCCA (2009) 563. 24 See, e.g., Reference Re: Public Service Employee Relations Act (Alta.), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 313, at 348, per Dickson CJ, cited with approval in United States v. Burns, [2001] 1 S.C.R. 283, at para. 80. To a similar effect, In Baker v. Canada

156 Gwen Brodsky (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), [1999] 2 S.C.R. 817 (Baker) at para. 70, the Supreme Court of Canada declared that international law is ‘a critical influence on the interpretation of the scope of the rights included in the Charter.’ 25 Slaight Communications Inc. v. Davidson, [1989] 1 S.C.R. 1038. In Baker, ibid., the Court reaffirmed that interpretive presumption. 26 Interestingly, in Adams, supra n22, Ross J referred extensively to Canada’s statements internationally about its human rights obligations. 27 The standards and processes recommended in Securing the Social Union are significantly more developed than the CAP standards (Day & Brodsky, 2007). 28 Day documents the persistent lack of response and even lack of processes that could permit the development of a meaningful response, specifically with regard to the recommendations of the U.N. commi ee that presides over the CEDAW. 29 U.N. Commi ee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), 2006: 211–12. 30 The ICESCR Optional Protocol was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 20 December 2008 (GAres.A/RES/63/117). It will not come into force until it is ratified by ten countries. Canada has not ratified the Optional Protocol. 31 First Ministers’ Accord on Health Care Renewal, 2003. 32 The issue of federalism is more fully addressed in Securing the Social Union (Day & Brodsky, 2007), and in ‘Harper’s ‘Open Federalism’ and the Human Rights of Canadians’ (Day & Brodsky, forthcoming). 33 Schneiderman (2007) reflecting on the Gosselin case and the lack of positive leadership shown by the courts on poverty issues, has also argued that it is time for governments to take some leadership on social and economic rights ma ers. 34 Shewell (in this volume) puts it this way: ‘What has changed since the rise of neoliberal politics has been a continued elimination and/or targeting of benefits.’ 35 Tapes from the 1998 CESCR hearings, on file with the author. 36 See, the Poverty and Human Rights Project, 2002. 37 These proposals are more fully developed in Securing the Social Union (Day & Brodsky, 2007). 38 Because the standards and principles set out here reflect human rights norms accepted historically by governments of Quebec, they may be acceptable to Quebec. However, Quebec will probably wish to devise its own implementation, monitoring, and accountability systems, as it has created

Human Rights and Poverty 157 its own health council. Parallel but different delivery and accountability mechanisms for Quebec and the rest of Canada are appropriate.

CASES Baker v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), [1999] 2 S.C.R. 817 Falkiner v. Ontario (Ministry of Community & Social Services) (2002), 59 O.R. (3d) 481 (C.A.) Finlay v. Canada (Minister of Finance), [1993] 1 S.C.R. 1080, 101 D.L.R. (4th) 567 Gosselin v. Quebec (A orney General), [2002] 4 S.C.R. 429, 2002 SCC 84 [Gosselin cited to S.C.R.] Government of the Republic of South Africa v. Grootboom, [2001] (1) South African Law Reports 46 (CC) Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Inc. v. Manitoba Hydro-Electric Board, [1992] M.J. No. 218, 78 Man.R. (2d) 141 (Man.C.A.) Reference Re Amendment of the Constitution of Canada (1981), 117 D.L.R. (3d) 1, at 13. Reference Re Public Service Employee Relations Act (Alta.), [1987] 1 S.C.R. 313. Reference Re Objection by Quebec to a Resolution to Amend the Constitution, [1982] 2 S.C.R. 793 R. v. Keegstra, [1990] 3 S.C.R. 697 Slaight Communications Inc. v. Davidson, [1989] 1 S.C.R. 1038 United States v. Burns, [2001] 1 S.C.R. 283 Victoria (City) v. Adams, [2008] BCSC 1363 Victoria (City) v. Adams (2009) BCCA 563

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158 Gwen Brodsky Bakan, J., & Schneiderman, J. (Eds.). (1992). Social justice and the constitution: Perspectives on a social union for Canada. O awa: Carleton University Press. Brodsky, G. (2003). Gosselin v. Quebec (A orney General): Autonomy with a vengeance. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 15, 194. — (2007) Charter rights and government choices. In M. Young, S. Boyd, G. Brodsky, and S. Day (Eds.), Poverty: Rights, social citizenship and legal activism, 201–20. Vancouver: UBC Press. Brodsky, G., & Day, S. (2000a). Squa ers perform a public service. Vancouver Sun, 16 Nov., A25. — (2000b). ‘We feel safe in that place,’ squa er tells court. The Province, 21 Nov., A11. — (2000c). Squa er’s rights: Homeless youth part of Vancouver squat for affordable housing. Sudbury Star, 28 Nov., n.p. — (2002). Beyond the social and economic rights debate: Substantive equality speaks to poverty. Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 14(1): 185. — (2006). Poverty as an equality rights violation. In F. Faraday, M. Denike, & M.K. Stephenson (Eds.), Making equality rights real: Securing substantive equality under the Charter, 319– 44. Toronto: Irwin Law. Brodsky, G., Buckley, M., Day, S., & Young, M. (2005). Human rights denied: Single mothers on social assistance in British Columbia. Vancouver: The Poverty and Human Rights Center. Retrieved 9 June 2007 from h p://www. povertyandhumanrights.org/docs/denied.pdf. Cameron, B. (2008). Accountability Regimes for the Federal Social Transfer. Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association, Vancouver, 6 June. Canadian Bill of Rights. (1960). c. 44 C-12.3 [Assented to 10 Aug. 1960]. Commi ee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR). (2003). General comment 3: The nature of states parties’ obligations. United Nations, Fi h session, 1990, U.N. Doc. E/1991/23, annex III at 86 (1991). Reprinted in Compilation of General Comments and General Recommendations Adopted by Human Rights Treaty Bodies, U.N. Doc. HRI/GEN/1/Rev.6, at 14. — (2006). Concluding observations of the Commi ee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Thirty-Sixth Session, 1–19 May, 2006. E/C.12/CAN/CO/5. Retrieved 14 June 2007 from h p://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/ docs/E.C.12.CAN.CO.5.pdf. Campaign 2000. (2006). Oh Canada! Too many children in poverty for too long. Retrieved 14 June 2007 from h p://www.campaign2000.ca/rc/rc06/06_ C2000NationalReportCard.pdf. Canada. (1982). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: First Report of Canada on Articles 10–12. O awa: Department of the Secretary of State.

Human Rights and Poverty 159 — (1992). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Second Report of Canada on Articles 10–15. O awa: Human Rights Directorate, Multiculturalism and Citizenship Canada. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (1982). Part I of the Constitution Act, Schedule B to the Canada Act, 1982 (U.K.), (1982), c. 11. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). (1982). G.A. res. 34/180, U.N. GAOR, 34th Sess. (Supp. No. 46) U.N. Doc. A/34/46 (1982), Can. T.S. 1982 No. 31. Convention on the Rights of the Child. (1990). G.A. res. 44/25, annex, 44 U.N, GAOR Supp. (No. 49), at 167. U.N. Doc. A/44/49 (1989), entered into force 2 Sept. 1990. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. (2007). G.A, res. A/61.106. Opened for signature and ratification on 30 March 2007. Constitution Act. (1982). Schedule B to the Canada Act, 1982 (U.K.), (1982), c. 11. Day, S. (2007). Minding the gap: Treaty commitment and government practice. In M. Young, S. Boyd, G. Brodsky, & S. Day (Eds.), Poverty: Rights, social citizenship and legal activism, 201–22. Vancouver: UBC Press. Day, S., & Brodsky, G. (2006). Strengthening the Canada social transfer: A call to account. O awa: Feminist Alliance for International Action. — (2007). Women and the Canada Social Transfer: Securing the social union. O awa: Status of Women Canada. Retrieved 14 June 2007 from h p://www. swc-cfc.gc.ca/pubs/pubspr/0662460909/200703_0662460909_e.pdf. — (forthcoming). Harper’s ‘Open Federalism’ and the Human Rights of Canadians. Dieticians of Canada. (2005). The cost of eating in B.C.: Li le money for food – the reality for some B.C. families. Retrieved 14 June 2007 from h p://www. dietitians.ca/news/frm_resource/imageserver.asp?id=488&document_type= document&popup=true&contentid=1944. First Ministers’ Accord on Health Care Renewal. (2003). Health Canada. Retrieved 14 June 2007 from h p://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hcs-sss/deliveryprestation/fptcollab/2003accord/index_e.html. G.A. res. A/RES/63/117. Hogg, P. (2006). Constitutional law of Canada. Scarborough: Thomson Carswell. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). (1976). G.A. res. 2200A (XXI), 21 U.N. GAOR (Supp. No. 16) at 52, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171, entered into force 23 March 1976. International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Right (ICESCR). (1976). GA res. 2200A (XXI), 21 U.N. GAOR, (Supp. No. 16), at 49, U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966), 993 U.N.T.S. 3, entered into force 3 Jan. 1976.

160 Gwen Brodsky International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. (1969). G. A.res. 2106 (XX) 660 U.N.T.S. 195, entered into force 4 Jan. 1969. MacInnis, G. (1953). J.S. Woodsworth: A man to remember. Toronto: Macmillan. Nader, A. (1996). Providing essential services: Canada’s constitutional commitment under Section 36. Dalhousie Law Journal 19, 306 –72. National Council of Welfare. (2006). Welfare incomes 2005. Report no. 125. O awa: National Council of Welfare. Norman, K. (2007). The Charter as an impediment to welfare roll backs: A meditation on ‘Justice as Fairness’ as a ‘Bedrock Value’ of the Canadian democratic project. In M. Young, S. Boyd, G. Brodsky, & S. Day (Eds.), Poverty: Rights, social citizenship and legal activism, 297–316. Vancouver: UBC Press. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2006). Commi ee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 36th Session, 1–19 May 2006. Retrieved 13 June 2007 from h p://www.ohchr.org/english/ bodies/cescr/cescrs36.htm. Poverty and Human Rights Project. (2002). A framework for improving the social union for Canadians: An assessment of the SUFA from a B.C. perspective. Vancouver: Poverty and Human Rights Project. Proclamation of Tehran. (1968). U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 32/41. Pulkingham, J. (2006). Bucking the national trend: B.C.’s welfare cuts and poverty among single mothers,.The CCPA Monitor, 8 June. Retrieved 14 June 2007 from h p://www.policyalternatives.ca/Editorials/2006/06/ Editorial1383/index.cfm?pa=DDC3F905. Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, R.S.Q. (1977), c. C-12, s. 45 [Quebec Charter]. Réaume, D. (2007). Dignity, equality, and second generation rights. In M. Young, S. Boyd, G. Brodsky, & S. Day (Eds.), Poverty: Rights, social citizenship and legal activism, 281–96. Vancouver: UBC Press. Schneiderman, D. (2007). Social rights and judicial competence. In M. Young, S. Boyd, G. Brodsky, & S. Day, (Eds.), Poverty: Rights, social citizenship and legal activism, 57–76. Vancouver: UBC Press. Statistics Canada. (2005). Study: Food insecurity in Canadian households. The Daily, Statistics Canada, Tuesday, 3 May. Retrieved 14 June 2007 from h p:// www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/050503/d050503b.htm. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (1948). G.A. res. 217A (III), U.N. Doc A/810, at 71. Vienna Declaration. (1993). World conference on human rights, Vienna, 14 –25 June 1993, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.157/24 (Part I), at 20.

7 Human Needs above Property Rights? Rethinking the Woodsworth Legacy in an Era of Economic Globalization david schneiderman1

I believe that to-day we of the Labour group ... are representing a new principle in the political life of this country, and that is the principle that we should elevate human rights above property rights – J.S. Woodsworth

In the contemporary world, there seems less and less space to envisage a be er, or at least a more tolerable, world than the one we currently inhabit. As inequality within and between national states continues to grow, the rules and institutions we associate with the idea of economic globalization are intended to narrow the compass of options available to states and their citizens to redress these developments. Rather than expanding the range of social policy choices, states from the global South are expected to follow pre-determined paths of development according to abstract economic hypotheses and the imagined histories of powerful states from the global North. The companion political project of neoliberalism aims to dampen the imaginative ability of states to regulate markets. Taken together, the disciplinary instruments of economic globalization are meant to constitute thresholds (Coward, 2005: 868), beyond which regulatory action simply is forbidden irrespective of social and economic contexts. The logic of threshold is well represented by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A regional agreement which purports to remove barriers to trade between the three party states (Canada, the United States, and Mexico) also generates legally binding constraints on state action in most every realm of the economy. These constraints are intended to lock states and citizens into an inhibited regulatory environment far into the future. Prohibitions on a wide range of state action

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ensure that there will be no deviation from what are considered normal state functions. The ‘norm’ in this ‘normal’ is government functions for which there is a contemporary U.S. government analogue, anything beyond which is considered intolerable (Tarullo, 1987: 577–8). Drawing on the idea of constitutional culture, I suggest that the Canadian variant is moving further in the direction of U.S.-style limited government and property rights. By constitutional culture, I am referring to popular conceptions about the fundamental rules that guide relations between state and citizen (and also between institutions of the state) (Schneiderman 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007). Constitutional culture touches on such ma ers as equality and property, fundamental freedoms and human rights. These rules may be found in domestic constitutional text or in high court rulings, but not exclusively so. They may be as likely to appear articulated in legislative debates, royal commissions, social movements, media reports, and even trade and investment treaties. Constitutional culture is ‘se led’ only to the extent that it is represented in dominant leading opinion. It always is contestable (Clifford, 1988) and so open continuously to revision. Emergent and competing articulations, for instance, may be found in nascent political parties. J.S. Woodsworth’s time, I suggest, was a time of transition, in which constitutional culture was open to change and revision, akin to what Tucker (in this volume) describes as an interregnum.2 Nestled uneasily between the influence of the United States and Great Britain, this was a period of openness to new directions: either U.S.-style reformism premised on limited government or the more radical agenda of the British Labour Party. Woodsworth, it seems, was not content simply with U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.3 Woodsworth was more interested in the socialization of markets and so ran with the more radical agenda associated with Labour. A new principle was being introduced into the political life of the country, Woodsworth suggested in a 1926 speech in the House of Commons, one that elevates the principle of human rights above property rights (Canada, 1926). But by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Canadians have, perhaps inadvertently, a ached themselves to U.S.-style constitutional limits. This signals a culture of closedness. It means legally shu ing the door on more promising and alternative ways of organizing state-market relations. First in what follows, I describe Canadian understandings of constitutionalism, particularly around property rights, and briefly contrast these with constitutional culture in the United States. Then I turn to the

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period of transition in Woodsworth’s time and explore the conception of constitutionalism and property rights that animated his work, primarily in the House of Commons. Finally, I address how the forces associated with economic globalization are placing pressures on Canadian constitutional culture to close off political options and converge around the values of the market. Canadian Constitutional Culture According to most indicators, Canada in the early part of the twentieth century was a social welfare laggard. As M.J. Coldwell noted immediately a er the Second World War: ‘Canada, under the rule of its two parties, is far behind the times in social legislation. Even Germany had unemployment insurance in 1878; Canada finally had an inadequate Act in 1940. New Zealand got old-age pensions in 1898; Canada passed a meager measure of assistance to the old people in 1928. England instituted health insurance in 1911; Canada is still without it. This is the record of the old parties – a record of delay and evasion’ (Coldwell, 1945: 102).4 Though he may have overstated the extent to which provincial legislation filled in the social legislative vacuum (Sears, 1995; Stewart, 1926; Whi on, 1944), Canada, in the face of severe economic depression in the 1930s, did not have any national ‘new deal’ worthy of the name. There only were incidental reforms cynically proposed by R.B. Benne on the eve of a federal election (McConnell, 1993). Even these few measures – federal legislation establishing national standards in regard to hours of work, minimum wages, an employment insurance scheme, and a natural products marketing plan – could not withstand constitutional scrutiny. The Judicial Commi ee of the Privy Council declared most every one of these laws to be in the realm of provincial authority and so beyond the capacity of the federal government to enact unilaterally (McDonald, 1937; McNaught, 1959). There was good reason to think that Canada, too, was premised on a culture of limited government highly protective of property and the rights of employers (Sco , 1937). Yet the Privy Council opinion – stuck in a mode of classical legal thinking (Kennedy, 1980) that drew bright lines between public and private, local and national, best exhibited by their reference to ‘watertight compartments’ – hardly captured the historical relation of Canadian citizens to their governments.5 The Canadian government played an active role in the promotion of private and public economic development

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from J.A. Macdonald’s ‘national policy’ of 1878 onwards (Canada, 1954). For this reason, Lipset described Canadian identity as more authoritarian, emphasizing its tradition of order, and less egalitarian, emphasizing its tradition of paternalism (Lipset, 1990, 1963). The presence of a viable social democratic le in Canada has been a ributed to this authoritarian tradition – what has been called the ‘Tory-touch’: a collectivist strain which enabled discussion of collectivist solutions to the problems posed by modernity (McRae, 1964). Hartz (1955) argued that the political cultures of se ler societies were derived from the ideological fragments that were brought from Europe – fragments that were not reflective of the ideological spectrum at play in European thought at the time of their migration. The British subjects representing this Tory fragment laid down roots in Canadian political culture facilitative of energetic state action. Building on Hartz, Horowitz (1966) argued that the presence of a social democratic le in Canadian political culture could be explained by the emigration of loyal British subjects escaping the American Revolution to Upper and Lower Canada. This ‘fragment’ of toryism, mixed with pre-revolutionary British whiggery, sustained a right wing and, in Woodsworth’s time, nurtured a le -wing politics. Socialism, according to Horowitz’s ‘Tory-touch’ thesis, was ‘contained as a potential in the original political culture,’ as it fit, to a certain extent, ‘with tory ideas already present’ (p. 154). There is an alternative explanation for this ‘Jacobin strain’ (Resnick, 1990: 45) and it is an institutionalist one. Elizabeth Mancke (1999) identifies the genesis for the strong state in Canada in the desire of colonial administrators, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to involve themselves directly in the governing of the British North American colonies. With a British presence before British se lement, colonial administration was ‘unequivocally subordinate to Parliament’ (ibid.: 11–12) and so merely represented its long reach (Mancke, 2002: 257). This is in contrast to the origins of self-government in the United States, where se lement by British colonists preceded the arrival of state institutions. All of the colonies involved in the American revolution, aside from Georgia, Mancke (1999) observes, had their origins in governments that predated the eighteenth century and so had ‘considerable political autonomy’ (p. 8). The institutional foundations of the strong state were embraced in later Canadian constitutional reform, leaving room for the development of political ideologies (like a viable social democratic le ) otherwise arrested in the United States.

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By 1867, the framers’ design le Canadian legislatures largely unconstrained and with few express constitutional limits, other than those carried over from colonial times, such as the royal power of reservation and disallowance (Kennedy, 1934) and, of course, federalism or the division of legislative powers. This was, in part, because the Canadian framers wished to endow the Canadian state – at both its federal and provincial levels – with sufficient power to facilitate the program of economic growth and integration they envisaged. Rather than removing the state from certain levers of economic power, then, the state would be expected to have its hands on those levers. This design not only facilitated economic productivity through state enterprise but sanctioned legislative intrusions into the realm of property rights as a motor of economic development. This institutionalist narrative helps to explain why Woodsworth and his colleagues could offer proposals to expand the role of the state and why no complementary movement took hold in the United States. Forbath shows how working-class consciousness was influenced by the possibilities and limitations offered by popular understandings of U.S. constitutionalism in the late nineteenth century. The language of the law limited social visions, silenced aspirations, and elicited the consent of the labour movement ‘to the dominant groups’ version of the natural and the good,’ writes Forbath (1991: 170). In Canada, by contrast, there were fewer legal or constitutional impediments in the way of implementing a Canadian socialist legislative agenda. Woodsworth perhaps was naïve about the effect of constitutional limitations still in place – I am referring here to the fact of federalism. He acted as if his plan for centralized planning could easily be implemented (Mills, 1991), even though federalism fragments political power and makes social change through legislation more difficult to achieve than in the unitary state (Corry, 1939). Courts helped further to dampen legislative energy by restraining federal legislative capacity. Nevertheless, both levels of government together could inhabit expansive legislative space. This is why Viscount Bryce, writing in the late nineteenth century, described Canada’ s constitutional order as more ‘democratic’ than in the United States. Legislative power in Canada, Bryce surmised, was ‘legally boundless’ (1924: 41). ‘Were there any revolutionary spirit,’ Bryce (p. 17) wrote, changes could swi ly be brought about by parliamentary legislation. Bryce, like Woodsworth, grossly exaggerated federal power but the observation captures an important

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aspect of Canada’s constitutional design. Though divided, legislative power was complete as between the two levels of government. There were other restraining influences on Canadian constitutional practice, including the British common law tradition. The common law has shaped Canadian legal developments well into the present time. The common law looks with disdain on interferences with private property – it is viewed as arbitrary and unfair to have individuals bear the costs associated with social policy transitions (Schneiderman, 1996). But common law courts will not stand in the way of such measures where legislatures make plain their intentions. Common law courts, therefore, would expect government to compensate private property owners in the case of expropriation or nationalization. Governments, nevertheless, have the final say – they can deny compensation if they say so expressly. We might contrast this approach with the reverence paid to property in U.S. constitutional culture (Schneiderman, 2006). Admi edly, property is extensively regulated in the United States (Underkuffler, 2003) and there have been periods in the early nineteenth century (the socalled commonwealth period) and in the 1930s, following the election of F.D.R., where the state actively intervened in markets in new and innovative ways (Novack, 1996). But the late nineteenth century conception of property – what Underkuffler calls the ‘common conception’ of property in contrast to a more flexible, ‘operative’ conception (2003: 38–51) – has long been dominant as an element of U.S. constitutional culture well into the present day. This is the classical legal conception, premised on an understanding of state regulatory capacity that radically separates ‘private right’ from ‘public power’ (Novack, 1996: 36). This libertarian view of property and rights admits only minor adjustments in the background distribution of wealth. Deficiencies in social welfare are to be corrected by markets, not states. It is not that the constitution prohibits regulatory innovation in markets, only that a more ‘chastened’ version of the state is envisaged. Its contemporary variant has been well described by Tushnet: ‘the guiding principle of the new regime is not that government cannot solve problems, but that it cannot solve any more problems’ (1999: 65). This is why a Louisiana survivor of the devastating 2005 hurricane Katrina would view the treatment she received at the hands of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) much less favourably than what she received from Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club in the wake of the storm: ‘It’s hard to say, but you get more justice at Wal-Mart’ (Tierney, 2005: A29).

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While quite extensive government regulation of economic ma ers is constitutionally permi ed in the United States, governments must avoid what are regarded as extreme forms of regulation. This, I suggest, is the constitutional conception of private property on which NAFTA and other investment treaties are premised. Before turning to a discussion of this model of constitutional property rights that is going global, let me turn to the model of constitutionalism promoted by Woodsworth as revealed by his contributions to debates in the Canadian House of Commons. Woodsworth and Property Rights Woodsworth’ s conception of private property and the role of the state fit easily into the strong statist tradition associated with the ‘Tory touch’ thesis or Mancke’s institutionalist account. Private property was not sacrosanct – the state could be expected to participate in, and even nationalize, large industry. ‘Today,’ Woodsworth proclaimed in the House, ‘no private employer or public corporation can say that a business is his own’ (Canada, 1922a: 3076). If Woodsworth welcomed the advance of the modern corporation (Mills, 1991), he also understood that they were creatures of statute. In which case, they were destined to serve public functions and so could be appropriated to pursue the public good through a program of nationalization. For Woodsworth, there were few businesses that would not be publicly owned under a system of responsible public management (Mills, 1991; Canada, 1934a), in contrast to the existing system of ‘irresponsible dictatorship’ (Canada, 1923: 3700). As it came to be articulated in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) program, the policy of nationalization was directed at ‘big interests’ (Canada, 1930a: 1862), ‘big undertakings’ (Canada, 1936: 580), and ‘the rich’ (Canada, 1930b: 2460). This was not a program for the confiscation of small, privately held property: I have said in this house before, and I should like to repeat, that it seems to me the time has come when we shall have to redefine what private property is. I take it from its derivation that private property should mean those things which I can use and enjoy for myself. It has to do essentially with personal ma ers. But the lawyers have stretched its meaning. They have created an artificial body which they have called a corporation, and they have endowed that corporation with nearly all the a ributes of an

168 David Schneiderman individual. They have said that the corporation can hold private property. It is an altogether unwarrantable extension of the term, and so we have these great corporations and trusts to-day holding what they call ‘private property.’ The result is that it is an absolute impossibility for me to have any effective control over my private property in the face of the strength which these big corporations exercise in the economic sphere. (Canada, 1934b: 3105)

With a nod to the British common law, the CCF acknowledged the ‘need for compensation in the case of individuals and institutions which must receive adequate maintenance during the transitional period before the planned economy becomes fully operative’ (Coldwell, 1945: 168). So in the case of the mining industry, Woodsworth explained in the House in 1932, ‘if we expropriate ... the simplest method would be to make a refund’ and ‘reward the prospectors’ (Canada, 1932: 3283). In the case of ‘institutions and individuals dependent on certain investments,’ like ‘widows and orphans,’ the CCF would ensure that ‘security is given, not merely to the privileged few, but to all’ (Canada, 1934a: 268). But the CCF would not extend its commitment to compensation to what Woodsworth called the ‘functionless owner class’ (ibid.). In this case, the monopolist generates wealth without producing value; therefore, confiscation would be less likely to produce full market value. Here was a program of socialization premised on the British common law tradition of compensation, a enuated by what the developing world later would call the standard of ‘appropriate compensation’ (Schneiderman, 2000). Another important exception to the principle of nationalization was the farmer. It was the farmer who was the ‘worst exploited’ (Canada, 1934a: 268) subject to the boom and bust of the grain economy (Lipset, 1971: 47). In the face of unstable prices, and pressure from banks and insurance companies, the one sure thing farmers wanted was ‘security of tenure’ (Canada, 1934a: 268). They would get it under the CCF program of socialism for, here, private property served an important public function, so long as it remained in the hands of farmers and not ‘great company farms’ (Canada 1936: 580). Private property, in Woodsworth’s constitutional portrait, was an acceptable mode of a human right – indeed, it was an engine of economic development in the Prairies – so long as property remained in the hands of individuals and farmers. Where property was in the hands of more powerful economic actors – as in the case of the large company farm – rights did not as easily a ach to the idea of ownership.

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This distinction, between the small to medium firm (associated with the ownership of one’s labour) and the big (associated with the business firm and the appropriation of another’s labour), runs through much of the progressive literature in the early twentieth century.6 Constitutional Culture under Stress It might be that we now are witness to a transition in another, but familiar, direction, one precipitated by powerful forces (both state and nonstate actors) promoting rules and processes that privilege de-regulated markets over basic human needs. The transnational legal framework for the protection and promotion of foreign investment best represents this privileging of markets. This is an interlocking network of rules for the liberalization of foreign direct investment (FDI). These rules can be found in almost 2,500 bilateral investment treaties (BITs), to which over 175 countries are parties (UNCTAD, 2006), as well as bilateral and regional trade and investment agreements such as NAFTA. These treaties typically entitle investors to enforce commitments undertaken by states in the hope that inward direct investment will be forthcoming – a hope that, for many parts of the world, remains unrealized (UNCTAD, 2006). Among the commitments usually undertaken is that the party state will not take measures, either directly or indirectly, tantamount to expropriation and nationalization. Of less concern are outright takings of title to property by states. Rather, what is of concern here are what are called ‘regulatory’ takings: measures that so impact on an investment interest that they are equivalent to an outright taking. The expectation is that the rule will catch state regulatory measures that significantly diminish legitimate investment-backed expectations. The analogous rule under the fi h and fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which shields the taking of property without just compensation, has given rise to a doctrine of regulatory takings entitling property owners to thwart a number of environmental or land use regulatory initiatives (Schneiderman, 1996). There is li le doubt that the takings rule found in investment treaties is informed by this national constitutional experience (Poirier, 2003). Debates in the U.S. Congress over the granting of ‘trade promotion authority’ to President George W. Bush confirm this, at least from a U.S. perspective. As it turns out, the NAFTA rule is much more expansive than the U.S. constitutional rule – it catches far more than takings of real property and protects every imaginable economic interest (Been & Beauvais, 2003). This

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fact precipitated a rolling back of the scope of the treaty rule in the U.S. Trade Promotion Authority Act, 2002. The congressional modification of the investment takings rule requires that foreign investors receive no greater entitlement under investment rules than do U.S. investors under U.S. constitutional law.7 The organizational logic of investment rules signals a movement away from the robust and energetic state to one inhibited by the strictures of neoliberalism. Economic success is to be achieved only via policy instruments falling within a traditionally acceptable range of regulatory initiatives. These may be facilitative of markets, as in earlier times, but not so interventionist as to deviate from the hegemonic norm represented by the modern U.S. experience. These legally binding constraints end up denying to developing states access to policy tools that helped to precipitate economic success for developed states in the past (Rodrik, 2001). The consequence, as David Kennedy notes, is to narrow the ‘ideological range’: ‘Political choices fade from view – as do choices among different economic ideas about how development happens or what it implies for social, political and economic life’ (2004: 155). Rather than expanding the range of policy options, the investment rules regime checks state action, and in more stringent ways than did the common law presumptions of the last century. This is because investors directly can seek damages from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars from international arbitration tribunals (UNCTAD, 2005). Admi edly, there have been few successful investor claims against states based on the takings rule. Tribunal decisions have been inconsistent, providing both wide and narrow parameters for establishing a successful takings claim (see Metalclad, 2001; Methanex, 2005). The problem remains in distinguishing between legitimate regulation and ‘policy misjudgments’ (UNCTAD, 2005: 25) that require the payment of compensation on the strictest of possible terms. Investors have had more success, however, relying on the kindred standard of ‘fair and equitable treatment’–an omnibus standard of treatment mandated by international law which is serving functions similar to the takings rule (TECMED, 2004: para. 154). Nor do the rulings of international arbitration tribunals tell the whole story. There are, for instance, threatened claims or claims that never get filed at international arbitration facilities (at the World Bank’s International Centre for the Se lement of Investment Disputes, for instance). Consider, for example, debates in the province of New Brunswick over the creation of a new scheme for public auto insurance (Shrybman & Sinclair, 2004; Schneiderman,

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2005). Though high insurance rates were a principal election issue and an all-party commi ee struck a er the election recommended that the province adopt a public auto insurance scheme (New Brunswick, 2004a), public auto insurance ceased to be an option for the Conservative government of Bernard Lord. Evidence before the legislative commi ee indicated that U.S.-based private auto insurers would seek compensation for the taking of their investment interests under NAFTA’s investment chapter if the government were to proceed (McCarthy Tétrault, 2003). Premier Lord rejected the legislative commi ee’s recommendation, but without reference to NAFTA’s potentially chilling effects (New Brunswick, 2004b). Not all of the developments associated with NAFTA and investment rules would have troubled Woodsworth. He would not necessarily have disapproved of a free trade area with the United States and Mexico. Woodsworth was a robust advocate of free trade and the removal of tariff walls. Canadian agricultural workers, he believed, would benefit by such an arrangement. He also would not have been troubled by the general movement towards deeper economic integration with the United States. The future of Canada was so ‘inextricably bound’ up with that of the United States, he declared, that ‘we cannot hope to prosper unless they also prosper’ (Canada, 1922b: 85). He was concerned, however, by the concomitant influence within Canada of powerful economic interests based in the United States (Canada, 1929: 49–50). He also would not have endorsed free trade at any cost, if free trade meant only competition between ‘big industries and free trade between huge corporations’ (Canada, 1934b: 3105). We can surmise that the major problem Woodsworth would have had with this regime of investor rights is that it privileges corporate interests and private property over human needs. Indeed, the logic of the regime is structured in such a way that, however important and beneficial an initiative, a regulatory measure cannot so impair an investment interest that it amounts to a denial of investor rights (Santa Elena, 2000). This renders difficult, under the U.S. Bill of Rights, both the maintenance and introduction of new social policy initiatives, whether they concern the environment, land use, or health care. What must be avoided, then, are ‘extreme’ or ‘out of the ordinary’ regulatory options – ones that do not rely on ordinary market forces for their resolution. The freezing and ratcheting effects of the investment rules regime becomes clearer in light of the policy response suggested by a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision, Chaoulli v. Quebec (2005).8

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The case concerned a constitutional challenge by Dr Chaoulli and his patient, George Zeliotis, of a Quebec legislative ban on the purchase of private medical insurance for publicly funded medical services. These services are defined as medically necessary hospital services and medically necessary physician services – services that cannot be privately funded or privately delivered by medical doctors outside of the public system. Chaoulli succeeded in convincing a majority of the justices (5:4) of the Supreme Court of Canada that the ban imperilled the lives of those on waiting lists and that private markets would perform be er in addressing pressing medical needs for those who could afford to buy private insurance. The majority of the justices agreed that the ban on the purchase of private medical insurance for publicly funded medical services offended the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, a statutory bill of rights that mirrors in many principal respects the constitutional Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Schneiderman, 2002), while four justices in the majority found that it also offended the Canadian Charter’s guarantee of liberty. The minority justices preferred to uphold the ban on private insurance as it respected the foundational idea behind the medicare scheme: to ‘provide health care based on need rather than on wealth or status’ (Chaoulli, 2005: para. 164). Since only four of the nine justices held that this ban on private insurance offended the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for the meanwhile, the decision is confined to the province of Quebec. If four of the justices are correct, however, it follows that this sort of ban also runs afoul of the Canadian Charter and would result in the invalidation of similar kinds of bans in the provinces of Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba (para. 71). Short of invoking the notwithstanding clause of the Quebec Charter, which would shield the ban on private medical services, the province was expected to open up at least part of the public system to ‘two-tier’ medicine. This, of course, has been a ma er of some debate within Canada and a focus of recent federal election campaigns. There is more to this story, however, than a Canadian court egregiously invoking human rights in order to constitutionalize a neoliberal vision of health care that undermines the principal of universal accessibility irrespective of an ability to pay. With NAFTA’s strictures in place, it would seem that once a part of the health care system is open to U.S. health insurance providers, it would be practically impossible to restore a fully public system because of NAFTA’s takings rule. Were a private health care industry to be established in Quebec to fill the private insurance market with

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U.S.-based investment interests of any sort, then rolling back access to the Canadian markets would very likely require the payment by the government of Canada of compensation for lost expenses and future profits (Epps & Schneiderman, 2005). This would make rolling back these illiberal gains prohibitively expensive for Canadians. It would amount to being hostage, in Woodsworth’s words, to a ‘functionless owner class’ (Canada, 1934a: 267–8). It suggests an ‘unhealthy’ shi in Canada’s constitutional culture – towards a cramped and closedminded view of the state that Woodsworth would have abhorred and all Canadians should condemn. The Quebec government, wisely, chose a modest course of action as a response to the Court’s decision (Dougherty, 2006a). Proposals were floated in the government’s white paper (Quebec, 2006; Flood, 2006: 304) and were subsequently enshrined in Bill 33 and enacted in late 2006 (Prémont, 2006).9 The legislation guarantees maximum wait times in the public system of no more than six to nine months for a few medical procedures, such as radio-oncology. Once the guaranteed wait time has expired, the province will pay for the provision of these medical services outside the jurisdiction of the province. This seems like a relatively good policy outcome which does not implicate NAFTA’s investor rights. This is in contrast to a second set of reforms that follow as a consequence of Chaoulli: a narrow class of medical procedures – cataract surgery and knee and hip replacements – is now eligible for private funding and delivery. As before (Brun et al., 2005), medical doctors who choose to provide such services outside of the public system, will not be entitled to offer publicly funded services – they must elect, in other words, to join either the public or private systems. This strategy, however, to the extent that it permits the privatization even of a short list of necessary medical services, kicks open the door to the transfer of resources from the public to the private sector (Prémont, 2006: 579). Should the list of privately funded and delivered services grow – which is likely, according to the Quebec Minster of Health (Dougherty, 2006b) – the public system will continue to erode. More significantly, for the purposes of this discussion, NAFTA and other investment treaties to which Canada is a party will preserve the rights of foreign-based medical insurers and providers far into the future. Their presence in the market for medical services virtually will be guaranteed. No future government of Quebec would be capable of reversing this policy option by beefing up the public provision of knee replacement surgery, for instance, so that private funding and

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delivery were banned once again. No government of Quebec could do so, that is, without Canada paying an exorbitant amount of compensation to economically injured foreign investors. Conclusion We might say that Canadian constitutional culture is moving away from a culture of openness – openness to the resolution of public policy problems by all variety of means and instruments – to one of closedness. Whereas, in J.S. Woodsworth’ s time, constitutional culture was beginning to open up to new possibilities in the relations between the state and markets, today options seem fewer and not merely as a consequence of limits to the public purse. Gains made in the twentieth century, like Canada’ s national health care plan based on the principle of universality irrespective of an ability to pay, are under threat. Charters of rights and trade and investment treaties, both of which Woodsworth endorsed in the early part of the twentieth century, work together, as in the Chaoulli case, to undermine the capacity of states to solve public problems in the early twenty-first century. It also is likely that Woodsworth would have distanced himself from the contemporary hegemonic neoliberal model of free trade. He would have insisted that citizenship mean more than membership in a society of producers and consumers. Canadians in his time slowly were awakening to the possibility that national and subnational governments could generate solutions to public welfare problems not organized simply around the logic of private markets. The legacy that Woodsworth has le for us is to take up the task of reawakening contemporary Canadian imaginations to the principle of elevating human rights above property rights.

NOTES 1 Many thanks to Jane Pulkingham for comments, to Emily Fitzpatrick for able research assistance, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for financial support. 2 Eric Tucker (in this volume). 3 This reflects a movement, among thinkers associated with the League for Social Reconstruction, away from F.D.R.’s New Deal as its conservatism became more apparent (ibid.). See Research Commi ee of the League for

Human Needs above Property Rights? 175 Social Reconstruction (1935: 198–9) and Horn (1980: 81). In the field of labour rights, however, Woodsworth’s orientation primarily was one of amelioration and gradualism as was the case in the United States, as Tucker argues (in this volume). 4 Coldwell effectively made the same argument in Parliament in 1937: ‘In a rapidly changing world Canada lags behind already in social and economic legislation’ (Canada, 1937: 428). 5 The following few paragraphs are drawn from Schneiderman (2006). 6 Louis Dembetz Brandeis, later a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, represented this progressive line of thought in a series of articles and books, distinguishing between the right of industrial democracy for workers and the negative effects of business combinations on citizens and workers, what he called the ‘curse of bigness’ (Strum, 1995: 118). Brandeis (1905: 26–7), unlike Woodsworth, did not hold out for state socialist solutions to the problem of ‘bigness.’ 7 The new rule, Congress has directed, should ensure that foreign investors in the United States ‘are not accorded greater substantive rights with respect to investment protections than U.S. investors in the U.S’ (s. 2102[b][3]). 8 The following two paragraphs are drawn from Epps and Schneiderman (2005). 9 An Act to Amend the Act Respecting Health Services and Social Services and Other Legislative Provisions, S.Q. (2006), c.43.

REFERENCES Been, V., & Beauvais, J.C. (2003). The global fi h amendment: NAFTA’s investment protections and the misguided quest for an international ‘regulatory takings’ doctrine. New York University Law Review 78, 30–143. Brandeis, L.D. (1905). Life insurance: The abuses and remedies. An address delivered before the Commercial Club of Boston. Boston: Policy-Holders Protective Commi ee. Brun, H., Demers, D., Garant, P., Lajoie, A., Prémont, M.-C., & Proulx, D. (2005). Quebec medicare plan is not what the Supremes ordered. [Montreal] Gaze e, 17 Nov., A29. Bryce, J. (1924). Canada: An actual democracy. Toronto: Macmillan. Canada (1922a). Debates. House of Commons, 14 March. — (1922b). Debates. House of Commons, 16 June. — (1923). Debates. House of Commons, 8 June. — (1926). Debates. House of Commons, 10 May.

176 David Schneiderman — (1929). Debates. House of Commons, 11 Feb. — (1930a). Debates. House of Commons, 7 May. — (1930b). Debates. House of Commons, 9 June. — (1932). Debates. House of Commons, 23 May. — (1934a). Debates. House of Commons, 5 Feb. — (1934b). Debates. House of Commons, 16 May. — (1936). Debates. House of Commons, 27 Feb. — (1937). Debates. House of Commons, 1 Feb. — (1954). Report of the Royal Commission on Dominion Provincial Relations, Book 1. O awa: Edmond Cloutier. Chaoulli v. Quebec. [2005] 1 S.C.R. 791. Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Coldwell, M.J. (1945). Le turn, Canada. London: Victor Gallancz. Corry, J.A. (1939). The difficulties of divided jurisdiction: A study prepared for the Royal Commission on Dominion Provincial Relations. O awa: King’s Printer. Coward, M. (2005). The globalisation of enclosure: Interrogating the geopolitics of empire. Third World Quarterly 25, 855–71. Dougherty, K. (2006a). ‘New era’ in health system. [Montreal] Gaze e, 17 Feb., A1. — (2006b). Alarm raised over privatization’s threat to medicare. [Montreal] Gaze e, 5 April, A8. Epps, T., & Schneiderman, D. (2005). Opening medicare to our neighbours or closing the door on a public system: International trade law implications of Chaoulli v. Quebec. In C.M. Flood, K. Roach, & L. Sossin (Eds.), Access to care, access to justice: The legal debate over private health insurance in Canada, 369–89. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Flood, C.M. (2006). Chaoulli’s legacy for the future of Canadian health care policy. Osgoode Hall Law Journal 44, 273–310. Forbath, W.E. (1991). Law and the shaping of the American labour movement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hartz, L. (1955). The liberal tradition in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich. Horn, M. (1980). The League for Social Reconstruction: Intellectual origins of the democratic le 1930–1942. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Horowitz, G. (1966). Conservatism, liberalism and socialism in Canada: An interpretation. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 32, 143–71. Kennedy, D. (1980). Toward an historical understanding of legal consciousness: The case of classical legal thought, 1850–1940. Research in Law and Sociology 3, 3–24.

Human Needs above Property Rights? 177 — (2004). The dark side of virtue: Reassessing international humanitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, W.P.M. (1934). The nature of Canadian federalism. In W.P.M. Kennedy, Essays in constitutional law, 25–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipset, S.M. (1963). The first new nation: The United States in historical and comparative perspective. New York: Basic Books. — (1971). Agrarian socialism, rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. — (1990). Continental divide: The values and institutions of the United States and Canada. New York: Routledge. Mancke, E. (1999). Early imperial governance and the origins of Canadian political culture. Canadian Journal of Political Science 32, 3–20. — (2002). Negotiating an empire: Britain and its overseas peripheries c. 1550–1780. In C. Daniels & M.V. Kennedy (Eds.), Negotiated empires: Centers and peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, 235–65. New York: Routledge. McCarthy Tétrault, LLP. (2003). Memorandum to Ed Cramm, Secretary, the Council of Atlantic Premiers. Retrieved 24 Aug. 2004 from h p://www.capcpma.ca/images/worddocuments/Memo%20re%20International%20Trade.doc. McConnell, H.W. (1993). A half-century of constitutional turbulence. Saskatchewan Law Review 57, 105–205. McDonald, V.C. (1937).The British North America Act: Past and future. Canadian Bar Review 15, 393–427. McNaught, K. (1959). A prophet in politics: A biography of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McRae, K.D. (1964). The structure of Canadian history. In L. Hartz (Ed.), The founding of new societies: Studies in the history of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada and Australia, 219–74. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Metalclad Corporation v. the United Mexican States. (2001). World Trade and Arbitration Materials 13, 47–80. Methanex v. U.S.A. (2005). Final award of the tribunal on jurisdiction and merits. International Legal Materials 44 (3 Aug.), 1345–1464. Mills, A. (1991). Fool for Christ: The political thought of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. New Brunswick. (2004a). Select commi ee on public automobile insurance. Final report on public automobile insurance in Ontario. Retrieved 23 Aug. 2004 from h p://www.gnb.ca/legis/business/commi ees/reports/2004auto/ report-e.asp. — (2004b). News Release: Auto insurance reforms to lower rates, increase choice, help first-time drivers. 29 June. Retrieved 24 Aug. 2004 from h p:// www.gnb.ca/cnb/news/jus/2004e0750ju.htm.

178 David Schneiderman Novack, W.J. (1996). The people’s welfare: Law and regulation in nineteenth-century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Poirier, M.R. (2003). The NAFTA chapter 11 expropriation debate through the eyes of a property theorist. Environmental Law 33, 851–928. Prémont, M.-C. (2006). La garantie d’accès aux services de santé: Analyse de la proposition québécoise. Les cahiers de droit 47, 539–80. Quebec. (2006). Guaranteeing access: Meeting the challenges of equity, efficiency and quality. Quebec City: Minister of Health and Social Services, Government of Quebec. Retrieved 12 May 2009 from h p://publications. msss.gouv.qc.ca/acrobat/f/documentation/2005/05-721-01A.pdf. Research Commi ee of the League for Social Reconstruction. (1935). Social planning for Canada. Toronto: Nelson. Resnick, P. (1990). The masks of Proteus: Canadian reflections on the state. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Rodrik, D. (2001). Development strategies for the 21st century. Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 2000, 85–108. Washington, DC: World Bank. Santa Elena, S.A. (2000). Compañía del Desarrollo de and the Republic of Costa Rica. ICSID Case No. ARB/96/1. Schneiderman, D. (1996). NAFTA’s takings rule: American constitutionalism comes to Canada. University of Toronto Law Journal 46, 499–537. — (2000). Investment rules and the new constitutionalism. Law and Social Inquiry 25, 757–87. — (2002). Dual(ling) charters: The harmonics of rights in Canada and Quebec. O awa Law Review 24, 235–63. — (2004). Canadian constitutionalism, the rule of law, and economic globalization. In P. Hughes & P. Molinari (Eds.), Participatory justice in a global economy: The new rule of law, 65–85. Montreal: Les Éditions Thémis. — (2005). Banging constitutional bibles: Observing constitutional culture in transition. University of Toronto Law Journal 55, 833–52. — (2006). Property rights and regulatory innovation: Comparing constitutional cultures. International Journal of Constitutional Law 4, 371–91. — (2007). Social rights and ‘common sense’: Gosselin through a media lens. In M. Young, S. Boyd, G. Brodsky, & S. Day (Eds.), Poverty: Rights, social citizenship, and legal activism, 57–73. Vancouver: UBC Press. Sco , F.R. (1937) The consequences of the Privy Council decisions. Canadian Bar Review 15, 485–94. Sears, A. (1995). Before the welfare state: Public health and social policy. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 32, 169–88.

Human Needs above Property Rights? 179 Shrybman, S., & Sinclair, S. (2004). Public auto insurance and trade treaties. CCPA Briefing Paper 5, 1. Retrieved 21 Sept. 2007 from h p://www. policyalternatives/documents/National_Office_Pubs/brief5-1.pdf. Stewart, B. (1926). Canadian labor laws and the treaty. New York: Columbia University Press. Strum, P. (Ed.). (1995). Brandeis on democracy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Tarullo, D.K. (1987). Beyond normalcy in the regulation of international trade. Harvard Law Review 100, 547–628. TECMED S.A. (Técnicas Medioambientales) v. Mexico. (2004). International Legal Materials 43, 133. Tierney, J. (2005). From FEMA to WEMA. New York Times, 5 Sept., A29. Tushnet, M. (1999). Foreword: The new constitutional order and the chastening of constitutional aspiration. Harvard Law Review 113, 26–109. Underkuffler, L. (2003). The idea of property: It’s meaning and power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). (2005). Investor-state disputes arising from investor treaties: An overview. New York and Geneva: United Nations. — (2006). World Investment Report: FDI from Developing and Transition Economies: Implications for Development. New York and Geneva: United Nations. Whi on, C. (1944). The reconstruction of the social services. In A. Brady & F.R. Sco (Eds.), Canada a er the war: Studies in political, social and economic policies for post-war Canada, 88–121. Toronto: Macmillan.

8 Zones of Abandonment:1 The Cultural Politics of Public Health in Vancouver’s Inner City denielle elliott

This chapter addresses a series of paradoxes at play in the delivery of public health care and social welfare for the urban poor in Vancouver’s inner city. It examines public health practices and policies surrounding the inner city poor and the unhoused within a larger contemporary landscape – one marked by declining social welfare and health services, gentrification and urbanization, intensification and privatization of policing, the contemporary effects of a colonial history, an increased global focus on HIV infection and treatment, and a local public health care industry enmeshed with the politics of the le . Using James Shaver Woodsworth and CCF/NDP sensibilities as background, I wish to highlight some of the complex political processes surrounding the treatment of the so-called untreatable, the deeply marginalized characterized by poverty, homelessness, illness, and drug addictions in a liberal democratic state. Health researchers and public health administrators construct the Downtown Eastside community with a discourse that highlights the progressive and innovative public health services, framing it as an international model for inner city health.2 The intensity of health services in the Downtown Eastside is an interesting point of departure for an inquiry into the links between the welfare state, citizens’ rights, and public health because the concentration and scale of health services here is a paradox. There are two reasons for this. First, in spite of hundreds of programs and millions of dollars of funding we still witness intense suffering, trauma, and loss; second, this concentration and intensity of programs occurs in an era when we are acutely aware of a decline in social welfare programs for the urban poor. The Downtown Eastside is, paradoxically, a site of abandonment and a site of intense surveillance

The Politics of Health in Vancouver’s Inner City 181 .

and governance.3 This is one of many paradoxes that I explore here as I analyse the intersections of public health, the welfare state, and the rights of citizens. This chapter is based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork that I carried out in 2005 and 2006 which included participant-observation at inner city community health clinics; interviews with clinicians, health care providers, and public health administrators responsible for the delivery of health care in the community; and a series of interviews with forty-five residents of the Downtown Eastside. It is also informed by a field placement with the HIV/AIDS, Addictions and Aboriginal Health branch of Vancouver Coastal Health Authority that provided an opportunity to conduct research within the organization. This included a ending planning and development meetings for public health interventions and a comprehensive review of grey documents and policies pertaining to inner city health administration. The opportunity to observe public health administrators and health care providers in their everyday work positioned me in a space where I was able to witness the disjuncture between discourse, policy, and practice – contradictions that individuals negotiate in very different ways. As an ethnography, this analysis offers a glimpse of the way in which social democratic policies, politics, and discourses shape the everyday lives of the urban poor through biomedicine. Health care delivery in the contemporary inner city is discursively framed within a rhetoric of humanitarian aid and is not dissimilar to contemporary discourses of development focusing on ill health, hunger, and displaced or unhoused populations in international contexts or from historical discourses of development and ‘progress’ in the Canadian context.4 I suggest here that the discourses of humanitarianism that surround the contemporary inner city of Vancouver and Woodsworth’s work historically in the ghe os of early twentieth-century Canada are similarly problematic in that both effectively eclipse the inconsistencies inherent in the politics and policies of the inner city. Thus in part, this chapter is a critical reflection on contemporary social democratic, or ‘le ,’ policies and politics surrounding the urban poor. Inner City Health Vancouver’s inner city, now famous for its poverty, violence, sex industry, public illicit drug market, and missing women, is a space sharing many similarities with the inner city ghe os that James Shaver

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Woodsworth would have visited at the turn of the twentieth century. The Downtown Eastside is a space characterized by unimaginable poverty, hunger, suffering, and dispossession.5 Living there are the displaced, unskilled working-class men, new refugees fleeing violence and poverty from other homelands, the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, First Nations representing communities from across Canada – among many others. Like the urban ghe os of Woodsworth’s time, this urban space is characterized by unsanitary and unsafe housing, homelessness, and the spread of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis but Woodsworth’s gaze would not have fallen on the number of bodies wasting from HIV/AIDS. Combined with the effects of toxic modern illicit pharmaceuticals like crack cocaine and ‘crystal meth’6 and an intensity of injection drug use, AIDS is a devastating visible marker on the lives of inner city residents. Lastly, this urban space has been transformed since Woodsworth’s era by the ways in which capitalism has rooted itself in the community – where everything is for sale. Paradoxically, inner city residents are viewed by the mass public as having ‘no value’ as citizens, yet they are embedded in multiple and powerful overlapping global economies – prostitution, welfare provision, illicit drugs, pharmaceuticals, and research. Marginalized from formal economies, they sell what they can – their bodies, sex, photographs, drugs, blood, and stories. Because the community is located between two important historical sites and thus key tourist a ractions – Gastown and Chinatown, and on the edge of Vancouver’s prosperous downtown core, the community has undergone a marked degree of gentrification (Blomley, 2004). Increasingly it is governed by advanced surveillance technologies and privatized policing; and while it is not a gated community, there are endless practices and policies at work that effectively contain community members (Feldman, 2001; Ellio , 2007). Although a distinctly ‘urban’ community, located within a metropolitan city with a population of 2.2 million,7 it would be amiss not to recognize the ties between the Downtown Eastside and rural and reserve communities.8 In many ways it is a distinctly colonial space within a postcolonial city. As others have noted, the community is clearly gendered and racialized – Aboriginal peoples are visibly over-represented in this community (Culhane, 2003; Razack, 2002). The community is more than just home to Aboriginal peoples – a large majority of whom are displaced from rural and reserve communities from across the country, and represent First Nations, Inuit, and Metis, those with treaties and those without treaties, those legally defined as status Indians and those

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with no legal rights under the Indian Act. The land is traditional Coast Salish territory (Culhane, 2003) – appropriated by the Canadian state which then relocated and displaced resident Aboriginal peoples to reserves. The colonial history of this space, the land itself, and Aboriginal peoples, all are erased from contemporary political debates and discussions about the Downtown Eastside. And while politicians, activists, and public health administrators may understand the links between health inequities, urban poverty, and colonial histories, discussions of Aboriginal peoples are largely absent from political forums – an erasure consistent with early CCF/NDP policy (Tester et al., 1999). HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment is a central concern in the lives of many Downtown Eastside residents – although it is just one of many health priorities afflicting the community. The Downtown Eastside has been the hardest hit by HIV and AIDS in Canada – prompting some to suggest it has reached epidemic proportions. In 1997, in response to growing rates of illicit drug use and epidemics of HIV and hepatitis C, the Vancouver/Richmond Health Board declared a public health emergency. Both researchers and senior-level health administrators issued public pleas demanding that the federal and provincial government address the declining health of Downtown Eastside citizens. Immediately a er the declaration, the provincial government promised $3 million to help address the co-epidemics. The federal minister of health similarly announced that his office would contribute $1 million. Out of this crisis arose the 2000 Vancouver Agreement, whereby $13.9 million was allocated for a range of interventions aimed at decreasing the co-epidemics.9 Among other things, the agreement included increased health care services, increased policing, and new housing initiatives. Rates of HIV infection in the Downtown Eastside have reportedly continued to rise despite multiple and varied a empts at prevention and this surge of funding for health care (Miller et al., 2006; Spi al et al., 2002). The effects of HIV and AIDS are compounded by poverty, lack of safe and affordable housing, various underground economies, increased rates of violence, and outbreaks of sexually transmi ed infections, hepatitis C, and tuberculosis. Despite widespread success across Canada for treating HIV-positive populations, the urban poor continue to fall through the cracks. Daily these individuals continue to grapple with their own failing health and the illness and/or death of friends and family members due to AIDS, hepatitis C, pneumonia, bacterial infections, and other chronic illnesses. A ending funerals for family and friends who have died of AIDS and the process of mourning is a daily

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part of life for many men and women living in the Downtown Eastside. This contrasts significantly with research documenting the success of antiretroviral therapy in other parts of Canada and the United States, where HIV is increasingly viewed as a manageable or chronic disease, much like diabetes. What also distinguishes the Downtown Eastside from the inner city ghe os from the early 1900s is the number of agencies operating in this space, offering housing, food, health care, advocacy, and support, among many other services. Many of these programs are staterun initiatives, like the public health clinics; others are state-sponsored, where funds from provincial and federal government support programs that have been contracted out; some are grassroots organizations, those which seek funds from private and public sectors and/or creative commercial enterprises; and lastly, there are the Christian humanitarian aid groups – those feeding the hungry and impoverished. Activist organizations demand be er housing, social services, and health care – o en framing their demands as an issue of human rights. National, provincial, and municipal politics play out among and o en shape these humanitarian interventions, with a long-standing le community dedicated to labour issues, housing activism, and antipoverty politics. The community is characterized by a historical commitment to activism – born out of working-class and feminist political advocacy (Carroll & Ratner, 2005). Today, le politics, particularly the New Democrat Party (NDP), continues to have a vocal, public voice in social and health care issues. For example, Libby Davies, NDP Member of Parliament for Vancouver East, has spoke out critically against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s policies on harm reduction, has demonstrated public support of the supervised injection site (a program also partnered between the Portland Hotel Society and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority), and advocates for new housing initiatives for the community. Jenny Kwan, NDP Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Vancouver – Mount Pleasant, is also a vocal advocate for the community. Kwan’s husband is a senior member of the administrative team at the Portland Hotel Society and a health researcher in the community who has a key role in the planning and implementation of many public health interventions in the community – including those discussed here.10 The inner city is, as Nicholas Blomley (2004) has carefully illustrated, an inherently political space and place. The historical importance of figures like Woodsworth and CCF colleague Thomas (Tommy) Douglas is not lost among the contemporary

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urban poor who are deeply enmeshed due to abject poverty with publicly provided social welfare and health services, relying on publicly funded Medicare and income assistance for survival. A week in the life of a Downtown Eastside resident alerts us to the maze of these organizations and their bureaucratic regulations which, along with increased surveillance and a loss of privacy, constrain residents’ decisions and actions about housing, medical treatment, work, and sexual relations. The simple task of finding a place to sleep or live is a complex set of processes that need to be negotiated very tactfully by a team of skilled and knowing actors. It is no surprise that many, frustrated and exhausted by the complicated politics and processes, decide to sleep in the park or under the viaducts, away from the rules and regulations. Two key foundational programs reflecting early CCF/NDP principles appear to be eroding into mere neoliberal surveillance and management strategies. Services and programs for inner city health, in particular, seem to be the most prolific, perhaps an indication of the depth of what Adele Clarke and colleagues (2003) refer to as the biomedicalization of social life. The number of organizations and services in such a small geographical space represents what some might call a ghe oization of health services. As Culhane notes, the City of Vancouver’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the escalating narco-economy has been to ‘contain’ the dual epidemics, not necessarily criminalize or police them (2003: 594). For some, the concentration of health care services for the marginalized in the neighbourhood is preferred and framed as being key in the creation of patient-centred care. Public health administrators argue that residents in the Downtown Eastside should have easy access to health services that are tailored to their specific needs, staff who understand the complex needs of marginalized patients, and environments where they feel safe and at ease. These interventions are framed within a rhetoric of humanitarianism and le politics, as was the work of Woodsworth, and are o en juxtaposed with the repressive, Conservative policies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government. But how is it that within this intense web and bureaucracy of progressive public health initiatives, there are still so many people ill and suffering? The Downtown Eastside is an area marked by more than simply universal health care and free access to antiretroviral therapy – it is a space marked by an intensity of services completely uncharacteristic of the neoliberal state. The rhetoric of public health innovation, particularly as it is discursively framed as le and humanitarian, masks

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the neoliberal projects at work within biomedical practice and policies aimed at the urban poor. To give an example: the Vancouver Health Authority was approached by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C.’s Medical Council to develop a program that would help reduce the number of patients, now referred to as ‘clients’ in our consumer-driven health care industry, who leave the hospital against medical advice (deemed AMAs by health care providers), especially those with acute bacterial infections, like endocarditis and osteomyelitis – debilitating infections of the heart tissue and bone tissue, respectively. Such bacterial infections are common among injection drug users and can be life-threatening resulting in surgery, amputation, and death in extreme cases. These individuals, o en chronic and active drug users with multiple illnesses, are costly to the health care system according to the Medical Council because they leave before completing their intravenous antibiotic treatments, pu ing themselves and the public at risk for ongoing drug-resistant infections, and having to return to the hospital for another, and another, extended stay. When questioned about why they leave the hospital before being formally discharged by hospital staff, patients explain that quite simply they do not enjoy being there; for chronic drug users, an unpleasant hospital stay is o en exacerbated by severe and painful drug withdrawals, and by the general feeling that hospital staff, nurses, and clinicians, treat marginalized patients in their own words as ‘like junkies,’ ‘like we’re invisible,’ or ‘like garbage.’ Although in-patient antimicrobial treatment may be required for acute cases, patients can eventually receive follow-up treatments as out-patients or through home-based care. In the la er option, many patients receive daily visits from home care nurses who set up the intravenous antimicrobial drip in the patient’s home. However, health care professionals and administrators feel that this option is not feasible for patients who live in the Downtown Eastside and are either homeless or residing in single room occupancy hotels (SROs). Home care staff report feeling unsafe entering the rooms, hotels, and larger community – the la er constructed by the news media as ‘four blocks of hell’ where ‘even the trash collectors demand police protection.’11 Central to the health service delivery challenge, although muted by the biomedical emphasis on patient compliance, is the issue of safe, affordable housing for the urban poor in a community marked by gentrification and urban development plans geared towards the 2010 Olympic games.

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As a solution to the costliness, non-compliance, and the dissatisfaction of patients with hospital stays, the Health Authority developed a unit, similar to a ward, located in the Downtown Eastside community that is comprised of ‘nurses, physicians, case managers and others who provide support and medical care, including IV antibiotics to people with addiction issues in a transitional housing se ing.’12 On paper this reads like an innovative solution that could provide vulnerable patients with the care they need, part of the progressive B.C. approach to harm reduction, inner city health problems, and a housing crisis. But the politics surrounding the development and implementation of such a program are complicated, especially since many different institutions were involved in its development – the health authority, Providence Health Care, and the Portland Hotel Society; concerns about recovery, referral processes, the involvement of community, on-site illicit drug use, and conflicting visions regarding the aims and purpose of the program caused serious delays. Site location for the new facility was central in the debate that played out between key stakeholders (primarily a group of clinicians who specialize in addictions and inner city health) but in the end the Vancouver Coastal Health Board made the decision to situate the site in the Downtown Eastside. In part, site location was metonymic for a long-standing local war among politicians, researchers, and clinicians about the politics of harm reduction programming.13 Many of the clinicians believed that due to the acuity of the bacterial infections that patients needed to stop injecting drugs during their treatment (and indefinitely, if possible) and that was not possible if they were living in the Downtown Eastside – the space where they purchase and use. The one issue that all key players agreed on was that, in the end, there was a need to improve health services being delivered to Downtown Eastside residents in need of urgent treatment and care. The Health Authority contracted out most of the services to a community-based non-governmental organization (NGO) in the Downtown Eastside that provides housing for some of the hardest to house in the community and is a vocal activist agency for drug users in the community.14 The community care unit was developed in one of the infamous single-room occupancy hotels owned by the key community partner – the Portland Hotel Society. They also provided nonclinical staffing (support workers) and management staff. The floor in the SRO was renovated and at the time of this research renovation had just been completed. There were twelve independent patient rooms, a fresh coat of paint on all the walls, someone had made a serious (but

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failed) a empt at concealing the smell of urine in the front entrance stairwell, metal bars were added to the windows, and about eight video cameras were installed for ‘safety.’ Additional safety measures included two solid security doors requiring the front desk person to buzz visitors in. At the opposite end of the floor, there was a door that opened into another part of the SRO. Patients moved freely between both sides. Screams, shouts, and other loud noises characteristic of SROs were only slightly muffled by the door. Patients were allowed to bring their pets in – so while I was doing research, Smokie, a surly looking grey feline was a empting to keep the mouse infestation to a minimum. Almost all of the patients who had been admi ed to the care unit spoke highly of this alternative care model, some suggesting that without the program, they would be dead. They respected the staff,15 said they felt considerably healthier, some had gained weight, and all stated that they would recommend the program to others. And yet, I am le wondering if the development of such a program solves the challenge of delivering health care to marginalized patients. Most residents from the Downtown Eastside are constructed by health care professionals as difficult to treat, or ‘untreatable’ because they are o en non-compliant with their medical regimes (e.g., leaving against the advice of their clinicians), and because they have layered, complex health issues. Patients feel, and it o en appears as if they are right, that they are unwelcome in a tertiary care system that other Canadians are afforded as a public right as citizens. Is the argument to offer ‘clientcentred services’ in the Downtown Eastside actually working for vulnerable citizens, or is it working to simply contain and segregate the urban poor? Leaving the Downtown Eastside is a common theme in the narratives of community residents. Many reflect on the desire to return to rural-based home communities or simply to escape to neighbouring communities, like the Downtown or Grandview/ Woodland, that are perceived as less ‘dirty,’ as one participant explained to me; a community where they can walk down the street without being asked if they want to buy drugs. For individuals with addictions, the Downtown Eastside is a dangerous place – full of temptations difficult to resist. Street-side salesmen offer passersby a menu of what is for sale: ‘speed, weed, up, down.’ A empts at leaving the Downtown Eastside, finding safer, cleaner housing in other neighbourhoods in East Vancouver, for example, are met with frustration – when residents are forced to make the daily commute back to the Downtown Eastside to see their

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HIV specialist to pick up their methadone or their daily dispensed medicines. Many residents, and researchers, have a love/hate relationship with the Downtown Eastside – we are pulled there by powerful forces, o en unexplainable, yet we are o en trying to figure out ways to escape or simply depart. The clustering of health services in the Downtown Eastside, or more importantly, the lack of health services focusing on inner city health issues like HIV, addictions, and mental illness, in other areas of our city robs citizens of basic rights that the rest of us are afforded – specifically, geographical mobility and adequate health care. Surveillance, Abandonment, and the Neoliberal Project It is difficult to reflect critically on public health care and social welfare policies and services for the urban poor in our current neoliberal context of decreasing social welfare funding, especially when they emerge from communities self-identified as the le (because we run the risk of being accused of being right or conservative). The actions and relationships of Downtown Eastside residents are imbricated in myriad systems of monitoring, regulation, and service provision, all of which are characteristic of the ‘roll-out’ phase of neoliberalization (Peck & Tickell, 2002). During the earlier phase of welfare reform (the ‘rollback’ phase), welfare states like Canada experienced an economic restructuring that o en resulted in the withdrawal of services and the removal of funding from social welfare programming. Under the second phase of neoliberalization, Peck and Tickell identify the emergence of new institutional apparatuses whose purpose is to contain and discipline those marginalized under the neoliberal projects of the 1980s. And, indeed, the concentration and intensity of public health services in the Downtown Eastside challenges the notion that social welfare programs and health care are simply being cut or withdrawn.16 The experiences of Downtown Eastside residents and workers suggest that it is more complicated than this. Some organizations have faced serious cutbacks as a result of restructuring, especially those working with women; others have had continued ongoing support, and yet other organizations and programs have received new, revitalized funding from provincial and federal sources, especially those defined as offering harm reduction programming. In order to account for the asymmetrical and disparate changes in the Canadian welfare state, I draw on Kingfisher, who suggests the changes in the social welfare

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system, and public health as part of that, are best understood as a ‘realignment of the public and private’ (2002: 7). While some programs are reduced or eliminated, some are transferred to the private sector or non-governmental community-based organizations. The state o en reassigns responsibilities for social welfare and public health to non-state agencies and/or organizations which are forced by funding structures to ‘piece’ programs together with project funding (Sco , 2003). While theoretically the private sector and/or NGOs could continue to provide the same level of services and programs, we can assume that without government regulation and without the same level of resources that this will not, or does not as with my example earlier, provide the same quality – a mouse-infested SRO is not a viable alternative for hospital care in the treatment of very ill, marginalized populations. What this particular case illustrates is that neoliberalism works not only through traditional conservative or reform policies, but also through the politics and policies of the le . Such programming in the inner city does not seem inconsistent with CCF/NDP policy as illustrated by Carroll and Ratner (2005), who suggest that support for the provincial NDP in the 1990s in British Columbia waned among antipoverty activists as a result of punitive policies aimed at the unemployed. What we witness in the Downtown Eastside is the simultaneous marginalization and centralization of the urban poor. They have been marginalized from social life and formal economic systems, and yet have been spatially centralized so that they can be counted, observed, and regulated through an assemblage of medico-administrative technologies. With closer examination the community-based care unit noted above, fashioned by public health administrators as a politically progressive, client-based harm reduction service appears as a neoliberal project par excellence. As Schneiderman17 points out, the advances in social welfare and public health made in the twentieth century, specifically a universal Canadian health care plan and social welfare support, are being threatened. The extent of public health programs in the Downtown Eastside also represents a shi in the way that the Canadian state governs – the restructuring of public health responsibilities should be understood as a move towards a new technology of regulating and managing populations (Larner, 2000; Rose, 1993). Characteristic of the neoliberal shi , the state has shi ed responsibility for caring and security to individuals and communities. In part this refers to a move towards governmentality – where individuals are expected to monitor

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themselves (i.e., eat healthier, lose weight, stop engaging in ‘high risk behaviours’ in order to alleviate ‘strain’ on the health care system) but it also refers to a shi fiscally – where individuals or communities are expected to carry more of the cost (i.e., ‘user fees’ are being considered for the health care system; not-for profit organizations in the Downtown Eastside turn to industry funding – funding from large pharmaceutical corporations interested in the health of Downtown Eastside residents) (Foucault, 1991; O’Malley et al., 1997; Higgs, 1998). Under the new mode of governing, the state is no longer responsible for the health of its citizens; the quest for health is a ma er of individual action and choice – to no longer participate in unprotected sex, harmful drug use, practices, or ‘chaotic lives.’ Neoliberalism refocuses its emphasis on citizens being ‘responsible’ and ‘independent’ (Kingfisher, 2001). Responsibility is shi ed from the state to individuals, families, and communities. In the inner city space, individuals who are unable to care for themselves and are deserted by families (not necessarily for any reason that families can control),18 end up abandoned by all. Residents in the Downtown Eastside also voice concerns regarding the limitations of public health care services in the community. They are acutely aware of the sheer volume of organizations offering services, yet they are quick to point out that they are still hungry, homeless, and o en very ill. Of course, many organizations are understaffed, underfunded, and crammed into spaces too small for the large numbers of participants that they must serve. In part, this is an effect of economic restructuring in the health care sector – where organizations are forced to apply for ‘project’ funding without long-term operational funds that afford space, basic services, and permanent staffing (Sco , 2003). Health care professionals report similar feelings of frustration although they frame it differently. One health care provider working at a Downtown Eastside health clinic explained to me that she is aware that no one likes the ‘Big Brother’ system of constant surveillance where people are carefully tracked and monitored through new techno-scientific electronic systems, but her frustration with clients who see four different people at four different agencies for the same issue or ailment – trekking from Pender Street Health Clinic, to AIDS Vancouver, then to the Vancouver Native Health Society, and then to yet another public health clinic, has led her to support such a tracking system, as a way to save valuable time and medical resources. Yet in her reasoning she fails to mention that the reason that patients might see four different health care workers for the same issue is because at the end of the day the suffering

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patient is still seeking a solution or cure to his or her problems, or perhaps she or he is simply seeking human contact, or support, or, perhaps a commodity that can be sold or exchanged on the street. Nor does that health care provider recognize the immense amount of time and energy it takes for a patient to make his or her way around from one organization to the next, manoeuvring through the bureaucratic public health care system, and waiting endlessly in long line-ups to see a nurse or a support worker. Individuals seeking health care are shuffled around from one health service to another. They see lists of physicians, each one prescribing a different medicine, most of which do not aim to cure the patient, but simply hide or alleviate the symptoms. Many of these medicines are not well tolerated due to side effects which, in turn, must be treated with other medicines. An average list of medicines might include a combination of antiretroviral therapy, sleeping pills, Seroquel®, pain medication ranging from Tylenol 3s to liquid morphine, methadone, and vitamins. In fact, none of these medicines are known to cure any disease – including antiretroviral therapy that, while keeping people alive, are only a temporary solution and frequently result in side effects requiring additional pharmaceuticals. Patients are encouraged to change their ‘high-risk’ behaviours: to stop sleeping on the street (and embrace the mice- and bedbug-infested SROs with intense video-monitoring); to stop self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, even though there are no psychiatrists working in the entire Downtown Eastside to help individuals learn new coping strategies to deal with lifetimes of intense loss and trauma, not to mention that the mental health system is already overburdened; and to stop engaging in illegal forms of economic exchange, like sex work or drug dealing, even though no one is offering viable economic alternatives. Public health in the Downtown Eastside works to regulate individual lives in particular ways, to shape marginalized populations into particular types of citizens, in a particular geographical zone – one that, in spite of hundreds of organizations offering a multitude of services, appears to be a zone of abandonment. This is not a reflection of the hundreds of talented and passionate advocates and service providers in the Downtown Eastside, nor a problem with those who misuse drugs, the mentally ill, or the dispossessed. It is a predicament that we as social activists and researchers must struggle with, especially in our work with vulnerable people, but also as we wrestle with the collapse of the Canadian Keynesian welfare state and

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the emergence of a new form of control state (Deleuze, 1995). Existing inequities in health care and service provision to the urban poor are not being addressed in these new initiatives; instead, the urban poor are being further marginalized from basic health care and, worst of all, this marginalization is veiled by the rhetoric of ‘client-based care,’ ‘harm reduction,’ and humanitarianism. Woodsworth’s reputation as ‘an ‘icon’ of the Canadian le ’19 and the self-fashioning of medical researchers and public health administrators in contemporary public health politics as le -leaning social democrats has worked to silence critiques of the le from within the le . Woodsworth’s work and commitment to impoverished communities was not unproblematic, as highlighted by a number of the contributors to this volume. His discourses, especially in his earlier years of se lement work in Winnipeg, were layered with a language of exclusion and assimilation, which clearly delineated the differences between the white, working-class poor (the ‘deserving poor’) and the new immigrants and Aboriginal peoples (the ‘undeserving poor’).20 And yet, as Allen Mills has demonstrated, for the most part it was not reflected in his reputation as a humanitarian or a political activist. Although there may be a commitment to le politics, for both Woodsworth and the actors involved in social welfare and health care services in the Downtown Eastside today, it does not necessarily translate into practices or policies that are truly reflective of social democratic principles. Patient- or participant-centred approaches in impoverished communities like the Downtown Eastside are the best approaches to health care. The problem with contemporary patient-centred approaches, as discussed above, is that they are represented as participant-centred, portrayed as good-intentioned, le -leaning interventions, yet in practice they are part of the neoliberal agenda emphasizing regulation and monitoring rather than treatment; an agenda which is also resulting in the neoliberalization of the le .21 Rather than supporting the principles of social justice and democracy, including the ‘humanity first’ position of the early CCF party, these interventions work to erode them. In part, this is because politicians, including members of the NDP and public health administrators must reconcile the principles of the le community while accommodating, at least to some extent, the market and its actors (Carroll & Ratner, 2005). By discursively framing public health interventions as humanitarian, combined with public support from NDP leaders and juxtaposing them with Conservative policies, there is no room for the development of a political critique of everyday practices

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that contribute to poor health or further marginalize and stigmatize the urban poor. We need to create space from within the le for critical reflection on what constitutes progressive interventions for the urban poor so that new solutions can be imagined and implemented – solutions that are patient-centred in practice. Acknowledgments This chapter was originally presented in the session, ‘The Erosion of J.S. Woodsworth’s Legacy: Perspectives on Vancouver,’ at the Human Rights and Social Activism: Rethinking the Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth conference at Simon Fraser University in 2005. It has been shaped by endless discussions over the past several years regarding the ‘politics of care’ with Dara Culhane, Stacy Leigh Pigg, and Leslie Robertson. I am most indebted to Dara Culhane for sharing her thoughts on the ‘neoliberalization of the le ’ with me. I’d also like to thank Jane Pulkingham and the reviewers for their insightful comments on this chapter.

NOTES 1 This title builds on João Biehl’s research on social abandonment in Brazil (2005). 2 For example, see Wood et al. (2006). 3 See Biehl (2005) on abandonment and the state. 4 For critical discussions of humanitarianism and the politics of aid see Redfield (2008, 2006), Fassion (2007), Cooper and Packard (1997), and Mosse (2005). 5 The Downtown Eastside includes seven sub-areas: Strathcona, Gastown, Chinatown, Thornton Park, Victory Square, and Oppenheimer (Vancouver, City of, 2006). Although I use the Downtown Eastside throughout this essay, I am speaking usually to the sub-area known as Oppenheimer. I do not refer to it by this name but instead use the local idiom. The City defines Oppenheimer as running north to south from Alexander Street to Pender Street and west to east from Carroll Street to Heatley Street – approximately five blocks by four blocks. 6 Methamphetamine hydrochloride. 7 Vancouver, Greater Regional District (N.d.), Community Facts, B.C. Stats. Retrieved 13 May 2009 from h p://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/dd/facsheet/ cf170.pdf.

The Politics of Health in Vancouver’s Inner City 195  8 Reserves are in some ways similar to the American reservation system – government land set aside for the habitation and use of Canadian Aboriginal peoples as defined by the Indian Act.  9 The Vancouver Agreement is an intergovernmental partnership between the federal government, the provincial government of British Columbia, the municipal government of Vancouver, and private businesses and communities. Initiated in 2000 for five years, and then renewed until 2010, the Vancouver Agreement is an urban development initiative primarily focused on inner city revitalization, or urban renewal. One of the strategies that developed from the agreement is ‘A framework for action: A fourpillar approach’ – a plan to tackle the ‘drug problems’ of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside by addressing prevention, treatment, policing, and harm reduction (Vancouver, 2000). Many have suggested that the focus has been on enforcement (and perhaps harm reduction), while prevention and treatment have been ignored. 10 See Small (2007).  11 The headline for the Vancouver Sun, 8 Dec. 2006 (Steffenhagen, 2006). 12 VCHA pamphlet (Vancouver Community, 2005). 13 For a thorough and sensitive discussion of harm reduction policy and practices of the Downtown Eastside, see Roe (2005). 14 See Gurstein and Small (2005) for a detailed discussion of this organization. 15 Human resource choices are critical to inner city medical clinics and other social welfare programs. For the most part, staff hired at this site had been working in the neighbourhood at similar sites, serving similar – if not the same clients for many years. The nursing staff and the social support staff provided by the NGO partner self-identify themselves as a ‘different breed’ than those typically found in a traditional primary or urgent care se ing. Most critically they all embrace without hesitation a harm reduction paradigm in the care of drug-using populations. 16 It is well documented that the economic restructuring associated with the rise of neoliberalism in British Columbia, and Canada more broadly, has hurt the urban poor and had serious implications for their health and wellbeing (Macdonald, 1999; Goldberg & Wolanski, 2005; Morrow et al., 2004; Sco , 2003; Burnley et al., 2005). 17 David Schneiderman (in this volume). 18 By this I suggest that families, unable to cope with their own poverty, illness, or social situations, perhaps influenced by state actors or state practices like colonialism, may simply be unable to deal with the illness of family members. They may simply be inadequately prepared to deal with HIV, resulting in the unintended abandonment of family members.

196 Denielle Ellio 19 See Allen Mills (in this volume). 20 See, e.g., Woodsworth (1909); Mills (in this volume). 21 For a more detailed discussion of this process and how it plays out in the inner city of Canada, see Ellio (2008). For a more thorough discussion of the dilemma of the le , see Brown (1998).

REFERENCES Biehl, J. (2005). Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blomley, N. (2004). Unse ling the city: Urban land and the politics of property. New York: Routledge. Brown, W. (1998). Le Conservativism, I. Theory and Event 2.2. Retrieved from h p://musejhv.edu.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/journals/theory_and_event/ v002/2.3brown.html. Burnley, C., Ma hews, S., & McKenzie, S. (2005). Devolution of services to children and families: The experience of NPOs in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. Voluntas 16(1), 69–87. Carroll, W., & Ratner, R. (2005). The NDP regime in British Columbia, 1991– 2001: A post-mortem. CRSA/RCSA 42(2): 167–96. Clarke, A., Shim, J., Mamo, L., Fishman, J., & Fosket, J. (2003). Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness and U.S. medicine. American Sociological Review 68(2), 161–94. Cooper, F., & Packard, R. (Eds.). (1997). International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Culhane, D. (2003). Their spirits live within us: Aboriginal women in downtown eastside Vancouver. American Indian Quarterly 27(3/4), 593–606. Deleuze, G. (1990). Negotiations, 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press. Ellio , D. (2007). Medical research, pharmaceutical surveillance and biovalue among the urban poor. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University. — (2008). Ideology trumps science in the weird world of Harper’s neoconservatism: Contesting evidence and ideology in Canada’s inner city. Paper presented at the American Anthropology Association Annual Meetings, San Francisco. Fassin, D. (2007). Humanitarianism as a politics of life. Public Culture 19(3), 499–520.

The Politics of Health in Vancouver’s Inner City 197 Feldman, A. (2001). Philoctetes revisited: White public space and the political geography of public safety. Social Text 68(19), 57–89. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell (Ed.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, M., & Wolanski, K. (2005). Le behind: A comparison of living costs and employment assistance rates in British Columbia. Report prepared for Community Social Services Council of B.C. Vancouver: SPARC BC. Gurstein, P., & Small, D. (2005). From housing to home: Reflexive management for those deemed hard to house. Housing Studies 20(5), 717–35. Higgs, P. (1998). Risk, governmentality and the reconceptualization of citizenship. In G. Scambler & P. Higgs (Eds.), Modernity, medicine and health: Medical sociology towards 2000, 176–97. London: Routledge. Kingfisher, C. (2001). Producing disunity: The constraints and incitements of welfare work. In J. Goode & J. Maskovsky (Eds.), The new poverty studies: The ethnography of power, politics, and impoverished people in the United States, 273–92. New York: New York University Press. — (2002). Introduction: The global feminization of poverty. In C. Kingfisher (Ed.), Western welfare in decline: Globalization and women’s poverty, 3–12. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Larner, W. (2000). Post-welfare state governance: Towards a code of social and family responsibility. Social Politics 7(2), 244–65. Macdonald, M. (1999). Restructuring, gender and social security reform in Canada. Journal of Canadian Studies 34(2), 57–88. Miller, C., Strathdee, S., Spi al, P., Kerr, T., Li, K., Schechter, M., & Wood, E. (2006). Elevated rates of HIV infection among young Aboriginal injection drug users in a Canadian se ing. Harm Reduction Journal 3, 1–9. Morrow, M., Hankivsky, O., & Varcoe, C. (2004). Women and violence: The effects of dismantling the welfare state. Critical Social Policy 24(3), 358–84. Mosse, D. (2005). Cultivating development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. London: Pluto. O’Malley, P., Weir, L., & Shearing, C. (1997). Governmentality, criticism, politics. Economy and Society 26(4), 501–17. Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing space. Antipode 34(3), 380–404. Razack, S. (2002). Gendered racial violence and spatialized justice. In S. Razack (Ed.), Race, space and the law, 121–57. Toronto: Between the Lines. Redfield, P. (2006). A less modest witness: Collective advocacy and motivated truth in a medical humanitarian movement. American Ethnologist 33(1), 3–26. — (2008). Sacrifice, triage and global humanitarianism. In T. Weiss & M. Barne (Eds.), Humanitarianism in question: Politics, power, ethics, 196–214. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

198 Denielle Ellio Roe, G. (2005). Harm reduction as paradigm: Is be er than bad good enough? The origins of harm reduction. Critical Public Health 15(3), 243–50. Rose, N. (1993). Government, authority, and expertise in advanced liberalism. Economy and Society 22(3), 281–300. Sco , K. (2003). Funding ma ers: The impact of Canada’s new funding regime on nonprofit and voluntary sector organizations. O awa: Canadian Council on Social Development in partnership with the Coalition of National Voluntary Sector Organizations. Small, D. (2007). Fools rush in where angels fear to tread: Playing God with Vancouver’s supervised injection facility in the political borderland. International Journal of Drug Policy 18, 18–26. Spi al, P.M., Craib, K.J.P., Wood, E., Laliberté, N., Li, K., Tyndall, M.W., O’Shaughnessy, M.V., & Schechter, M.T. (2002). Risk factors for elevated HIV incidence rates among female injection drug users in Vancouver. Canadian Medical Association Journal 166(7), 894–9. Steffenhagen, J. (2006). Our four blocks of hell. Vancouver Sun, 8 Dec., A1. Tester, F., McNicoll, P., & Forsyth, J. (1999). With an ear to the ground: The CCF/NDP and Aboriginal Policy in Canada, 1926–1993. Journal of Canadian Studies 34(1), 52–74. Vancouver. (2000). Vancouver agreement 2005. An urban development agreement among Canada – British Columbia – Vancouver regarding economic, social, health and community development in the city of Vancouver. Retrieved 1 March 2007 from h p://www.vancouveragreement.ca/ TheAgreement.htm. Vancouver, City of. (2006). 2005/06 Downtown Eastside Community Monitoring Report, 10th ed. Retrieved 9 March 2008 from h p://www.city. vancouver.bc.ca/commsvcs/planning/dtes/pdf/2006MR.pdf. Vancouver Community. (2005). Community transitional care team. Vancouver: Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. Vancouver, Greater Regional District. (N.d.). Community Facts, B.C. Stats. Retrieved 13 May 2008 from h p://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/dd/facsheet/ cf170.pdf. Wood, E., Tyndall, M., Zhang, R., Stoltz, J., Lai, C., Montaner, J., & Kerr T. (2006). A endance at supervised injecting facilities and use of detoxification services. New England Journal of Medicine 354, 2512–14. Woodsworth, J.S. (1972) [1909]. Strangers within our gates, or coming Canadians. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

9 ‘Re-construction’ from the Viewpoint of Precarious Labour: The Practice of Solidarity geraldina polanco and cecily nicholson

In May 1919 thousands of workers in Winnipeg walked off the job, instigating one of the largest strikes in Canadian history. These striking workers demanded rights that are now taken for granted by many working in the formal labour market,1 including the right to collective bargaining, minimum wages, an eight-hour workday, and safe working conditions. As a key organizer and community leader, James Shaver Woodsworth participated in the Winnipeg strike, confronting the state and contesting the power of ‘the profiteers.’ He later weathered several years as a voice of dissent and leadership within government. He advanced principles central to today’s welfare state such as the provision of social welfare, health care, education, social insurance, and a standard of living that guaranteed shelter, leisure, political representation, and for women an equal pay for equal work.2 These were radical notions in their day and time. Today, even while we disagree with Woodsworth’s views on citizenship and we argue for a more inclusive view of labour, we find his call for social change and social action compelling.3 In Re-construction: From the Viewpoint of Labour, Woodsworth writes: ‘we lack imagination. We accept things as they come to us and imagine that “as it was in the beginning, is now, it ever shall be a world without end”... It may take time to build a new social order, but let us try as far as we can draw a plan and then, as opportunity is given us, work to our plan’ (1922: 8). Here we wish to take up Woodsworth’s call to be more imaginative and to work to build a new social order based in social justice; we appreciate this provocation and see the task as one that clearly is yet to be fulfilled. In this chapter, we reflect on the contemporary face of one dimension of Woodsworth’s legacy – the quest to establish and strengthen

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labour rights and protections – and challenges to this quest. These challenges can be grouped into two interlinking sets. One set of challenges pertains to the nature or substance of labour rights protections. Given that Canada now brings in more temporary workers every year than it does immigrants, we focus here on the situation of temporary workers and in particular, one subset of temporary workers, live-in caregivers. The other set of challenges pertains to ma ers of social change and organizational praxis – the need to build a more inclusive set of practices to effect social change. The struggle to shore up workers’ rights continues to resonate among ‘le ’ social activists, yet it is an effort that is emba led and at risk of faltering. In an era of neoliberal economic restructuring, the protections and rights that have been established are under a ack from those who depict former and current provisions as inefficient and unaffordable. Concurrently, assumptions regarding race, citizenship, ethnicity, and gender continue to striate and marginalize certain groups,4 even among those who favour enhancing the protection of workers’ rights, as Woodsworth’s assumptions and legacy also reveal The result is that many workers continue to be excluded from or are but marginally covered by labour provisions, thereby limiting the nature of the human rights protections they are afforded. Here we highlight the contemporary labour and human rights plight of a particular group of marginalized women5 in Canada – that of women working as live-in caregivers under Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Programme (LCP). At the same time, we briefly discuss the work of a few community organizations whose mandate includes support for these and similar workers. Their efforts also shed light on the complex sets of changes that have to occur if all workers’ rights are to be protected. The LCP lends itself to making explicit the ways in which Canadian labour provisions fit within the context of contemporary neoliberal global economic restructuring, as well as the international and transnational global labour networks that form the fabric of this economic system. The most menial, dangerous, and stigmatized forms of service and care work are disproportionately performed by racialized women. In the context of the Canadian state, many of these women are migrant labourers, further compounding their already marginal position as racialized persons. As we will be demonstrating, the LCP is a prime example of a precarious labour niche, characterized by ‘job insecurity, low wages, limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, and a lack of control over the

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labour process’ (Vosko, 2004: 4). Such precarious working conditions place many women in dangerous and unhealthy situations. The disregard for these women’s safety rests on the idea of their ‘disposability’ (in part informed by hegemonic ideals of who belongs in Canada), and fuelled by normatively high levels of poverty and neglect. For women working under the LCP, the volatility of their experiences within the Canadian state extends beyond their encounters in the workplace. Their official migrant status as ‘temporary’ workers and hence non-citizens restricts their access to accredited education and institutionalized forms of labour and political representation. Many precarious workers experience poverty and a lack of access to formal education. This exclusion is compounded by a general lack of concern for securing and protecting avenues for political and cultural representation.6 A corollary argument we present here, then, is that integral to the task of a ending to the question of labour rights and protections is the necessity to engage in a more critical consideration of organizational praxis, or how to go about practising social change. This includes questions about what and how it means to be ‘inclusive’ or to provide ‘access’ to rights and protections afforded by the state. Following the discussion of the LCP and precarious labour, we turn to a discussion about progressive and inclusive organizational praxis and how Woodsworth’s legacy figures within this praxis. This issue is central if we are to advance efforts to establish and strengthen labour rights and protections, particularly in the case of marginalized persons. The Live-in Caregiver Programme: Precarious Labour, Disposable Workers Today, as in Woodsworth’s day, gendered and racialized assumptions about who ‘belongs’ in Canada are mapped onto labour and immigration policies. The LCP provides a clear example of how the scope of citizenship is circumscribed by the nature of labour rights and protections afforded workers, and how Woodsworth’s views on citizenship figure within this relationship The LCP also provides an example of the evolving trend towards ‘precariousness’ in the labour force. While the terms non-standard work and precarious labour are sometimes used interchangeably, this practice is problematic because the former term suggests a false sense of labour homogeneity. In using the term nonstandard work, the trope of the full-year, full-time, single employer, job-for-life employment scenario within the formal labour market is

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reified; non-standard work comes to encompass any and all forms of employment that deviate from the purported standard employment relationship. Yet for many workers, the so-called standard employment relationship never was a reality; in particular, it ‘never took hold for the predominantly women and immigrant workers in small and decentralized workplaces in the service and competitive manufacturing sectors’ (Cranford, Vosko, & Zukerwich, 2003: 7). Facilitated by Canadian labour and immigration policies, the LCP operates as a marginalized and precarious labour niche. The program brings ‘foreign’ domestic service workers to work in the homes of Canadian families with dependent children and/or elderly and infirm family members. Under the LCP, workers are required to live in the homes of their employers while being provided with a private and furnished room, which they pay for through deductions from wages. The provincial labour legislation governing other workers is said to apply to live-in caregivers, including minimum wage legislation, the length of the workday, and holiday and overtime legislation. However, as we shall describe below, positioning temporary workers as migrant workers facilitates the violation of labour legislation that is supposedly in place to protect them. At present in Canada, more than 90 per cent of live-in caregivers that work under the LCP are from the Philippines (CBC, 2005). The program was enacted on 27 April 1992 (Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2002) and is the latest in a series of Canadian policies governing domestic workers. The use of racialized women as domestic workers has a long history in Canada, commencing with Aboriginal women and black slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Grassroots Women, 2005: 16). In the early twentieth century Canada began to recruit domestic workers from abroad, with a preference for women racialized as ‘white.’ Most of those recruited at the time were young British women, who were particularly welcomed and esteemed as ‘they were regarded as future wives who could establish a household, populate Canada and ensure the survival of British culture’ (Langevin & Belleau, 2000: 19–20). It was only when Europe could no longer meet the demand for domestic workers that foreign women regarded as being of ‘colour’ were considered as potential replacements; potential replacements, that is, to perform the domestic labour. From 1955 to 1967, Canada recruited women from Jamaica and Barbados to do domestic work. These women were to work ‘as live-in

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domestics to provide affluent Canadian families with cheap home child care service and domestic labour’ (Fleras & Ellio , 2003: 150). The women who came to Canada under this program were approved permanent residency, granted they worked as domestics for one year. But in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, immigration policies in Canada started to become much more restrictive. In 1967 the point system became institutionalized as the primary structure governing Canadian immigration policy, and to this day it remains the primary system governing immigration to Canada for those applying for landed immigrant status. However, in 1973 the Temporary Non-Immigrant Employment Authorization Program became the principal system governing temporary and migrant workers. This program also governed foreign domestic workers, and imposed on them more limitations and afforded them fewer rights as workers than previously. Under this program, it became mandatory that domestic recruits work for a specific employer, and at the same time, they were no longer granted permanent residency. Rather, ‘a er working in Canada for an average of three years, domestics were required to return to their countries of origin’ (Langevin & Belleau, 2000: 20). In 1981 the Foreign Domestic Movement (FDM) became the operative program governing domestic workers, followed in 1992 by the Live-In Caregiver Programme. The LCP resembles its predecessor in its tight barriers and obstacles to establishing landed immigrant status or citizenship in Canada. According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) live-in caregivers are: ‘economic migrants granted permanent resident status a er their participation in the Live-In Caregiver program. This program brings temporary residents to Canada as live-in employees to work without supervision in a private household to care for children, seniors or people with disabilities. Participants in this program may apply for permanent resident status within three years of arrival in Canada a er completing two years of employment as live-in caregivers’ (2002, n.p.). The majority of the women who work under the LCP are from the Philippines; in 2004 they constituted more than 90 per cent of those working under the program (CBC, 2005). For women from the Philippines, a central motivation for working under this program is that it permits them to apply for an open visa a er two full years of employment. Eventually they are able to apply for landed immigrant status (Pra , 1997). The LCP is, ultimately, a means by which migrant labourers (in this case caregivers) combat exclusionary immigration policies. Since in Canada more people are accepted as temporary labourers than

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as landed immigrants (Baines & Sharma, 2002), the LCP is one way to begin the immigration process. The LCP is an a ractive program for residents of the global South who are in search of be er living conditions. There are, however, risks for these migrant workers that result from the structure of this program. For example, caregivers’ living circumstances, financial well-being, and immigration status are all dependent on their employer, resulting in extremely unequal power relations. This stems from the requirement that live-in caregivers live and work in the homes of their employers, be paid by their employers, and complete their two years as live-in caregivers before they can apply for landed immigrant status. This serves to make live-in caregivers particularly susceptible to abuse. This susceptibility is aided and abe ed by the unwillingness of the government to intervene to protect these ‘non-citizen’ employees. One of the most significant limitations affecting the labour experiences of live-in caregivers is the ‘temporary status’ these workers occupy. It is precisely because of this status that live-in caregivers are not empowered to practise the limited rights the state does extend to them, both in relation to their employers and to the state itself. As these workers are not considered to be immigrants or permanent residents, they cannot easily leave an abusive working environment in favour of a job in another sector as they are only permi ed to work as live-in caregivers. If they decide to work as live-in caregivers for an employer other than the one who initially sponsored them to come to Canada through the LCP, the fees and requirements to establish a new work permit are time consuming and financially prohibitive. Similarly, time spent not working does not count towards the twenty-four-month period that must be completed before these workers can apply for permanent residency status. Another significant limitation of the LCP is the stipulation that caregivers must live in the home of their employer. This makes possible many forms of abuse, such as requiring caregivers to work excessively long hours on any given day or over the course of a week; it also makes more probable instances of sexual abuse. While there is provincial employment standards legislation regulating the rate of pay and working conditions (e.g., overtime) for women working under the LCP, these provisions vary from province to province and are not always enforced. Indeed evidence indicates that ‘overtime, resulting from the obligation to live in the home of the employer, is rarely paid’ (Langevin & Belleau, 2000: 59).

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As mentioned previously, the majority of women who toil under the LCP are from the Philippines (CBC, 2005; Langevin & Belleau, 2000; Pra , 2005, 1997), and the economic prospects for many in the Philippines are dire, especially for the most marginalized citizens of that country. But the requirements of the LCP make it impossible for the most marginalized women from the Philippines to participate in the LCP. In fact, many of the women who come to Canada from the Philippines through the program have university degrees (Pra , 1999). As a result, the LCP entrenches and exploits the classed nature of the North-South divide both in terms of class oppression within the North and South respectively, as well as between the North and South. As Munck argues with respect to the classed relations between the North and South, ‘the ‘push and pull’ of migration is determined by the overarching socioeconomic inequalities between the global North and the global South as workers seek out be er conditions, usually at great personal risk and cost’ (2005: 107). Besides being burdened with years of colonization, in more recent decades the Philippines, like many other southern countries, accumulated extreme levels of debt owed to international financial institutions as a result of changes in the global economy, the politics of petrol and oil scarcity, and within the Philippines itself, corrupt and inhumane national leadership. While the Philippine government has been coerced into restructuring its economy in a way that ensures that it pays back its ‘debt,’ at present one of its primary strategies for doing so is by exporting its people: ‘exporting workers and receiving remi ances are means for governments to cope with unemployment and foreign debt ... the Philippine government ... expanded and diversified the concept of exporting its citizens as a way of dealing with unemployment and securing needed foreign exchange reserves through their remi ances’ (Sassen, 2004: 101). In fact, ‘caregivers from the Philippines support one-third of the population of that country. Three million women working overseas (most of them caregivers) send $5 billion home to their country, managing to support about 20 million people in that country’ (Langevin & Belleau, 2000: 21). Foreign debt has now replaced the role of economic colonization, thus perpetuating relations of domination and subordination, this time through the medium of loans (McMichael, 2004). Indeed, most of the remi ances coming into the Philippines are being used for the purpose of paying back foreign debt, lending credence to Daly and Lynn’s point (2002) that marginalized peoples and classes end up burdened with the task of paying back large loans to international financial institutions.

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The LCP also entrenches class-based and racialized social divisions within Canada because of the way it addresses the care needs of children, the disabled, and elderly for the more affluent while ignoring these same needs faced by others. For instance, the majority of Canadians who employ live-in caregivers are ‘involved in the business sector, with a gross annual income of at least $100,000’ (Langevin & Belleau, 2000: 22). Most people in Canada who access these high incomes are persons racialized as being ‘white.’ Conversely, while the LCP is a feasible option for the privileged who can afford to ‘house,’ ‘feed’ and pay (low wages) for the services of a live-in caregiver, ‘the majority of families have been forced to continue relying on informal childcare arrangements as there are never enough affordable or accessible childcare spaces for all children in Canada’ (Grassroots Women, 2005: 18). This situation is especially difficult for Aboriginal peoples, recent immigrants, and people of colour, given that they tend to inhabit the lower rungs of the socioeconomic hierarchy. Although child care work is poorly compensated in general, live-in caregivers are even more poorly remunerated than other workers in the child care sector because of the gendered nature of carework, the devaluation of caregiving activities generally, and the invisibility of caregiving undertaken in the privacy of the home se ing. Naturalized assumptions about the gendered division of caring mean that this labour o entimes is not seen as real ‘work.’ As Geraldine Pra notes, ‘if nannies are constructed as other than employees and their jobs not quite as jobs, wage levels and working conditions unacceptable to Canadian citizens are legitimated. It justifies a different standard of fair compensation for women who are other than Canadian’ (1997: 160). However, the LCP is problematic not just because women are disproportionately responsible for reproductive labour or because when they undertake this work for pay, they are poorly paid. The LCP is problematic because the racialized commodification of reproductive labour entrenched by the program creates new forms of social exclusion and remarginalizes particular groups of women (typically women from the global South). More affluent women in Canada (disproportionately women racialized as ‘white’) are able to ‘get ahead’ occupationally because they and their families are able to offload reproductive responsibilities onto mostly women of colour. As a result, ‘the growing social differentiation within women as a social category takes its sharpest form with migrant domestic workers servicing the needs of the Northern “mistress”... the Western professional woman needs a “wife”

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to take over her caring role, and this role is o en filled by third-world women ... This accentuation of divisions between women has created new forms of social exclusion’ (Munck, 2005: 84). The LCP embodies and replicates racist nationalist ideologies that configure and make possible the ‘migrant worker.’ As Sharma (2002: 24) argues, ‘nationalist ideologies ... [rely] upon racist ideologies to make common-sense of the negative duality between Canadians and foreigners.’ Within this nationalist ideology Canadians are racialized as ‘white,’ while ‘foreigners’ are all ‘Others’ and racialized as ‘of colour.’ Ghassan Hage explores this process within the context of Australia. He argues that the fantasy of the ‘white nation’ is a fantasy of white supremacy wherein legal immigrant status is based not only on a binary between those who ‘belong’ versus those who are legally constituted as ‘foreigners’ but also on a binary notion of how people ‘look’: ‘when ... people who embrace the White nation fantasy look at a migrant, what they differentiate between are ... those who are Third World-looking and those who are not’ (2000: 18–19). We suggest that a similar nationalist fantasy of white supremacy currently operates in Canada and has long contributed to dominant constructions of Canadian national identity. Woodsworth, for instance, subscribed to a white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon supremacy fantasy, as seen in his book Strangers within Our Gates (1909) (see Coleman, in this volume). Dhruvarajan confirms this white supremacy fantasy in Canada, suggesting that the nationalist story is one of a country of white se lers; through this white se ler nationalist story people of colour are regarded as strangers and outsiders to the nation (2002: 100). Similarly, as Abele and Stasiulis (1989) note, when one emphasizes Canada’s white se er history, Canada’s Aboriginal peoples also are also rendered invisible. From a labour perspective this white supremacy fantasy adds to the maintenance of highly exploitative labour practices and the more dangerous niches of the precarious labour continuum such as that in which the LCP operates. It accomplishes the same for labour niches in which Aboriginal peoples are disproportionately represented. In the former case, ‘Third World-looking’ Filipino women are rendered ‘Outsiders’ and framed as not ‘belonging.’ Hence they are deemed to be ‘unimportant’ to the nation. Consequently they are discursively objectified; objectified in a manner that a empts to make them ‘non-existent’ and beyond the normative concerns of the Canadian citizenry. This ‘nonexistent’ status makes them disposable vis-à-vis the ethics of the state,

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exacerbating their already precarious position. As such, in order to truly enact an improvement in the situation of those precariously and/ or dangerously employed, we must also critically interrogate our racialized (and otherwise informed) assumptions about who ‘belongs’ in Canada. Beyond Labour Rights The Live-In Caregiver Programme demonstrates Canada’s dependency on the labour of particular women. The experiences of women hired through the LCP reveal key dynamics of globalized processes through which they are rendered flexible, exploitable, and ultimately disposable. Generally, being restricted to underpaid, low-waged, unstable, part-time, and/or precarious work results in subsequent barriers to accessing education, labour, and political representation and cultural and knowledge production. Therefore, what it means to enact solidarity moves practice well beyond the scope of simply demanding be er labour rights. Much more critical a ention needs to be given to questions about how to go about the practice of social change in ways that are inclusive and accessible. This entails honouring principles generally espoused by Woodsworth, while moving beyond the kinds of activities and associations that Woodsworth would have considered desirable. As Chariandy (in this volume) argues, Woodsworth ‘imagine[d] the debate on ethnic minorities occurring among an Anglo-Canadian audience without the presence, or at least comfortable participation, of ethnic minorities.’ We move beyond this aspect of Woodsworth’s legacy, and in the following section articulate a need for more responsible ways to organize for change that acknowledge problems of representation, communication and material barriers. While progressive academics and organizers recognize that citizenship, education, mobility, and other markers of privilege simultaneously benefit their position and limit their ability to engage in community-based analysis with marginalized, subordinated, and exploited peoples, it remains a struggle to legitimize and prioritize the need to address these sets of issues within academia. On the other hand, these issues are more broadly recognized in the practice of local, globally linked, community work. In the remainder of this chapter we consider a few examples of this kind of work. In Canada it is Aboriginal women, ‘non-status’ migrant workers, and ‘women of colour’ who are generally among the most subordinated and exploited groups of people (Grassroots Women, 2005).

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As Geraldine Pra (2005) observes, marginalization is an experience shared by women who come from ‘within’ as well as ‘outside’ of Canada. She points out that disparate groups engaged in various forms of precarious work share a similar experience by virtue of being located at the margins of the Canadian nation. They are therefore also excluded from the nationalist white supremacy fantasy and hence beyond the normative concern of the Canadian citizenry. For example, Pra observes a parallel between the fate of Vancouver’s ‘missing women’7 (a disproportionate number of whom are Aboriginal) and the experiences of Filipino nannies. Based on her collaborative work with the Vancouver Philippine Women Centre on Filipina domestic workers, Pra suggests that the ‘experience of being stigmatized as a prostitute [also] haunts Filipino domestic workers’ (2005: 1057) because both sets of workers are located at the margins of the Canadian nation state by virtue of their respective racialized historical geographies. As Pra elaborates, in the case of Vancouver’s ‘missing women’ and Filipina domestic workers, ‘women’s claims to rights are compromised by the fact that they embody particular racialized historical geographies. These racialized geographies nonetheless locate them at the limits of the Canadian nation ... One haunts the nation-state from “within” as a reminder of the inability of the state to conclude the act of colonization, the other marks a troubled passage from “outside” ’ (2005: 1057–8). Both groups of labourers occupy a deeply marginalized position within gendered, precarious labour niches. Although the specific aspects of their work differ, they have in common the exposure to violence, exploitation, and stigmatization directly related to pejorative, racialized designations within the context of the Canadian state and nation. The disproportionate presence of Aboriginal women in the survival sex industry and among those missing in Vancouver is linked to high levels of economic poverty, the significant likelihood of exposure to violence for Aboriginal women and girls, high rates of child apprehension, and the general concentration of Indigenous people in Western Canadian inner cities. But these conditions are not an isolated occurrence geographically or otherwise. For example, the Sisters in Spirit campaign of the federally funded Native Women’s Association of Canada calls a ention to alarmingly high rates of violence against Aboriginal women in Canada and the fact that there are over five hundred Aboriginal women who have gone missing in communities across Canada in the past twenty years. Patricia Monture-Agnus, Sherene Razack, and Kat Norris also draw a ention to violence against Aboriginal men

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that is a regular aspect of policing and incarceration in Canada. What these writers and activists draw a ention to is the relationship between contemporary experiences of violence among Aboriginal peoples and the legacy of colonial practices that accompany European se lement. These practices include the forced displacement of Indigenous people, the suppression of language and culture, the imposition of residential schools, child apprehension, colonial governance systems, the of land and resource expropriation, and exclusion from the Canadian nation. Even while we draw a ention to similarities in the structural circumstances that lead to the marginalization of Aboriginal and Filipino women, at the same time it is critical to avoid generalizing the experience of Aboriginality and conflating the experiences of domestic workers and survival sex workers, or associating this work solely with the racial categories of those disproportionately present in these industries. This tendency, prevalent in corporate media, is reductive and dangerous. We would emphasize however, as Pra and others do, the related material, spatial, and discursive functions that are contributing to the specific marginalization of both groups of women particularly as related to nationhood. This legislated and constructed marginal status fosters conditions that contribute to their harm, levels of abuse, and literal and figurative disposability. The narratives of ‘disposable’ workers are synecdochic of common, global, gendered, and racialized labour experiences. In the effort to enact social change, recognizing common barriers manifest in the Canadian (formal/informal) labour market can also provide a unifying basis to organizational praxis. The precariousness of marginalized women’s working conditions has ramifications beyond the work se ing. Precarious working conditions restrict women’s access to education and institutionalized forms of political representation. Limited access to the production of knowledge, cultural politics, and representational security further compounds the economic poverty experienced by Aboriginal women and women racialized as ‘of colour’. Therefore it is not enough to focus social change efforts on ‘universalizing’ labour rights. Rather, if the desire is to improve labour protections, then this must be undertaken as part of broader resistance strategies that foster enabling conditions with a deeper commitment to alternative ways of organizing for change. This requires moving beyond what Woodsworth advocated in respect to how social justice should be enacted, and who ought to figure prominently in the process. The practices we advocate here, in stark contrast to Woodsworth’s, are commi ed to foregrounding those

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who have been marginalized by complex and historically oppressive conditions – not as individual problems to be solved or communities that require assistance – but as collaborative allies, sources of analysis, vision, and shared resolution. Solidarity Forever If we are prepared to acknowledge the substantial power differentials that characterize and reinforce categories of difference (and not simply to ‘celebrate’ these differences), then we must build associations in ways that work to overcome these dynamics by equalizing power among those involved while addressing our broader political goals. ‘Real political change,’ David Harvey (2000: 234) argues, ‘arises out of simultaneous and loosely coordinated shi s in both thinking and action across several scales (either simultaneously or sequentially).’ While Harvey outlines critical ‘theatres of insurgent activity’ (p. 234), his observations in this context, about how insurgents might configure and practice ‘association’ and ‘combine action on all fronts’ (p. 253) are limited to more theoretically inclined discussions. In contrast, there are a number of feminist and anti-oppression theorists (for instance) whose work engages the specific, concrete concerns of how to effect political change ‘on the ground.’ In order to enact solidarity, we need to forge these separate spheres of activity and theoretical discussion. Gloria Anzaldúa states: ‘It is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed ... both are reduced to a common denominator of violence ... the counterstance [is] a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life’ (1999: 100). As Anzaldúa observes, remaining in an oppositional stance is in many ways unsustainable over the long run, and it is not necessarily effective in neutralizing or negating structures of dominance. The practical implications of this insight can be seen in the emergence of alternative political mobilization strategies and community-building practices among those working for social justice. Given the indignity of constantly asking for space, recognition, and legitimacy, marginalized people have long struggled to build autonomous spaces for community, organizing, and support. There are many examples of local community groups and organizations labouring to build these kinds of spaces for social change. Successful alternative structures and networks

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may combine notions such as ‘communal ownership, collective responsibility, anti-oppression practice, decentralized, environmentally sustainable, community-based standards for justice, self-regulation and self-policing [and] recognition of various forms of leadership’ (Walia, 2006).8 These are difficult principles to put into practice yet they are of utmost importance in comba ing paternalistic practices of organizing and realizing the objectives of social justice. An example of these efforts can be found in the work of the Kalayaan Centre of Vancouver which provides resources and social supports for the local Filipino community, in particular LCP workers. This centre and the various organizations that work out of its premises pursue the ‘rights and welfare of and social justice for Filipinos in Canada, while supporting the struggle for human rights, national freedom and democracy of the Filipino people.’9 In Vancouver, the Kalayaan Centre is at the forefront of efforts to redefine labour rights and struggles, and it does so in part by participating in coalition building and engaging in cultural and knowledge production for Filipino people. Some of these coalitions and alliances include academics, feminist research institutes, and grassroots organizations (e.g., the FREDA Centre for Research on Violence against Women and Children, the former Status of Women Canada, and the UBC Centre for Research in Women’s and Gender Studies). The Kalayaan Centre and its various affiliates have also engaged in collaborative art projects addressing the theme of migration. Within these struggles, collective and collaborative efforts at demonstrating a cultural politics are also being recognized as critical paths of resistance to global neoliberalism and other systems of oppression. In his discussion of ‘the New Ethnicities’ movement, David Chariandy recognizes such cultural and political work as proceeding not with some limited framework of ‘identity politics,’ but as ‘an open-ended effort to negotiate the best of one’s heritage in light of other equally indispensable concerns and factors such as class, gender, sexuality, the environment, disability, etc.’10 The Kalayaan Centre is one example of a marginalized community’s integrated efforts to effect labour rights while addressing systemic factors and dominant cultural assumptions. Fraught Processes We embrace J.S. Woodsworth’s call to advance a new social order while recognizing his limitations and the historical and social context within which he lived and worked. Rather than focus a critique on Woodsworth’s

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individual legacy, however, we are more concerned with similarities in the discursive practices and beliefs, as well as the social and material relations that continue to undermine progressive social movements. As Daniel Coleman observes, problems that are ‘deep-rooted and ongoing’ characterize Woodsworth’s times as well as our own.11 This legacy of fraught organizational practices and unexamined hierarchies of power with regard to classed, raced, and gendered processes, and issues such as sexuality and ability, have created significant disconnects for, and reasonable scepticism on the part of, marginalized people. This historical legacy has created obstacles to the realization of social justice initiatives, such as collaboratively established improvements in the situation of those precariously and or dangerously employed. There are many marginalized groups and community organizations that are unable or unwilling to establish relationships with formal institutions, labour unions, or government-funded bodies even while they respect different forms of political mobilization, community-building processes, and places. For those who do wish for ad hoc or sustained relations with more privileged, institutionalized arenas, they commonly find it difficult to access or be represented in these arenas. As a result, contending with issues of representation that arise in coalition building is a regular component of the ‘actual’ political work of marginalized groups engaged in community building for change. One key issue progressive coalitions and alliances face is how to mutually respect processes of self-determination on the part of those whose presence is consistently (and historically) tokenized, mediated, interpreted, isolated, and outright silenced. Self-determination is not something that can be done on anyone’s behalf. Yet those who are marginalized or tokenized are also not wholly or equally present in most of these encounters. This absence must continuously be restated. Although many communities have limited access to institutional and other organizational contexts this does not necessarily mean that marginalized people are completely absent from these spaces. A working day of consultations cannot occur without caregivers, secretaries, and sandwich makers, even if these workers o en go unnoticed. The experiences of the instructor, student, and janitor all contribute to the production of the classroom space, even if they do not do so with equal benefit. As these examples indicate, while we normalize the labour of different groups of people, this does not necessarily mean that the people who perform this work are considered to be a part of these institutional or organization spaces, in a normative sense. Similarly, communities with

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limited access to institutional and economic power nevertheless struggle to produce and communicate their own ideas through materials such as the ‘grey literature’ of non-profits, community forums, storytelling, testimonies, and other individual and collective works. O en distributed electronically, this material provides avenues for marginalized groups to articulate themselves. Yet marginalized people who try to communicate their ideas are o en violated in these efforts because of the way their issues are taken up in corporate media and popular discourses. For example, stereotypes that form around ‘the migrant’ and ‘welfare queen’ o en obscure marginalizing conditions legislated by the state. While the problems of deeply hierarchal structures and relations may be engrained, the category of who is marginalized (or privileged) constantly shi s. Indeed in Woodsworth’s time, many considered to be ‘Outsiders’ were persons who today would be welcomed as belonging to the nation. Gayatri Spivak reminds us that once ‘communication is established between a member of a subaltern group and the circuits of citizenship or institutionality, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony’ (1999: 310).12 If the goals are collective and geared towards social justice, there really is no comfortable position on this path. For example, as producers and legitimators of culture, academic social activists ‘are the group most closely aligned to the colonizers in terms of their class interests, their values and their ways of talking’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999: 69). Similar issues arise for other privileged political activists. Therefore, we must always be conscious of and vigilant about how, individually and collectively, we reinforce structures of oppression. This is the case even where we identify as marginalized persons ourselves. As we also advocate from intersections of privilege we are unavoidably complicit in structures of oppression and must therefore enact sustained resistance in order to be accountable. One of the ways we can do this is by interrogating the category of marginalized itself even as we apply and rely on this concept. Revisions Inclusive practices go beyond a concern for more specific material supports (such as child care, transportation, food, building access, sustained outreach and translation services) in order to make it possible for people who o en are marginalized to participate. Though necessary, these are not enough. Difficulties in communication and a lack of respect for

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all kinds of knowledge, cultural world views, and knowledge systems contribute to processes of marginalization. The complexity of oppression and privilege make the practice of communication across difference challenging: ‘the potential for both multiple and conflicting experiences of subordination and power require a more wide-ranging and complex terrain of analysis’ (McCall, 2005: 1780). The effort of this analysis ideally must be shared. The standpoints of those who have been subjugated are not ‘innocent positions’ (Haraway, 1991: 191), as indeed no stance can be. However, if approaches to learning, working, and organizing are to realize and sustain solidarity, then these processes must be informed through ‘shared conversations in epistemology’ (ibid.). And further, the language, ideas, and theory by and of ‘the oppressed’ ought to be foregrounded in direct and heterogeneous forms whether through the ‘informal’ materials produced by marginalized groups or the inclusion of more diverse theory and published texts. Though these sets of concerns were largely absent in Woodsworth’s time and in his own efforts to advance social justice, today these concerns are present but not adequately advanced. As women engaged in organizing for change, we are located in complex ways at intersections of gendered, racialized, and other social, political, economic, and cultural conditions. This complexity is o en obscured or simplified by unexamined practices. Organizational and academic work geared towards progressive social change requires approaches that actively work to reveal differences and, further, that challenge marginalizing discourses as well as oppressive material relations. One of the ways these relations can be understood within academia is through feminist intersectional analysis. Leslie McCall defines intersectionality as ‘the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations’ (2005: 1771). This approach she observes in some feminist analyses produces new methodological problems.13 A practical a empt to address methodological implications of this approach is evident in the work of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW), Intersectional Feminist Frameworks: An Emerging Vision (2006). Processes of communication, decision-making, pedagogy, and organizing continue to have transformative, even radical, potential. However, if these practices are engaged without a commitment to anti-oppressive learning, participation is dictated by unexamined hierarchies and implicit privileges that create barriers to accessibility. This is especially daunting for those marginalized workers for whom gaining access to institutional or formal

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structures of learning and organization are generally denied. Organizers, including all categories of women, must struggle with how to provide actual space for marginalized women to speak for themselves. We must also work harder to name the limitations and complicity of our own privileged positions. Conclusion As a leader in the quest for the rights of labourers, farmers, and to a significant degree, immigrants, Woodsworth pursued social justice through forums easily recognizable today – the Church, labour unions, coalitions, published texts, political parties, and the parliamentary process. In Canada, Woodsworth helped form new avenues for this kind of work in order to realize his vision of social activism. He contributed, for example, to the formation of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Federated Labour Party, and perhaps most notably, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Concerns for workers’ safety, the right to a living wage, the security of unions, and more specific provisions such as an old age pension and unemployment insurance were critical in Woodsworth’s day, as they are today. Pursuing these goals entailed imagining a polity that could access unions, electoral politics, and parliamentary decision-making. In addition, Woodsworth was part of a broader movement that sought an ideal citizenry that would be educated, socially engaged, and as workers – united. Yet, we can clearly observe that in Woodsworth’s day, as in ours, there are systematic exclusions to this ideal polity – individuals who are in a variety of ways ‘foreign’ to the construction of who is ‘from’ or ‘of’ Canada, including Indigenous peoples rendered invisible by the (violent) imposition of a se ler nation. Even so, Woodsworth’s efforts were strategic in the development of Canada’s welfare state. While today a number of the provisions he forwarded may be taken for granted within the formal work sector we must remember that, in his time, these were radical provisions. Perhaps because of this and regardless of the limitations in his work, Woodsworth understood that progressive social change requires imagination. Finding inspiration in his call for social justice, we embrace the challenge to think more imaginatively and apply this to the issue of expanding labour rights for temporary workers, in particular the plight of women who work under the LCP. We recognize the LCP as an example of broader, dominant pa erns of labour divisions that historically and

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contemporarily contribute to the marginalization of racialized and impoverished women. Responding practically to Woodsworth’s encouragement to be more imaginative in the manner in which social justice is pursued, we suggest that the scope of change is not limited to what is being struggled for (although it is important to expand what it means to protect labour rights for temporary/precarious workers who labour both within the formal and informal labour markets), but also to consider critically how just relations and decent labour can be realized by pu ing forward an understanding of social justice as intrinsically related to concerns of self-determination, accessibility, and solidarity. Woodsworth’s encouragement that we struggle for social justice in a more imaginative way, ironically, requires us to move beyond how he conceptualized the role of marginalized persons within this struggle and path towards social change. Progressive political work demands a more stringent and imaginative examination of how multiple barriers are maintained through fraught processes of organization. Specific barriers to institutions, political representation, and knowledge and cultural production place additional burdens on communities already restricted in terms of their labour and exclusion from the nation. Intersectional analysis offers one helpful approach within the academic context to understanding and addressing these challenges. Concurrently, despite multiple barriers, deeply marginalized groups are also at the forefront of contemporary reimaginings of labour rights. As academics working in solidarity with marginalized people we strive to deconstruct and decolonize epistemic and economic divisions in the struggle towards a new social order that – as many communities actively imagine it – is truly socially just.

NOTES 1 For many individuals and communities in Canada, however, these aspects of a ‘decent workplace’ have never been components of their working lives. The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines decent work as ‘work that meets people’s basic aspirations, not only for income, but for security for themselves and their families, without discrimination or harassment and providing equal treatment for women and men’ (ILO, 2001: 36). 2 See Woodsworth (1922: 11, 13). 3 For a fuller discussion of these views, see the chapters in this volume by Allen Mills, Daniel Coleman, Neal McLeod, and David Chariandy.

218 Geraldina Polanco and Cecily Nicholson  4 Coleman (in this volume).  5 By ‘marginalized women’ we mean, for the moment, those experiencing multiple and interacting systems of oppression. Like the designation ‘racialized women’ this is not intended as a homogeneous category.  6 See also the chapters by Chariandy and Coleman (in this volume).  7 Community organizers of the 14 February Women’s Memorial March honour close to 80 women who have been murdered or have gone missing from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia. The organizers also acknowledge the many women who have died through violence, alcohol and drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, poverty, and homelessness.  8 From an interview for Z/Znet Vision and Strategy Session, Woods Hole Massachuse s, June 2006, retrieved 5 May 2009 from h ps://www.zmag. org/junewaliaint.html.  9 The Kalayaan Centre is a Filipino community centre located in the Downtown Eastside area of Vancouver. Since 1996, the groups in the Kalayaan Centre have operated to serve the needs of and empower the growing but marginalized Filipino migrant and immigrant community in Vancouver. It is a place not only for Filipinos to gather, but more importantly, a place where marginalized Filipinos can collectively continue the struggle to achieve equality, human rights, and genuine development. Retrieved 4 May 2009 from h p://www.kalayaancentre.net/. 10 Chariandy (in this volume). 11 Coleman (in this volume). 12 The concept of ‘subalterneity’ has a dense theoretical context. We reference Spivak’s use of the term as it comments on the ways in which social status can limit agency. We also find salience in how the term is evoked within the dialectics of counter-hegemonic practices and resistance against neoliberalism and social exclusion. While parallel to the frame of ‘marginalization’ we are using here, these concepts are not directly interchangeable. 13 McCall outlines three approaches to this analysis. First, anticategorical complexity takes a deconstructive stance that rejects categories. An intracategorical approach evokes categories strategically while remaining critical of this process. This effort a empts to reveal the complex experiences of groups subjected to social exclusion at neglected points of intersection. This essay is mainly informed by an intracategorical approach. Finally, an intercategorical approach involves the provisional use of categories, but focuses on comparisons between groups.

The Practice of Solidarity 219 REFERENCES Abele, F., & Stasiulis, D. (1989). Canada as a ‘white se ler colony’: What about natives and immigrants? In W. Clement & G. Williams (Eds.), The new Canadian political economy, 240–77. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Anzaldúa, G. (1999). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Baines, D., & Sharma, N. (2002). Migrant workers as non-citizens: The case against citizenship as a social policy concept. Studies in Political Economy 6 (Autumn), 75–107. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). (2005). Advocates call for changes to O awa’s ‘nanny’ program. Retrieved from h p://www.cbc.ca/canada/ story/2005/03/25/nannies050325.html. Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW). (2006). Intersectional feminist frameworks: An emerging vision. O awa: CRIAW. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. (2002).The Live-In Caregiver Program: For employers and caregivers abroad. Canada: Minister of Public Works and Government Services. Retrieved 16 March 2006 from h p://www.cic.gc.ca/ english/work/caregiver/index.asp. Cranford, C.J., Vosko, L.F., & Zukewisch, N. (2003). Precarious employment in the Canadian labour market: A statistical portrait. Just Labour 3, 6–19. Daly, H., & Lynn, D. (2002). Surviving globalization: In three Latin American communities. Peterborough: Broadview. Dhruvarajan, V. (2002). Women of colour in Canada. In V. Dhruvarajan & J. Vickers (Eds.), Gender, race and nation: A global perspective, 99–122. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fleras, A., & Ellio , J.L. (2003). Gendered diversity. In A. Fleras & J.L. Ellio , Unequal relations: The dynamics of race, ethnic and Aboriginal relations in Canada, 4th ed., 137–64. Toronto: Prentice-Hall. Grassroots Women. (2005). Between a rock and a hard place: Examining how the lack of universal childcare impacts marginalized women’s equality. Vancouver: Grassroots Women. Hage, G. (2000). White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The re-invention of nature. New York: Routledge. Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. International Labour Organization (ILO). (2001). Crises and decent work: A collection of essays. Eugenia Date-Bah (Ed.). InFocus Programme on Crisis

220 Geraldina Polanco and Cecily Nicholson Response and Reconstruction, Recovery and Reconstruction Department. Geneva: ILO. Langevin, L., & Belleau, M. (2000). Trafficking in women in Canada: A critical analysis of the legal framework governing immigrant live-in caregivers and mail order brides. O awa: Status of Women Canada. Retrieved 16 March 2006 from h p://dsp-psd.communication.gc.ca/Collection/SW21-83-2001E.pdf. McCall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(3), 1771–800. McMichael, P. (2004). Development and social change: A global perspective. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge. Munck, R. (2005). Globalization and social exclusion: A transformationalist perspective. Bloomfield: Kumarian. Pra , G. (1997). Stereotypes and ambivalence: The construction of domestic workers in Vancouver, British Columbia. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 4(2), 159–77. — (1999). From registered nurse to registered nanny: Discursive geographies of Filipina domestic workers in Vancouver. B.C. Economic Geography 75(3), 215–36. — (2005). Abandoned women and spaces of the exception. Antipode 37(5), 1052–78. Sassen, S. (2004). Counter-geographies of globalization: Feminization of survival. In K. Saunders (Ed.), Feminist post-development thought: Rethinking modernity, post colonialism and representation, 89–104. London: Zed. Sharma, N. (2002). Immigrant and migrant workers in Canada: Labour movements, racism and the expansion of globalization. Canadian Woman Studies 21/22 (Spring/summer), 17–25. Spivak, G.C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. London: Zed. Vosko, L. (2004). Confronting the norm: Gender and international regulation of precarious work. O awa: Law Commission of Canada. Retrieved 25 Oct. 2006 from h p://www.lcc.gc.ca/research_project/er/tvw/resources/intro-en.asp. Walia, H. (2006). Interview for Z/Znet Vision and Strategy Session. Woods Hole Mass., June 2006. Retrieved 5 May 2009 from h p://www.zmag.org/ junewaliaint.html. Woodsworth, J.S. (1922). Re-construction: From the viewpoint of labour. Winnipeg: Hecla Press.

10 J.S. Woodsworth and the Discourse of White Civility daniel coleman

How does one assess a legacy? Many Canadians would agree that J.S. Woodsworth has le us a legacy that includes practical social provisions such as old age pensions and workers’ rights legislation as well as the intellectual groundwork for the democratic socialism that produced the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) party and evolved into its successor the New Democratic Party (NDP). But others have also noted that his most (in)famous book, Strangers within Our Gates (1909), with its hierarchy of more and less desirable immigrants, betrays a legacy of Anglo-centrism and racism in the very midst of Woodsworth’s progressive social vision, making this book, as Allen Mills puts it in his essay,1 one that the guardians of Woodsworth’s reputation wish he had not wri en. We may agree that a legacy exists, then, but there are clearly complex considerations at stake in the activity suggested by this present volume’s subtitle – how we ‘rethink’ the qualities, relevance, and ongoing effects of this legacy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The value of this volume’s gathering of scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives is that it outlines a number of approaches to the assessment of Woodsworth’s legacy. Very broadly, we might see two general groups among the approaches, although, of course, some chapters take part in both groups. One general approach, clearly articulated in the chapters by Eric Tucker, David Schneiderman, Gary Teeple, and Hugh Shewell, as well as the co-authored chapter by Geraldina Polanco and Cecily Nicholson, observes the ways in which the provisions for the welfare state that are central to the Woodsworth legacy have been under a ack since the decline of Keynesian economic philosophy from the 1970s onwards. This approach refers to Woodsworth as a figure of what

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Canadian society stands to lose or has already lost with the increasing power of international capital to overwhelm the capacity of governments to protect the social and human rights of citizens. A second general approach identifies flaws or contradictions within Woodsworth’s legacy itself, and we might characterize these as problems concerning the inclusiveness or universalism of his vision of Canadian society.2 The chapter by Neil McLeod calls a ention to the ways in which First Nations peoples have never fit smoothly into the schemes for social welfare, workers’ benefits or a universal polity that are elements of the Woodsworth legacy, while those by David Chariandy, Geraldina Polanco and Cecily Nicholson, as well as my own chapter here, a end to the ways in which his assumptions about race, ethnicity, or gender either marginalized or striated certain groups in Woodsworth’s social vision. They also note how women and people of colour have continued to be either poorly provided for or ignored under the provisions for human and social rights associated with Woodsworth’s legacy in Canada. So it seems, if the chapters of this volume are representative of the current assessment of this legacy, that the name of Woodsworth has become associated with a set of ideals, a cluster of rationalizations and provisions for social justice and human rights, which, either because of the subsequent developments of economic and political history or because of internal flaws, are slipping dangerously into extinction. What interests me here is how Woodsworth’s name itself functions as what Michel Foucault (1969) famously called an ‘author function’; that is, as a human symbol for a set of ideas, a complex of texts, a body of work, and associated institutional practices. Therefore, instead of hearkening up his ghost as Mills reports young NDP convention delegates did in the 1970s with lapel bu ons that read ‘Woodsworth Lives!’ I will examine his legacy in relation to what Foucault called a discursive formation. Rather than a empting to reanimate Woodsworth as a human individual or character who made certain choices, held certain views, or initiated certain acts, I will examine him as an author function, a name that ‘manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture’ (Foucault, 1969: 982). I call this larger discursive formation ‘white civility’ and show how the legacy of J.S. Woodsworth has functioned within, and been shaped by, ideologies of race, whiteness, and linked concepts of time that continue to have powerful effects in Canada to this day. Although this approach may seem to dehumanize Woodsworth insofar as it considers him to be a nexus of concepts in an impersonal

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discursive formation, I would suggest that it rehumanizes him because it eschews a politics of blame, which would examine the discriminatory or racist elements of Strangers within Our Gates as symptoms of personal failure or inconsistency. Instead, an analysis of his discursive context situates him within the larger structures of belief, discourse, and knowledge that organize what any of us can know, how we can speak, and the avenues of action available to us. I am influenced in taking this route of analysis by the lessons of recent feminist reassessments of the racism endemic to first-wave feminism that was contemporary with Woodsworth at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. During the early phase of what has been called thirdwave feminism in the 1980s, when women of colour and lesbian women drew a ention to the ways in which the women’s movement tended to assume white, middle-class, and heterosexual paradigms for feminist activism, feminist historians responded to these concerns by calling attention to the ways in which the founders of feminist politics in Canada (and more generally throughout English-speaking societies) o en employed forms of xenophobia and racism to fuel their campaigns for the franchise, temperance, and homestead property rights. Fears of Indigenous and immigrant populations having too great an influence on these ma ers gave the idea of women swelling the numbers of white, Englishspeaking, middle-class voters wide appeal among the mainstream settler population.3 Although there is no question that first-wave feminists promulgated racist ideas in their campaigns for women’s rights, there is a danger, as more recent feminist writers have noted, that the charge of racism aimed at them as human individuals – finding Nellie McClung or Emily Murphy, for example, guilty of racism – becomes a way of discrediting the real and significant gains these activists made for women in Canada, including racialized women. One can trace, then, in more recent feminist commentary on the legacies of these first-wave feminists a tendency to move away from assessing the a itudes of this or that historical person as an individual, and instead assessing the larger discursive fields of which such individuals were part.4 The value of this move is that it avoids the dismissive conclusions that would simply find specific historical figures guilty of racism and, instead, it engages in the much more crucial a empt to understand how systemic racism works, how people who were so clearly commi ed to social justice, equality, and protections for the disadvantaged in Canadian society could have been blind to the ways in which they contributed to maintaining social inequities and unjust

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hierarchies. There is, of course, a way in which a focus on discourse analysis can imply that historical individuals were simply acting according to the assumptions of their times and had no personal choice or responsibility for racist views or actions. For discussions that take these larger social systems into account, but which nonetheless insist that historical individuals did respond to them in distinct ways and can therefore be held accountable as individuals, see Fiamengo (2002) and the introductory chapter to Backhouse (1999). The benefits of a more discursively oriented approach is that it stimulates a reflexivity on our own part, insofar as we become alerted ourselves to the ways in which social progressives of all stripes and in all eras can wear similar blinkers. There is a way in which a politics of blame draws a false line between the present and the past by stopping its inquiry once it has fingered a guilty party and, having arrived at this premature conclusion, pronounces the end of an embarrassing or unwanted legacy. By contrast, an inquiry into the persistence and presence of discriminatory or racist views within the social discourses, values, and belief systems of social progressives engages us in a much more urgent and far-reaching form of analysis, one which involves a nuanced inquiry into these very deep-rooted and ongoing problems that characterize not just Woodsworth’s times but our own times as well. For the fact is Woodsworth was not the last, and is not likely to be the last, socially progressive public intellectual in Canada to purvey racist views. Many would insist that Canadian society has changed a great deal since Woodsworth’s times in the ways in which it deals with people of non-English- and non-French-speaking backgrounds, pointing to the removal of discriminatory laws in the Immigration Act in 1967, the establishment of an official multiculturalism policy between 1972 and 1988, and the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. It is undeniable that antidiscriminatory legal and policy provisions have been set in place during the second half of the twentieth century, but, as various commentators have pointed out, legislative provisions cannot and have not dispensed with the realities of discrimination and racism in Canada. I will mention two of these commentators here because, in keeping with the project of this volume, they both insist on the reassessment of historical legacy as central to addressing these current realities. M. NourbeSe Philip is a Tobagan-born Toronto writer and activist who has wri en for over twenty years on race relations in Canada, while Doudou Diène is a special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia,

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and related intolerance for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNHCR) who visited Canada in September 2003 on the heels of the Durban Conference on race and racism; he interviewed federal and provincial government members, minority group leaders, and human rights groups across the country to assess the situation here. In Why Multiculturalism Can’t End Racism, Philip argues that ‘multiculturalism, as we know it, has no answers for the problems of racism, or white supremacy – unless it is combined with a clearly articulated policy of anti-racism, directed at rooting out the effects of racist and white supremacist thinking ... It is for this reason that an understanding of the ideological lineage of this belief system is so important to any debate on racism and multiculturalism’ (1992: 185). Diène agrees with Philip’s call for a ention to the ideological lineage of white domination in Canadian cultural life as essential to addressing current racial inequities. In his report on his mission to Canada, Diène compliments Canada on establishing policies such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with its guarantee, in section 15(1), that ‘every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability’ (2004: 11). Despite his praise for legal provisions such as this, however, Diène reports that racism is alive and well in Canada, and that Canada has yet to develop what he calls an effective and urgently needed ‘intellectual and ethical strategy’ for implementing antiracist initiatives in the broader culture. ‘This new strategy,’ Diène writes, ‘would be based on three objectives: a be er understanding and knowledge of the deep roots of the history, culture and mentality of racism and discrimination, the encouragement of mutual awareness of the history, culture and spiritual background of the different communities, and a be er understanding of their interactions and cross-fertilization, with the aim of achieving democratic, equalitarian and interactive multiculturalism’ (p. 3). Both Philip and Diène therefore report a gap between the ideals laid out in Canadian legislation and their actual practice and implementation in Canadian society, and they both identify a reassessment of cultural history – what we are calling (in this book) ‘historical legacy’ – as urgent and necessary for addressing this gap. A study of what I call the discourse of white civility is fundamental to this process of reassessment because, while there has been important work done in Britain and the United States in the critical study of whiteness, we still need to identify the operations of whiteness that are

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specific to English-speaking Canadian culture.5 Central to this exploration is the question of how we can critically examine the reproduction of Canadian whiteness in relation to the real image of its exemplary civility. I say the real project of Canadian civility as a deliberate alternative to saying the myth of its civility. For I am not among those who would trivialize the prodigious efforts of previous generations to create a civil society in Canada by considering it a mere ruse or theatrical trick – as if civility were an easy accomplishment and its failure ready cause for derision and accusations of hypocrisy. It would be easy to identify the racism of a completely fraudulent civility. It is much harder, and I would suggest, more productive in the long term, to find ways to analyse the operations of white supremacy embedded in sincere and always-incomplete efforts to establish civility. The discourse of white civility is founded on a central contradiction that profoundly shaped and determined the social vision of early twentieth-century social progressives such as J.S. Woodsworth and the first-wave feminists I mentioned above, and I would argue that this contradiction continues to shape many of our assumptions to this day. In Racist Culture (1993), David Theo Goldberg argues that the rise of European modernity involved a central ironical paradox: on the one hand, liberal modernity heralded the universal equality of human beings, while on the other, its valuation of scientific systems of classification generated the catalogue of racial and other differences that have consistently rationalized exclusions from that human ‘universality.’ Goldberg summarizes the situation thus: ‘So the irony of modernity, the liberal paradox comes down to this: As modernity commits itself progressively to idealized principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, as it increasingly insists upon the moral irrelevance of race, there is a multiplication of racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize, enable and sustain ... [T]he more open to difference liberal modernity declares itself, the more dismissive of difference it becomes and the more closed it seeks to make the circle of acceptability’ (pp. 6–7). Liberal modernity, according to Goldberg, produced the enduring contradiction of bounded or limited universality. We can see the complexities that develop out of this contradiction in Neil McLeod’s discussion6 of the ways in which nêhiyawak or Plains Cree people have found themselves resisting Canadian assumptions of universalism which simultaneously erase and insist on their difference from mainstream white culture.

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The French cultural theorist, Étienne Balibar (2002) traces the paradox of exclusive egalitarianism or bounded universalism to the problematic heart of modern understandings of civility. Central to Balibar’s analysis is Hegel’s proposal that the modern concept of civil society comes into being when people of different identities have equal access to and agency within a public sphere, and that the price of this access is that they must allow their identification with that shared public entity to displace or subsume their other regional, domestic, or ethnic identifications (exactly the situation described by McLeod). Balibar observes that civility, then, will always be linked to violence – whether internalized violence in which people repress their own alternate identifications or externalized violence in which the margins or borders of civility are guarded against outside identities or allegiances. Adding Balibar to McLeod and Goldberg, therefore, I want to suggest that civility is structured by liberalism’s paradox: to produce an egalitarian public sphere, it polices the borders and the interior composition of that sphere, excluding or subsuming any elements that are perceived to threaten the primary collective identification of that public sphere. In their separate works on Canadian diversity, Eva Mackey (1999) and Richard Day (2000) examine the ways in which Canada has dealt with racial and ethnic diversity either by exclusion at the nation’s borders, or, in more liberal eras of immigration policy, by a proliferation rather than suppression of internal differences, but they also point out that these internal differences have been consistently striated according to racial hierarchies. The constant celebration, they argue, of internal difference has been marketed as an outward sign of Canadian civility, at the same time that it has reinforced the normativity of what Mackey calls the Canadian-Canadian as white and British. In this sense, English Canadian civility combines two contradictions: it is a bounded universality and it is internally striated. To trace these contradictions as they operated in the Woodsworth legacy and as they continue to operate in wider Canadian culture, I will examine their presence in relation to Canada’s most famous sign of civility, multiculturalism. A genealogical approach to the development of multiculturalism in Canada allows us to examine how Woodsworth’s ideas about race and immigration operated, far beyond the reach of his own intentions or views as an individual person, within the evolution of multicultural ideals in Canada that went on, a er his death, to have a long and lasting influence in Canadian approaches to cultural and racial difference. In order to pursue this line of analysis, I will examine the

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assumptions that structured Woodsworth’s Strangers within Our Gates, and I will show how these assumptions and structures of thinking recurred, despite Woodsworth’s later efforts to modify his views, in John Murray Gibbon’s The Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation (1938), a book which was central to the popularization of the symbol of the mosaic for Canada’s culturally diverse population, as well as to the promotion of ethnic or heritage festivals as a way to showcase that diversity. My point is to emphasize the way in which the discursive formation of white civility, of which Strangers within Our Gates was only one of the more well-known instances, functioned beyond Woodsworth’s own intentions or efforts as an individual, and that it shaped the modes of inquiry, ways of organizing analysis, and accumulations of information around Canada’s multiethnic population not just in 1909 or 1938 when Woodsworth and Gibbon published their books, but right up to the present day. At the turn of the twentieth century, Woodsworth was the Methodist minister at Winnipeg’s All People’s Mission Church which a ended to the physical and spiritual needs of mostly Eastern European immigrants en route to their newly surveyed Prairie homesteads. Strangers within Our Gates was published in 1909, and it gives us a perfect instance of the way a book can have a life of its own and circulate widely under an author’s name, even if it was not wri en exclusively by that individual, because in fact Woodsworth operated as something between an author and an editor for the book, gathering together in it not only observations from his own experience among Winnipeg’s multiethnic immigrant populace but also the latest in social science thinking that was then being published in Canada and the United States. Various parts of the chapters are wri en by other people, while others are Woodsworth’s own. Strangers repeatedly uses a ‘flood’ metaphor to describe the thousands of non-English- and non-French-speaking people arriving in Canada under the Laurier government’s relatively open door policy at the time, and the book is aimed at providing Canadians, particularly civic-minded church volunteers, with information about the various newcomers so that they can be processed and assimilated into BritishCanadian ways of life. The book’s taxonomy of immigrants by their ‘racial’ or ‘national’ origins established what John Porter (1965) famously later called the vertical mosaic and what Richard Day has more recently called the Great Chain of Race classification that was reproduced in texts about Canadian diversity for decades a erwards. As the Table of Contents of Woodsworth’s composite book indicates (see Figure 10.1),

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a er three introductory chapters that differentiate between who ‘we’ Canadians are and who the ‘strangers’ are, the text launches into a descending catalogue of races and nationalities from the most desirable British, Americans, and Northern Europeans at the top of the list, through less desirable people from Southern and Eastern Europe in the middle, to the non-desirable non-white groups such as the Levantine races, Orientals, Negroes, and Indians at the bo om of the list. I should note two things at this point: first, as Eva Mackey (1999) and Richard Day (2000) have observed, Canadian national rhetoric operates more o en by proliferating than by suppressing difference; and Figure 10.1 Table of Contents from Strangers within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians Introduction Preface 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

7 9

Who are we? The strangers With the immigrants Immigrants from Great Britain Immigrants from the United States The Scandinavians The Germans The French Southeastern Europe Austria-Hungary The Balkan states The Hebrews The Italians Levantine races The Orientals The Negro and the Indian The problem of immigration The causes of immigration The effects of immigration The city Restriction of immigration Assimilation A challenge to the church

15 21 31 45 63 73 81 89 91 105 119 123 131 137 141 157 161 169 179 209 221 223 243

Appendices

261

Source: James S. Woodsworth, first published in 1909 by the Young People’s Forward Movement Department of the Methodist Church.

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second, the hierarchy of different races or nationalities sketched out in this Table of Contents closely follows the Enlightenment teleology of civilization’s single timeline as outlined by Stuart Hall (1992) in his discussion of how Western Europe came to signify itself as the vanguard of civilization, and Europeans further east and south were placed further backward in the scale of civilization, while non-Europeans were portrayed as the uncivilized backward races which must be brought forward into modernity by the colonial civilizing mission. My point here is that the discourse of civility has a timeline and that it striates that timeline, as if civility were layered over various ages like sedimentary rock. Thus, the Western concept of civility imagines European culture as the modern vanguard and other cultures as delayed or submerged in varying degrees of primitiveness.7 Inherent in the temporally striated catalogue reproduced in Woodsworth’s book is a notion of civility that envisions white European civilization at the apex of a social Darwinist scale. In the opening lines of the chapter ‘Who Are We?’ Woodsworth writes: Within the past decade, Canada has risen from the status of a colony to that of a nation ... A few years ago Canadian-born children described themselves as English, Irish, Scotch or French ... To-day our children boast themselves Canadians, and the latest arrivals from Austria or Russia help to swell the chorus, ‘The Maple Leaf Forever.’ There has not been sufficient time to develop a fixed Canadian type, but there is a certain indefinite something that at once unites us and distinguishes us from all the world besides ... As yet we have not entered fully into our national privileges and responsibilities, but great national problems are already forcing themselves upon our a ention. In grappling with and solving these we shall a ain our national manhood. (1909: 16)

Against the background teleology of global civilization, this statement composes the local allegory of Canada’s maturation. The new Dominion is entering a critical point, for it has outgrown its colonial dependency on its elderly British parent and must now prove its independent ‘manhood’ by bravely facing its responsibilities. And the primary proof of Canada’s maturity, ‘that certain indefinite something that at once unites us,’ will be manifested in the nation’s civility – that is, in the courtesy and fair-mindedness manifested by ‘us’ – white British Canadians – towards incoming immigrant others, who are nominated

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as the strangers within ‘our’ gates. The way we know who ‘we’ are is by our civil interactions with these ‘others,’ and they can be known by means of the book’s elaborate catalogue of their myriad distinctions and differences.8 The book’s taxonomy of immigrants, then, is organized in a descending order of assimilability until it reaches the cut-off at the border of European whiteness. Strangers clearly indicates that Levantines such as Turks, Greeks, and Persians ‘constitute one of the least desirable classes’ (Woodsworth, 1909: 138), Hindus are ‘sadly out of place’ (p. 154), Orientals flatly ‘cannot be assimilated’ (p. 155), and the writer is grateful that Canada has no ‘Negro problem’ (p. 158). This hard edge at the border between what Richard Dyer has called ‘sometime whites’ (1997: 19) such as Southern and Eastern Europeans and non-whites alerts us to the way in which civility, as enacted in this book, elaborates a multileveled taxonomy of Canadian others, not so much to diversify or expand the image of who ‘we’ are, but to define the white, British normativity that constitutes the category of the civil in Canada. Ross Chambers (1996) has identified this strategy of whiteness as the strategy of ‘unexaminability.’ According to Chambers, dominant groups – whose domination derives from being on the privileged side of racial, gender, sexual, class, or other divides – elude scrutiny by proliferating the representations of their others. In the very process of elaborating its others, the normativity of an unexamined group becomes established as that against which difference can be compared. For example, we read in Strangers that Germans are generally acceptable immigrants because they are ‘white like us’ (Woodsworth, 1909: 84). There is a curious moment, however, in the book’s catalogue of Canadian diversity, when the desirability of English immigrants falls under question. Whereas ‘Scotch, Irish, and Welsh immigrants have done very well’ in Canada, the book notes that the English are o en ‘the least readily assimilated of the English-speaking nationalities’ (p. 46), for they are usually from one of two extremes, either upper-class families or poor, urban backgrounds and, in whichever case, are less prepared than Celts to do the back-breaking labour of agricultural homesteading. This curious questioning of English immigrants allows us to observe how the Canadian discourse of civility functions as a technique of internal management. If members of even the most traditionally privileged group are not flexible enough to adapt to the pioneer ideals of thri and hard work, of hospitality, of improving themselves, their properties, and the lives of their neighbours, if they are unwilling to enter enthusiastically

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and proactively into the tasks of welcoming the strangers at the nation’s gates and aiding them in the process of Canadianization, then, in the words of an infamous pamphlet published the same year as Woodsworth’s book, ‘No English Need Apply.’9 I read this moment as a symptom of Canadian belatedness. What I mean by this is that Canada as a se ler colony enters into nationhood aware of being a newcomer on the global stage of modernity. The older Western European nations occupy the vanguard of civilization, while the colonies, only recently establishing themselves as independent nation states, feel a great urgency to promote themselves to the front of civilization’s narrative of progress. Stranger’s anti-English critique constitutes the New World answer to colonial belatedness: it constructs the most privileged class of the Old World as inflexible, weighted down by a rigid structure of class divisions and by a system of inherited rather than self-made wealth, and therefore less capable to produce modern civil relations than the more supple, less encumbered peoples of the New World. And the agents of this flexibility, of this newness, are British as opposed to English.10 I will return to the importance of this category of Britishness to outlining the Canadian contradictory discourse of white civility presently, but let us turn our a ention for a moment to its appearance in the work of John Murray Gibbon. Gibbon’s Governor-General’s Award–winning book, Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation, was published in 1938, almost thirty years a er Woodsworth’s book, but it follows Woodsworth’s descending taxonomy and his code of civility faithfully, and in so doing it shows how certain discursive formations, certain ways of seeing and organizing the data of reality, have remarkable durability and social power. Gibbon was a respected British journalist who had been appointed by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1907 to the position of supervisor of European propaganda in which capacity he visited Russia, Austria, Hungary, and Scandinavia for the purposes of promoting immigration to Canada.11 In 1913, he moved as the railway’s head of publicity to Montreal, where he became important to the history of Canadian multiculturalism not just because he popularized the image of the ‘mosaic’ that went on to become its central symbol,12 but also because he pioneered the establishment of ethnic heritage festivals across the country. Between 1927 and 1930, Gibbon organized fourteen festivals of folk arts and music that served as promotional events for the railway-owned hotels. These included festivals of French-Canadian culture at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec, a series of European ethnic

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festivals in Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, and Calgary featuring Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and Scandinavian performers, and the annual Banff festivals called ‘Indian Days’ and the ‘Highland Gathering and Sco ish Music Festival.’ Influenced by the national-romantic approach to folklore studies, Gibbon argued that folk music expressed the popular spirit of a group’s particular consciousness and, by extension, then, he hypothesized that awareness of one another’s folk traditions could bring Canadians of different cultures together into mutual understanding (McNaughton, 1981). With the commercial depression of the 1930s, and the resulting falloff in the number of railway tourists, Gibbon translated his ethnic festivals into a radio series for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation entitled ‘Canadian Mosaic’ and eventually into this book. As with Strangers, this book opens with a version of the time-conscious allegory of maturation, according to which Canada is too ‘young’ yet to have established its own racial type (Gibbon, 1938: vii). This fact, we read, makes it important to understand the backgrounds of the various groups in Canada, so that as the country grows up, Canadians can try to give positive shape to its mélange of peoples. The book sets up the Canadian mosaic not only as a contrast to the American ‘melting-pot’ model of cultural assimilation but also against the model of racial purification that was on the rise in Nazi Germany in 1938.13 In contrast, it portrays Canadian civility by means of the mosaic and its image of the beauty and unique contribution of each separate, distinct cultural fragment that collectively constitutes the nation as a work of art. At the same time, statements such as these are interspersed with concepts of assimilation and absorption that would seem to contradict this image of valued diversity. Like Woodsworth’s chapter series, Gibbon’s Table of Contents proceeds down the hierarchy of racial-national origins from France and Britain at the top of the list (note that English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh get separate chapters) to Northwestern Europe in the middle and finally to Eastern Europe and Jews at the bo om; unlike Woodsworth, however, Gibbon excludes Natives, blacks, Chinese and other Asians from discussion completely (see Figure 10.2).14 As with Strangers within Our Gates, Canada’s inclusive civility, imaged here as a multicoloured mosaic, actually insists that all of its tiles will be various shades of white. The volume concludes with: ‘Whether time, the artist, will ever design and create a masterpiece out of the Canadian scene remains for a mythical judge in some remote future to decide. All we can do

234 Daniel Coleman Figure 10.2 Table of Contents from Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Europe, United States and Canada France and Canada England and Canada Scotland and Canada Ireland and Canada Wales and Canada Germany and Canada The Netherlands, Belgium and Canada Scandinavia and Canada The Eastern Baltic and Canada Poland and Canada Ukraine and Canada Czechoslovakia and Canada The Balkans and Canada Hungary and Canada Russia and Canada Italy, Spanish Peninsula and Canada The Hebrew and Canada Cement for the Canadian Mosaic

1 19 48 78 115 146 160 196 211 249 267 282 308 323 350 364 380 397 413

Dates of the Old and New Worlds Index

426 439

Source: Gibbon (1938).

today is to collect and separate and perhaps ourselves fabricate the tesserae or li le slaps of colour required for what that artist seems to have in mind as a mosaic ... One contribution we can deliberately make is to discover, analyze and perfect the cements which may best hold the coloured slabs in position’ (Gibbon, 1938: 413). The cements subsequently named are largely the various volunteer and civic agencies that enable immigrants to se le into and adapt to life in Canada, including the school system, YMCA, YWCA, IODE, the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society of Canada, ethnic music and folk arts festivals, and Frontier College – which offered courses in English as a second language. In the end, then, the tiles of the Canadian mosaic may represent a range of cultural differences, but they all come from Europe, and they must all be embedded in the white cement of assimilative institutions. I began this chapter by suggesting that I would approach the question of Woodsworth’s ‘legacy’ by turning away from trying to assess

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him as a person and instead by a ending to his legacy as part of a larger discursive formation that I am calling white civility. In this approach, I follow Foucault’s method of discourse analysis that de-emphasizes conscious human agency and instead a ends to the social practices that produce subject positions, rules of procedure, and objects of knowledge. My interest is in examining the author-function, fulfilled by Woodsworth or thirty years later by Gibbon, and assessing whether, to borrow Foucault’s phrasing from The Archeology of Knowledge, there is regularity – ‘a system of dispersion between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices’ (1972: 38) – in their a empts to account for Canadian cultural and racial diversity: my name for this discursive formation is white civility. I have very deliberately chosen ‘civility’ as the central problematic for this analysis of the discourse of English Canadian whiteness because it seems to me that the particular pathologies central to Canadian whiteness arise from a long and extraordinary anxiety in Canadian national culture with the codes and performances of civility. First, ‘civility’ links the problem of Canadian whiteness to questions of its legitimacy in the New World. For Canadian white se lers, ‘civility’ is the sign of decency that disavows the expropriation of Indigenous lands and the imposition of European laws and cultural practices on those alienated lands. The remarkable silence regarding First Nations people in both Woodsworth’s and Gibbon’s texts indicates the way in which the narrative of immigration and its a endant civil codes of courtesy, welcome, and peaceful se lement, overwrites a narrative of invasion, genocide, and the legal – therefore ‘civil’ – expropriation of Aboriginal lands.15 Civility, in this context, operates as a mechanism of external management: the assumption of British Canadian civility constitutes a form of legitimacy that justifies the expunging of Indigenous land claims as ‘external’ to the arrangements that characterize negotiations within the civil sphere. Throughout the discourse of civility, this process is more o en assumed than spoken: thus the noticeable absence of Indigenous people in these two texts, and, I should add, in the language of multiculturalism more generally that we have inherited from them. But civility also operates, in a closely related second instance, as a system of internal management: the sign of white Canadians’ legitimacy in the New World, the proof of their right to exploit North America’s resources and to expropriate Indigenous peoples’ lands, resides in their civil treatment of each other. This is the function of the term

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‘British’ (as opposed to the closely related term ‘English’) in the imperial age – whereas formerly hostile Welsh, Scots, Irish, and English may have once torn at each other’s throats, the common cause of empire has united these erstwhile enemies into an harmonious, worldwide power, and qualified them in their own minds to become agents in a worldwide civilizing mission. They can teach others how to live in peace with former enemies. Multiethnic Britishness functions as the proof of the empire’s civility. And, in case a local Canadian proof is needed, one may examine the history of British ‘leniency’ to French difference to see the extension of this enlightened civility.16 Civility, in this second instance, functions as a mechanism of internal management because it behooves white British Canadian subjects to live their lives in such a way as to give evidence of their leading the vanguard of modern civilization. Every time they practise civility to one another, they demonstrate their right to govern Indigenous and French people. Third, British civility functions as a mechanism of self-definition in that it serves to distinguish Canadian whiteness from American whiteness. Whereas many analyses of whiteness in the United States construct whiteness by relation to blackness (e.g., Toni Morrison’s (1990) discussion of the way white freedom is defined by its proximity to black slavery in American literature), it is my belief that Canadian whiteness must be understood by means of its proximity to Britishness, and Britishness as identifying a certain form of civility in particular. As the sidelong glances at the United States in Woodsworth’s and Gibbon’s texts show, one of the important functions of the mosaic in Canada is to serve as a sign that distinguishes Canadian civility from American brutality. Canadians regularly and repeatedly congratulate themselves on much more civil treatment of Natives, blacks, or immigrants in comparison with the United States. Indeed, the image of Canadian civility towards its internal others as demonstrated in the multicultural policy has become Canadians’ most cherished sign of what makes Canada Canadian and a be er place to live than the United States. The irony here, and this is the problem at the heart of Canada’s white civility, is that civility requires demonstration; the civil self needs its needy other to receive and benefit from its tokens of civility. I will provide one last, much more recent, instance of this problem as a way of indicating the ongoing dynamics of white civility eighty years a er the publication of Strangers within Our Gates and fi y years a er Canadian Mosaic. The political philosopher Charles Taylor concludes his influential

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discussion of the particular challenges of negotiating a multicultural society, ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (1997), by arguing for what he calls the ‘presumption of value’ in cross-cultural encounters. He reasons, ‘If withholding the presumption is tantamount to a denial of equality, and if important consequences flow for people’s identity from the absence of recognition, then a case can be made for insisting on the universalization of the presumption as a logical extension of the politics of dignity.’ He therefore concludes that ‘we owe all cultures a presumption of this kind’ (p. 123). While I have deep admiration for Taylor’s argument as a whole and particularly for this call for a presumption of value in all cultures, one can see how the discourse of civility as expressed here reproduces a scheme of subject positions we have seen earlier. The ‘we’ in Taylor’s sentence constitutes the host, the already legitimated, already enfranchised arbiter of value. ‘We’ are never the guests or newcomers, never the unfamiliar people whose strange ways must be presumed to have value. The discourse of civility, therefore, even in the midst of a multicultural politics of recognition, reaffirms the normativity of Britishness and whiteness; these are the recognizers who will presume the value of the recognized.17 The pervasiveness of white civility’s discursive system engulfs many of our terms for racial and cultural difference, including terms such as ‘visible minority,’ which implies, even as it normalizes, its invisible majority; ‘ethnic minority,’ which occludes the internal ethnic differentiations within the larger category of ‘whites’ and imagines them somehow as lacking ethnic distinction; or ‘people of colour,’ which reaffirms the colourless unexaminability of whiteness. The paradox of the discourse of white civility is that it needs to reproduce internally necessary strangers at its margins; indeed it needs to proliferate and striate them, to organize them as the many and repeated signs of the plenitude of its own bounty. And in so doing, it necessitates, even in the very act of liberal generosity, the cementing of a vertical mosaic, with more amenable others taking the positions near the top of the scale and less amenable ones occupying the positions at the bo om. It seems to me that, rather than dismiss or devalue the achievements of social progressives such as Woodsworth, Gibbon, or Taylor through the simple distancing (and self-exonerating) technique of a politics of blame, we can begin to dismantle the ‘naturalness’ of the discursive legacy that shaped and constrained their views, first, as NourbeSe Philip and Doudou Diène have suggested, by beginning to outline its lineaments as I have tried to do here. Perhaps, by becoming aware

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of its characteristics and structures, of the objects of knowledge and subject positions it creates, we – and here I mean the same (white) ‘we’ implied by Woodsworth, Gibbon, and Taylor – can learn what I call a wry, or critical, engagement with the discourse of civility. Wry in the sense of being aware that we ourselves have inherited non-neutral, culturally freighted ideas of what constitutes civility, wry in the sense of being aware that we nonetheless value civil society and want to protect the rights and freedoms it aims to provide, and wry in the sense of remaining ever-vigilant to the ways in which our concepts of civility perpetrate violence at its borders and detain strangers at its gates, even as they striate its internal mosaic. This wryness very much parallels the process of introspection and critical reappraisal that Chariandy calls for in his chapter in this book. Malcolm X famously said that racism is like a Cadillac; there’s a new model every year. If this is the case, then a wry engagement with the discourse of white civility reminds us that at the borders and in the striations of our civil sphere we will always encounter new exclusions and systems of inequality. And as conscientious observers of and participants in the systems in which we live, we need to anticipate and try to avoid or mitigate them, not just once but on an ongoing basis. We can admire some of this wry civility and capacity for ongoing self-critical reassessment in Woodsworth (1913) himself, who returned to the problems of immigration in a series of fourteen articles he wrote for the editorial section of the Manitoba Free Press in May and June of 1913 and later on in the speeches he delivered in Parliament in the 1920s around the debates over Chinese exclusion and in the 1930s over rising anxieties about Japanese Canadians. In these articles and speeches, Woodsworth moved towards a more inclusive, pluralistic idea of Canada than the Anglo-centric assumptions he had put forward in Strangers within Our Gates. But as Allen Mills (1991) observes, despite Woodsworth’s argument for a greater pluralism in these later articles, his lifelong commitments to social unity and integration meant that non-whites were still considered unfit immigrants and ‘his thinking was shot through still with the language and aspirations of conformity and assimilation’ (1991: 50, see also 230–5). Perhaps in observing Woodsworth’s a empt to revise and temper the discriminatory elements of his earlier statements and yet all the while maintaining a colour line for Canadian civility, we can see what we ourselves are up against, as we too in the twenty-first century inhabit and try to live critically beyond the limitations of white Canadian civility.

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NOTES  1 Unless otherwise indicated, references in this chapter to contributors to this volume are in respect of their contributions published in this volume.  2 One reason for the provisional nature of my division of the chapters into these two groups can be seen in Eric Tucker’s identification of a flaw in the Woodsworth legacy similar to the one I lay out here. Tucker observes this flaw in Woodsworth’s failure to link the pursuit of labour rights to a broader understanding of subordinate classes in creating the conditions for resistance, reform, or transformation.  3 See Devereux (1999) and Fiamengo (2002) for overviews of these relations between feminist suffragist and temperance campaigns and racism.  4 For examples of this more discursively oriented approach, see Valverde (1991), Henderson (2003), and Kulba (2001/02), as well as Devereux (1999) and Fiamengo (2002) mentioned in the previous note.  5 For some work on Canadian forms of whiteness, see Ward (2002), Philip (1995), Henderson (2003), and Coleman (2006).  6 McLeod (in this volume).  7 Walter Mignolo (1998: 35) follows Johann Fabian (1983) in calling this strategy the ‘denial of coevalness.’  8 Consider how this vision of courtesy towards non-English-speaking newcomers assumes that white British Canadians are hosts and not themselves guests. Submerged in the a ractive and innocent role of courteous host, therefore, we find the ideology of the land grab. By overwriting and disavowing an understanding of white charter-group Canadians themselves as guests, the discourse of white civility operates through a strategy of self-indigenization, which replaces First People with a proprietary role for se lers and their descendents. See Alan Lawson (1995) for a discussion of the ways self-indigenization works to displace First Nations presence and priority in se ler-invader societies such as Australia and Canada.  9 The pamphlet was wri en by Basil Stewart and published in London. Its full title was ‘No English Need Apply, or Canada as a Field for Immigration’ (see McCormack, 1981: 41). 10 Britishness is a remarkable category, for, as Linda Colley (1992) and Robert Crawford (1992) have shown, it is a pan-ethnic term, invented largely by eighteenth-century Lowland Scots to reformulate the formerly hostile groups of Anglo-Saxons and Celts that populated the British Isles into a coalitional identity that gave them access to the offices and spoils of

240 Daniel Coleman empire. As the Canadian historian Donald Akenson (1995: 396) argues, for New World se lers, ‘an integral and absolutely necessary aspect of the development of a sense of [colonial] identity was the creation of a “British” culture in the new homeland, one that did not in fact exist in the old.’ 11 I am indebted for much of the biographical information about Gibbon to Janet McNaughton (1981) and Daniel Francis (1997: 81ff ). 12 Gibbon is careful to credit the American writer Victoria Hayward with the first use of the term ‘mosaic’ to describe Canada’s diverse religious population in her Romantic Canada (1922). He then credits Kate A. Foster of Toronto with the second use in her 150-page survey of ‘New Canadians’ called ‘Our Canadian Mosaic’ wri en for the Dominion Council of the YWCA in 1926 for use by social workers (Foster, 1926: ix). Ian McKay (1994) insists, however, that Gibbon was central to the popularization of the metaphor: ‘Without Gibbon the now all-pervasive metaphor of Canada as a cultural mosaic might have died an obscure death as an American writer’s conceit. It was Gibbon who rescued it as the governing metaphor of the new post-colonial liberal nationalism that gradually overshadowed many Canadians’ earlier identification with Britain’ (McKay, 1994: 57, as quoted in Francis, 1997: 81). 13 See, e.g., Gibbon (1938: 2). 14 That Gibbon was born in Ceylon makes his exclusion of Asians from the book seem more likely a conscious than an unconscious decision. 15 Woodsworth’s half-chapter on ‘Indians’ is aimed mostly at the problems of assimilation and ends up suggesting that the reserve system is one of the greatest inhibitors to this process. There is no a empt to discuss Indigenous history or culture in Strangers. Gibbon (1938: vii) includes only two references to Indigenous people in his 400-page book, the first of which indicates why: ‘The Canadian race of the future is being superimposed on the original native Indian races and is being made up of over thirty European racial groups.’ 16 See, e.g., the references in Gibbon’s chapter on ‘Canada and France’ (1938) to the generous and lenient accommodations to the Catholic religion and French language in the Quebec Act of 1774. 17 I owe the phrasing here to Paul Huebener, a member of my graduate class ‘Debating Canadian Multiculturalism’ in summer 2005.

REFERENCES Akenson, D.H. (1995). The historiography of English-speaking Canada and the concept of diaspora: A sceptical appreciation. Canadian Historical Review 766(3), 375–409.

J.S. Woodsworth and the Discourse of White Civility 241 Backhouse, C. (1999). Colour-coded: A legal history of racism in Canada, 1900– 1950. Toronto: Osgoode Society & University of Toronto Press. Balibar, É. (2002). Three concepts of politics: Emancipation, transformation, civility. In C. Jones, J. Swenson, & C. Turner (Trans.), Politics and the other scene, 1–39. London & New York: Verso. Chambers, R. (1996). The unexamined. In The White Issue. Special issue of the Minnesota Review 47, 141–56. Coleman, D. (2006). White civility: The literary project of English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Colley, L. (1992). Britons: Forging the nation 1707–1837. London: Vintage. Crawford, R. (1992). Devolving English literature. Oxford: Clarendon. Day, R. (2000). Multiculturalism and the history of Canadian diversity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Devereux, C. (1999). New woman, new world: Maternal feminism and the new imperialism in the white se ler colonies. Women’s Studies International Forum 22(2), 175–84. Diène, D. (2004). Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobobia and all forms of discrimination: Mission to Canada. United Nations Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights, Sixtieth Session, 1 March 2004. Retrieved 14 May 2009 from h p://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/ Documents?OpenFrameset. Dyer, R. (1997). White. London & New York: Routledge. Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fiamengo, J. (2002). Rediscovering our foremothers again: The racial ideas of Canada’s early feminists, 1885–1945. In D. Coleman & D. Goellnicht (Eds.), Race. Special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (Winter), 85–117. Foucault, M. (1969). What is an author? In D.H.H. Richter (Ed.), The critical tradition: Classic texts and contemporary trends, 978–88. New York: Bedfords/ St Martin’s Press. — (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. London: Routledge. Translation of A.M. Sheridan Smith, L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Editions Gallimoard, 1969. Foster, K.A. (1926). Our Canadian mosaic. Toronto: Dominion Council of the YWCA. Francis, D. (1997). National dreams: Myth, memory, and Canadian history. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Gibbon, J.M. (1938). Canadian mosaic: The making of a northern nation. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Goldberg, D.T. (1993). Racist culture: Philosophy and the politics of meaning. Oxford: Blackwell.

242 Daniel Coleman Hall, S. (1992). The West and the rest: Discourse and power. In S. Hall & B. Gieben, Formations of modernity, 275–331. Cambridge: Polity. Hayward, V. (1922). Romantic Canada. Toronto: Macmillan. Henderson, J. (2003). Se ler feminism and race making in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kulba, T. (2001/02). Citizens, consumers, critique-al subjects: Rethinking the ‘statue controversy’ and Emily Murphy’s The black candle. Tessera 31 (Winter), 74 –89. Lawson, A. (1995). Postcolonial theory and the ‘se ler’ subject. In Testing the Limits: Postcolonial Theories and Canadian literatures. Special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing 56, 20–36. Mackey, E. (1999). The house of difference: Cultural politics and national identity in Canada. London: Routledge. McCormack, R. (1981). Cloth caps and jobs: The ethnicity of English immigrants in Canada 1900–1914. In J. Dahlie & T. Fernando (Eds.), Ethnicity, power and politics in Canada, 38–55. Toronto: Methuen. McKay, I. (1994). The quest of the folk: Antimodernism and cultural selection in twentieth-century Nova Scotia. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. McNaughton, J. (1981). John Murray Gibbon and the inter-war folk festivals. Canadian Folklore 3(1), 67–73. Mignolo, W.D. (1998). Globalization, civilization processes, and the relocation of languages and cultures. In F. Jameson & M. Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization, 32–53. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Mills, A. (1991). Fool for Christ: The political thought of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morrison, T. (1990). Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Philip, M.N. (1992). Why multiculturalism can’t end racism. Frontiers: Essays and writings on racism and culture, 1984 –1992, 181–6. Toronto: Mercury. — (1995). How white is your white? On the lack of colour in the Bernardo/ Homolka affair. Border/Lines 38/39, 6–13. Porter, J. (1965). The vertical mosaic: An analysis of social class and power in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Taylor, C. (1997). The politics of recognition. In A. Heble, D. Palmateer Pennee, & J.R. Struthers (Eds.), New contexts of Canadian criticism, 98–131. Peterborough: Broadview. Valverde, M. (1991). The age of light, soap, and water: Moral reform in English Canada, 1885–1925. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

J.S. Woodsworth and the Discourse of White Civility 243 Ward, P.W. (2002). White Canada forever: Popular a itudes and public policy towards Orientals in British Columbia. 3rd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. Woodsworth, J.S. (1972) [1909]. Strangers within our gates, or coming Canadians. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — (1913). Canadians of tomorrow. Manitoba Free Press, Editorial section, 29 May to 13 June.

11 Embodied Memory: Universal Citizenship and Indigenous Cree Identity neal mcleod

My father, Jerry McLeod, told me a story about nimosôm,1 my grandfather, Gabriel (Gabe) Vandall, who was involved in the ba le of D-Day in the Second World War. Gabriel Vandall was part of the initial wave of the D-Day landing and demonstrated great bravery. His friend was shot as they went towards the beach, and he said years later that the blood of his friend was the only warmth he felt that day: When they had first come ashore and onto land at the event that has been called D-Day they were standing on a large boat with his friends this Gabe and his fellow trainees and one that he had trained with. They were standing there together looking and waiting to offload and the Germans were shooting at them from shore. sasâkisîiwak those Germans. While they were standing there together him and his friend, his friend was hit with a bullet and his friend was hit in the neck and was decapitated. Immediately therea er, Gabe was angry that his friend had been killed even before they were able to offload, it was like he was blinded with rage and he carried this feeling of rage with him from that moment that they offloaded over there all the way through until the fighting ended. (J. McLeod, 2005, personal communication)

My father and uncle are always welding and fixing things. While they were welding (ispîhk ê-kî-akôhkasikêcik), they would o en talk about nimosôm, Gabriel. Apparently, Gabriel had an idea to save lives in the tanks that involved welding: It was there when they landed on D-Day and they were fighting, they were small those things I don’t know what they are called, like those tanks,

Universal Citizenship and Indigenous Cree Identity 245 Americans tanks, Sherman tanks, those ones. Those that were in the back, the Germans had big bombs and when they were hit they immediately were destroyed when the bullets hit the tanks because the bullets were large and powerful, even when the Sherman tank was hit they would explode. He used to say, ‘It was because the metal used was too thin and the interior of the tank was also destroyed including the men that were housed inside’, he used to say. ‘Those that were sent to the front lines were worried because they knew that they would be killed, those that were inside the tanks. It came about that while he was helping he came up with an idea to put what a bulldozer has on its front, to weld a large bulldozer blade onto the tank and this is what would be hit when they were shot at, it would be the first thing that would be hit and damaged, this is what he helped with in coming up with this idea. This is what he and his friends came up with in building this but you will not hear of it spoken about anywhere, this is what I used to hear, he helped in coming up with this idea then.’ ( J. McLeod, 2005, personal communication)

My grandfather’s unit eventually went too far, was surrounded and captured. Later he was released. During the Second World War, grandfather Gabe earned fi een medals. Gabriel Vandall was a Cree-speaking man who lived near the yêkawiskâwikamâhk (Sandy Lake) reserve in north-central Saskatchewan. What makes his story even more interesting is that he is a descendant of masasakâpaw, brother of the influential Treaty Six Cree leader, atâhkakohp.2 Also, another important layer of his story is the fact that one of his uncles, Joseph Vandall, is buried in the mass grave at Batoche commemorated with a cairn.3 Joseph Vandall’s grandfather in turn, was a general in Napoleon’s army. I have o en thought about why my grandfather fought for Canada when the same country had treated him and his family so terribly. Gabriel’s people, my people, carried the embodied memory of being torn from our homeland, and of a very violent encounter with the British, yet they held on to an ancient memory. Just as Franz Fanon (2004 [1961]) has suggested, the experience of colonialism is essentially one of the body, wherein we hold these experiences within us and pass this embodied memory through generations. So what would inspire my grandfather to fight for a nation that did not recognize his rights as an Indigenous person? Part of the answer lay in the military tradition within the family. And there is an ironic twist or paradox to this history: his ancestors fought against the British while he fought with them. However, the

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answer lay deeper. In his actions as a decorated soldier, my grandfather was seeking a dignity and recognition that was not available to him in his own country. This is my understanding of Gabriel’s story. My uncle Burton Vandall told me: ‘The military buried him and many military personnel came when passed away and they buried him, he was buried in that way ... Over there in there, he was buried there that one. That is probably why his siblings are buried there also’ (2005: 12). My grandfather was highly honoured by the army, perhaps in a way similar to how Xavier and Elijah were depicted in Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005). All of these veterans, these heroes, were trying to find their place in a radically transformed world. They were trying to find honour and respect. At the one-hundred-year anniversary of Treaty Six, another grandfather of mine, the late John R. McLeod was to be the chairperson of the commemoration ceremony. He was part of the first wave of urbanization among Cree people in the 1960s. Despite participating in the larger Canadian society and benefiting from the opportunities this afforded him and his family, he stressed that the treaties were necessary for the survival of Cree people: ‘Our elders tell us that the reason our people and our leaders went to Fort Carlton was to work for the survival of Indian people. One hundred years ago, they called upon the Queen to send her representations. One hundred years ago, they met with the commissioners and negotiated a Treaty which allowed the Indian people to survive as Indians, and which allowed us to be here as Indians today and whatever the federal government or anyone else may say, without the efforts of our forefathers at Fort Carlton and Fort Pi , we would not exist as Indians today’ (J.R. McLeod, 1975b: 2). My grandfather’s point is that despite the intuitive appeal of a discourse of inclusion and universal citizenship, without treaties as an accountability mechanism and historical record, Cree people will simply disappear through processes of cultural and political hegemony and assimilation. The danger of invoking individual rights for Indigenous peoples is the potential neglect of historical processes associated with the creation of the nation state and the historical/political relationships that exist, vis-à-vis the treaties, between Indigenous people and the nation state. On the one hand, while universal citizenship is o en simply a coded way of describing assimilation, there is something laudable about the idea of universal citizenship: the idea that all citizens should be treated equally. On the other hand, this ideal o en takes the experiences of people with privilege, those who have benefited from the colonial process, as normative and

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universal. Through this process, the embodied experience of Indigenous Cree people is o en relegated to a lesser, subaltern role. Indeed, a discourse of universal citizenship can rationalize colonization and undermine the collective aspirations of Cree-speaking people. Equally, while the discourse of liberal democracy has the potential to recognize human rights, it also has the potential to ignore the history of injustices to Cree people (and others) through processes of political amnesia. During the negotiations of Treaty Four in 1874, Chief kawâhkatos, reiterated, albeit with a sense of humour, the common Cree narrative that the Cree people would not give up control of their land. This is a story of Indigenous resistance to colonial power and it was told to nimosôm (my grandfather Gabriel Vandall) by an elder in Saskatchewan: ‘One of the Queen’s representatives had come to negotiate with the Indians. His aides treated him very grandly and even had a chair for him to sit on. A cloth was spread on the ground and several bags of money were placed on it. The representative explained through an interpreter how many bags of money the Queen had sent. [A Chief] was told this and said, “Tell the Queen’s representative to empty the money and fill the bags with dirt. Tell him to take the bags back to England to the Queen. She has paid for that much land”’ (J.R. McLeod, 1975a: 6). kawâhkatos played with the government official, Alexander Morris, to demonstrate that the Crees, nêhiyawak, would not readily give the British control over their land. There was a very long period of time in which the Cree and the British engaged in mutually beneficial trade with one another. Foster (1999) characterizes this as a compact; as a relationship between equals. This relationship eventually changed to one of subservience through the imposition of the Indian Act and the failure to honour treaties. Sometimes the period between initial contact and the pressure to control lands inhabited by Indigenous people was very long, whereas at other times, the point of contact and the fight for control and ownership of these lands was concurrent. For the Cree, the difference between these two points was protracted, and I think that this informs the relationship. Because of the long-standing relationship between the British and nêhiyawak, there was a process of treaty making, which in some ways mimics the activity and processes of the fur trade. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Cree people were in a period of transition. The treaties were taking place, and Cree people were trying to adapt to shi ing circumstances: namely, a shi form the fur trade to agriculture. The agriculture policy of the federal government at the

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time, however, was not working: implements to till the land were not adequate and food was in short supply; as a result, people were very hungry. During this time period, mistahi-maskwa, Big Bear, was trying to organize the people, and to get a be er treaty. In 1885, violence erupted at Frog Lake where mistahi-maskwa’s band had been relocated. Many of the young men were tired of waiting for a be er treaty, and had grown tired of waiting for the government to honour the terms to which it had agreed. There was much ill-feeling towards authorities representing Euro-Canadian institutions, such as priests and specific individuals, such as the farm instructor, Delaney, and Indian Agent Quinn. Although violence against unarmed humans can never be justified, it must be understood that these men had abused their power. Delaney, for instance, had used his position of power to trade food for sex with Cree women. Big Bear a empted to use his waning influence over the young men to stop violence as he knew the repercussions would be extreme. Eventually, Big Bear surrendered at Fort Carlton with his boy, mistatim-awâsis. In Cree the term is ê-mâyihkamikahk, which means ‘where it went wrong.’ Fort Carlton, ê-mâyihkamikahk, ended the possibility of intercultural dialogue and a meaningful notion of citizenship for Indigenous people within the nation state. It also served as a pretext for the government to end any possibility of opening treaty discussions. A er ê-mâyihkamikahk most of the leaders were either dead, imprisoned, or in exile. There is a story I heard many years ago from Violet Coleman of Lipton, Saskatchewan. The story involves her grandparents, Thomas and Harriet Anne Murray (née Wannamaker). They were originally from Ontario, and they were some of the first farmers in the Lipton area. He was the mayor and on the school board. Her story goes as follows: ‘Mounties went to the door of my grandparents’ house and asked for food. Big Bear shackled to a wagon was on his way to Stoney Mountain penitentiary. My grandmother, Harriet Anne Murray, asked about Big Bear. “Forget him,” she was told. “But if you are hungry then he is probably hungry too.” She brought tea and food on plates for mistahi-maskwa, and fed him along with the others. She fed mistahimaskwa first however.’ The reason that I want to share this story is that it shows that not everyone in the English-speaking society was against mistahi-maskwa; there were those in the English-speaking society who recognized the humanity of mistahi-maskwa and tried their best to help him.

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A er Ê-Mâyihkamikahk A er the events of 1885, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald is noted as saying: ‘The execution of the Indians ought to convince the Red Man that the white man governs.’4 This stark statement symbolizes the diminishing possibility of a universal citizenship and an inclusive notion of political deliberation. At the same time, the possibility of addressing the historical injustices surrounding the incorporation of nêhiyawak into the nation state of Canada was greatly diminished. The quotation summarizes the general position of the government regarding Indigenous people: the empire is rationalized and justified through the expansion of the nation, and rationalization of its right to power. In the period following the violent events of 1885, the pass system was imposed (restricting Indigenous peoples’ mobility), various Indigenous Cree and Metis leaders were imprisoned, and relations between the Cree, Metis, and English-speaking society entered a new era. The treaties were superseded by the system of colonialism and the Indian Act. The reserve system continued to be developed through the policies of the federal government; these afforded Indigenous people very li le mobility within their territories. Together, the reserve system and the Indian Act operated as a form of cultural hegemony, bringing about a restructuring of Indigenous economies, changes in language acquisition and use (in part through the residential school system), an imposition of alien political structures, and an undermining of traditional spirituality. While Canada was a multiethnic state, a cultural and political hegemony was constructed on the basis of the English language and the British political structure.5 Dressed up in the language of universal citizenship, this discourse was used to suppress Indigenous people (including Cree nationalism) and alternative world views and aspirations. The period from 1885 to the First World War also was a period of relative political inactivity for nêhiyawak. Many Cree people were simply in survival mode, facing an onslaught from the mainstream culture and the continual erosion of their land base through land surrenders. But English-language acquisition among the Cree and their participation in the First World War also produced a new generation of Cree leaders. The war instilled in people the notion that they were part of the country we call Canada and in warfare they proved themselves to be equals. In turn, these experiences became the basis for demands that se ler

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society treat the Cree with dignity and accord them certain citizenship privileges that previously had been denied them. Participation in the army during the war inspired the Cree to seek a more inclusive notion of citizenship, but at the same time, they wanted to protect their treaty rights and maintain their status as a separate nation of people. League of Indians As I have learned through the stories of the late John B. Tootoosis,6 and my great-grandfather Abel McLeod, one of the ironies of the residential school system was that it allowed people to read the Indian Act and le ers from the government for themselves. They were able to question mainstream society, and they were able to speak to challenge governmental officials directly. The League of Indians arose during this period a er the First World War. People were concerned with maintaining treaties, but also strident in their a empts to achieve fuller participation in mainstream society, especially in education and health. F.O. Lo , himself a veteran of the First World War and a Mohawk from the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, began to organize Indigenous people on a national scale; his efforts can be seen as an extension of mistahi-maskwa’s a empts to organize on a more regional scale. Lo attempted to create a pan-Indian nationalism and constantly referred to the nationhood of Indigenous people, and protested the patronizing and oppressive Indian Act, as well as other coercive policies. In the West, this cause was taken up by Edward Ahenakew, who was active in the League of Indians. He was also an Anglican priest, and protested the treatment of children in residential schools and sought be er conditions for his people. Yet Ahenakew, like many others in the movement, was very cautious about voting in federal elections; he and others thought that voting in such elections could limit their treaty rights – that by voting, Indian political structures would be undermined. John B. Tootoosis noted how the Church tried to cripple Indigenous identity: ‘The Church discouraged Indians from joining the organization [League of Indians of Western Canada]. The nuns would lecture the Indians. They would tell the children every day that if they listened to their parents they would go to hell. A er many years of this the young children didn’t listen to their parents. They were brainwashed. They created a conflict inside every teepee on the reservation. The church cut off the very people [the elders] who should have been teaching and

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preaching and guiding the young people’ (1977: A1178–9). A empts were made by various political organizations to stop these residential schools. An aim of the Allied Bands (later called the Protective Association for the Indians and their treaties) north of Regina was also to end the schools. The organization sought ‘to strive for a be er Indian education with schools on every reserve in order to bring Indians a be er standard of socio-economic development’ (Opekokew, 1980: VI–26). The League of Indians of Western Canada, an offshoot of Lo ’s organization, was also against the schools: ‘The League opposed residential schools – the church wanted to dominate the people through the schools’ ( J.B. Tootoosis, 1977: A1178–9). John B. Tootoosis was the grandson of osâwaw-askiy-akohp (Yellow Mud Blanket), who in turn was the older brother of Chief Poundmaker. Tootoosis rose to prominence when he became leader of the League of Indians of Western Canada, a er Edward Ahenakew stepped down in the 1920s because of pressure from the Church. He later became the first president of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians in 1958. Tootoosis commented that ‘the Church was supporting the domination. They were doing the brainwashing in those residential schools ... I went through the mill myself. I saw what was happening and what they were trying to do’ (1977: A1178–9). My dad once told me that John Tootoosis said that one had to be careful about one’s involvement in white religious groups, because there was always the danger of them using their power to dominate Indian politics. The Church has o en supported the political domination of Indians. Tootoosis o en talked about how hard it was to organize people: ‘Indians weren’t organized before. They were so damn dominated by the government’ (ibid.). People were seemingly unable to make decisions, as they had li le control over their lives. As Indians became organized in the 1920s and 1930s, they broke the yoke of domination; a central demand of Indian political leaders and organizations in that period was to end the domination of Church schooling. Tootoosis said that: ‘The League opposed residential schools, the church wanted to dominate the people and keep the schools’ (ibid.). In many ways, John Tootoosis was the mistahi-maskwa of the twentieth century; he struggled to maintain our identity in a very difficult time and led the movement to regain our rights and assert our dignity as a people. He did this through his stories, his connection to place, and the help of his father. Sluman and Goodwill write that ‘John Tootoosis, Sr would not allow his sons to feel rejected and useless. This perceptive

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man had encouraged all his children from their earlier years to listen to the Elders in Council and then debate on the various ma ers that had been under discussion with one another’ (1984: 107). While there were severe pressures on our culture at that time, people found ways to preserve their identity and their place in the world. Stories and language led some back to their identities, as it is only through our own stories that we can find true dignity and integrity in the world. John Tootoosis was trying to protect ‘Cree space’: both the spiritual and physical home of the Cree. ‘Cree space’ could be understood as a metaphorical way of describing the narratives, land, and all the things that allow nêhiyawak to express themselves in relation to their ancestors. The late Wilfred Tootoosis, John’s eldest son also reflected on his experiences in residential school and how he was singled out because of his father’s activities: ‘I had quite an experience in school. I’d get picked on. The nuns and priests spoke against my dad’s movement, everywhere, in church, in the classroom. And when somebody did something wrong they ganged up and blamed me for it ... They could have had my dad shot if they had a chance to’ (1999: 314). The children of activists and spiritual leaders were o en hit hardest, and a acked regularly and singled out. My father told me that the priests used to call John Tootoosis’ children ‘communists’ (ibid.). There are many stories about John Tootoosis and his struggle to fight for the rights of the Cree people. Here is a story I heard from Pat Cayen (from Muskeg Lake): The Tootoosis family at one time had only one saddle. John’s sons would use the saddle to ride, an activity they enjoyed very much. However, one time there was a man from Cold Lake who was visiting. He had ridden a horse all of the way from Cold Lake to Poundmaker, which is a considerable distance. John had pity on him and gave him the saddle so that his trip would be be er because the man from Cold Lake still had to travel to the proximity of Regina. Some time later John was in Cold Lake at a meeting. He was si ing at a table when the man who was given the saddle approached him. He looked at John as though he recognized him. Finally, he did recognize him and started to talk to John. He learned that John did not have very much money to travel back, so he gave John $15, which was a lot of money back then.

In the early days of Indian organization, people would help each other, stay at each other’s houses, and feed travellers. They would share

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what li le they had and collect money to help activists a end meetings. Leaders back then had a lot of support because they truly did represent the people. My father said once how people would share hay with one another and extra things with those who did not have quite enough. The League continued to operate in Cree territory alongside other organizations. Finally, in 1946, the Union of Saskatchewan Indians was organized at the Barry Hotel in Saskatoon. Various groups merged to form the larger organization. In the document describing this meeting, there are two seemingly conflicting strands of narrative: one stresses a sense of nationalism, of treaty, and the issue of justice; and the other stresses universalism. ‘The Union shall be democratic and non sectarian ...’ and ‘promoting respect and tolerance for all’ (Union of Saskatchewan Indians, 1946: 1). Joe Dreaver, grandson of mistawâsis, and a Second World War veteran, noted: ‘the Indian Department has gone to work without consulting the Indians; they never asked us where our grievances might originate. This is not the treaty. Years ago a nation made a treaty with the English crown, but the Indian Act was passed without our consent, and it abrogates the treaty. They have done a great deal to improve our lot. But in O awa, they do not want us to organize. Are we living under democratic rule?’ (ibid.: 5). As a veteran he wanted some benefits of citizenship. He also wanted to protect the treaties, which he saw as the foundation for ensuring that his people were treated justly. Perhaps one of the strongest articulations of the imposition of universal citizenship was the 1969 statement of the government of Canada about Indian policy, referred to as the White Paper. It marked an important turning point in relations between Indigenous people and the government. It was a unilateral a empt to impose new procedures governing Indigenous/Canadian relations. The paper was based on liberal principles and had two basic purposes: to help those who were farthest behind, and to end the special rights Indigenous people had in favour of the universal conception of citizenship. Both tenets ignored the collective claims of Indigenous people. People would be given some measure of justice through the liberal principle of ‘helping those most behind,’ but Indigenous people were also to be politically absorbed into Canada: Indigenous nations, without the treaties which afforded collective rights, would no longer function as distinct nations and collectivities. Indigenous people were conscious of their humanity, of universalism, but they were also insistent about wanting to protect their Indigenous identity.

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Canadian National Homogeneity and the White Paper The White Paper a empted to impose universal citizenship upon Indigenous people, to assimilate them. As Eriksen argues, the White Paper reflects a ‘nationalist tendency towards cultural homogeneity and the accompanying tendency to frame every political question in the state’s legalistic, bureaucratic form of discourse; this disqualifies culturally distinctive groups from full participation and simultaneously promotes their assimilation’ (1991: 272). To be fair, the White Paper must be situated in a larger context, namely, Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s dream to create a ‘Just Society’ which would redistribute wealth and resources to the poorest within the society, including to Indigenous people. Redistribution of wealth was to be done on the basis of individuals and not collectivities. Augie Fleras and James Elliot put the White Paper into a larger context: ‘Fallout from the American civil rights movement as well as broader movements, as for human and individual rights, was equally important in revising the political agenda. For the architect of the paper [White Paper], Pierre Elliot Trudeau, replacing special status with equality was part of a grander vision of a just society in which all citizens regardless of race were similar under the law’ (1992: 118). But as Dianne Longboat writes, ‘In 1969, the federal government issued a probing paper on Indians. The White Paper proposed to end the special status of Indians as individuals and their communities as distinct political entities – this caused the reawakening of political consciousness and the emergence of provincial and territorial Indian political organizations designed to protect the rights of First Nations’ (1999: 24). And so, Indigenous people, led by the late Harold Cardinal, argued against the White Paper and produced the so-called Red Paper, which forced the government eventually to withdraw the White Paper. In the wake of its withdrawal, the government decentralized large amounts of funding to Indigenous people. Cathy Wheaton writes: ‘The FSI [Federation of Saskatchewan Indians] grew dramatically at this time in this development due to massive increases in funding. David Ahenakew would increase the budget of the FSI from $70,000 to $1.5 million by 1972. It employed 199 people to run its programs’ (1999: 14; citing Pitsula, 1996). Indian people thus began to create modern bureaucracies. Having survived overt colonialism and a empts at cultural genocide, their culture was inevitably changed.

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Creation of Modern Indigenous Institutions The resistance of various Indigenous Cree leaders, such as John Tootoosis, made the creation of modern nêhiyawak institutions possible. An important aspect of nêhiyâwiwin and modernity is the strong resistance by which nêhiyawak opposed colonialism. Once nêhiyawak people began to control their own lives, the challenge became how to create new institutions. Things began to change as Indian people asserted their right to control their educational institutions. Smith Atimoyoo, the first director of the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College, stressed the importance of knowing who we are: ‘It is very important that we, as Indian people, realize that we must learn to know who we are and what we should be doing’ (1969: 4; original emphasis). Perhaps one of the most interesting recent developments has been the use of education to preserve culture. Instead of destroying culture (as in residential schools), education today has the capacity to strengthen it. Education also can allow people to think outside of modernity. For example, the Blue Quills residential school in Saskatchewan was taken over in 1970 by nêhiyawak. ‘We have to realize that we must take part in planning and in carrying out those plans if we are ever to regain our proper place in the social life of our country. We can no longer be content to let others do our thinking for us. We, ourselves, must take the action which will remove the discrepancies which have existed in education for Indians in the past’ (Blue Quills Native Education Council, 1970: n.p.). A 1972 National Indian Brotherhood position paper, Indian Control of Indian Education, stressed the importance of children learning about their past, thus linking history, education, and self-government: ‘Unless a child learns about the forces which shape him: the history of his people, their values and customs, their language, he will never really know himself or his potential as a human being’ (p. 9). A new curriculum was needed: ‘The present schools system is culturally alien to native students. Where the Indian contribution is not entirely ignored, it is o en cast in unfavourable light. School curricula in federal and provincial schools should recognize Indian culture, values, customs, languages and the Indian contribution to Canadian development’ (p. 2). Jean Barman, Yvonne Hébert, and Don McCaskill observe that Indian Control of Indian Education was founded on two principles: ‘parental responsibility’ and ‘local responsibility’ (1987: 21).

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In Saskatchewan, a empts were made to develop curricula that would help foster the retention of Aboriginal languages. The Cree Language Commi ee a empted to implement a meaningful curriculum into the schools. Language was stressed because it was seen as a valuable source of cultural preservation: ‘We also feel that learning of Cree is important for our children. Their ability to appreciate the history and mode of living of their people depends considerably on their knowledge of our language’ (Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College, 1973: 8). Indian control of Indian education would ‘ensure the transmission of Indian values, identity and tradition while providing a quality education’ (Barman, Hébert, & McCaskill,1987: 2). ‘Following centuries of domination and the a empted imposition of alien values Native people are reaffirming the validity of their own cultures; they are redefining political, economic, and social priorities within the context of the late twentieth century. Control over education lies at the heart of this process’ (p. 1). An example where nêhiyawak a empted to get control over our institutions was in 1973 on the James Smith Reserve, in east-central Saskatchewan. It was called the ‘louse incident.’ Children who were bussed into the nearby town of Kinistino for their schooling were wrongfully accused of having lice. The incident was painful for the children and energized the people of James Smith to establish their own school. A news report of the time described the ‘louse incident’ as the ‘final straw that capped a growing disenchantment by both parents and the white man’s school’ (Northian Newsle er, 1974: 26). The school at Kinistino had received federal funding, but as Noel Dyck and John McLeod write, ‘over a period of fi een years these schools were unable and perhaps even unwilling to meet the needs of the students from James Smith, even though they received large amounts of money in tuition and capital agreements’ (1973: 1). Establishment of a Cree-controlled school on the reserve was the first step towards self-government. By controlling schools, people could try to reverse colonialism and establish Indigenous institutions founded on Indigenous philosophy. Robert Regnier, a former employee of the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre and friend of nimosôm, shared the following story with me concerning the ‘louse incident’: ‘The events had reached a climax, and there was a meeting where representatives of Indian Affairs came. Before that meeting, the school commi ee had got together and created stereotypes of different officials from Indian Affairs; there was “the know it all,” for example: The school commi ee created hypothetical questions that these people would have to answer.

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For instance, they practised how they would respond to the question, “You will not be able to do this. How can you take over the school?”’ (Personal communication). The point of the story is that mainstream institutions and their representatives were still very patronizing to Indigenous people. Eventually my community acquired control over the school and developed programs. Language lessons were created, and some wanted to use land claims research to develop histories. John Tobias commented that the information could be made to be part of a ‘social studies program’ (1973: 2). The James Smith Reserve was the first in Saskatchewan to establish control. Two years a er my reserve achieved control over schooling, my grandfather became the chairperson of the centennial commemorations of Treaty Six. At a meeting in 1975, the minutes read: ‘Mr McLeod expresses his happiness every time a new school is opened on a reserve but he wishes to see more of the Indian image projected from these schools’ ( J.R. McLeod, 1975a: 14). He was a survivor of the residential schools. mosôm’s vision was that ‘we should realize that it is up to us to teach our children their history and make them proud to be Indians. There is a quote which reads: “The public school is a state institution created by the state for its own preservation.” Every reserve is a state and so should we Indians rely on our own people to preserve our own culture by teaching our children’ (ibid.). By articulating Cree history and culture in the schools, nêhiyawak have self-government because we would know who we were as a people. In a later meeting, nimosôm stated that ‘the reserve is also an institution, an Indian institution where children can be taught their Indian history and language and be proud that they are Indians’ (p. 6). As my father Jerry McLeod has o en observed, there were innumerable problems in pu ing Indian control of education into practice, such as with funding. For instance, a Band audit identified: ‘extremely weak, almost non-existent internal control’ (James Smith Band Audit, 1973–74: 4). The report argues that ‘it should be obvious that the only logical solution to the problems of James Smith Band is a complete withdrawal of programs’ (ibid.). The relative speed by which Indigenous governments adopted characteristics of ‘modern governments’ demonstrates that modernity is more than a cultural phenomenon specific to Europeans. A cousin of mine, Elaine Vandall, told me that once when she was interpreting for an assembly of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians,

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the elders spoke at the beginning, but then the bureaucrats began to speak in a different language (they did so by speaking English and by using bureaucratic jargon). Instead of relying on the power of kimosômipanawak (ancestors), they depended on flow charts and fiscal breakdowns. Many leaders no longer share as they once did; give-away ceremonies, which once flourished, are now displaced by individualism. Exemption from federal and provincial taxes o en justifies individual greed. It is therefore essential that a critique of Indian political/ideological structures be undertaken. By the end of the 1970s, nêhiyawak in Saskatchewan were struggling to create their own modern institutions, but at the same time were simply replicating the modern mainstream institutions. Perhaps what was missing was the philosophy of nêhiyawak. At a meeting at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College in 1979, my grandfather questioned the centralization of power in the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians. My grandfather, who taught me much of what I know either directly or through my father, said: ‘It seems to me that this is a one-man organization and this one man is the Chief of this organization’ (Co-ordinators Meeting, 1979: 6). The chief, instead of being accountable to the people, was answerable only to himself. nimosôm added: ‘He decides everything when he likes. As for the other members of the executive, it appears to me that they are just followers and the Chief says, that is what happens and that is how these deficits occur and we have no say’ (ibid.). The challenge of Indigenous modernity is to create modern institutions but to maintain key elements of traditional Cree philosophy; if this is not done, modernity becomes simply a vehicle for assimilation. Instead of using technology to develop and expand Indian institutions, technology and new modes of production have led to assimilation of Indigenous consciousness. Noel Dyck’s thoughtful book, What Is the Indian ‘Problem’: Tutelage and Resistance in Canadian Indian Administration (1991) is one of the most succinct descriptions of how corruption emerged once Indians began to administer programs. In a telling story, Noel Dyck relates a night when he went with his friend Val Nightraveller to visit on Val’s reserve at Li le Pine. Dyck notes: ‘Later that evening as we le the reserve I suggested to him that his father must be very proud of the work that Val, one of the few Indian university graduates in Western Canada, was doing for Indian people through his activities in the provincial Indian

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association. A er several moments of silence Val replied that his father did not agree with the activities of the association: “He is afraid that I will end up doing in ten years what the missionaries and the Indian agents couldn’t do in more than a hundred years”’ (p. 33). This quotation gives an insight into the thoughts of a man actively working in the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians at a time when it was receiving more funding. Val Nightraveller was critically reflecting on the process of how Indian organizations could bring about assimilation quickly and effectively. The encounter of nêhiyawak with modernity must be understood as a series of layers. There is an interesting relationship between the universalistic impulses of modernity and the tribal forces of particularism. Some may see the universalistic tendencies of modernity as a liberating force, saying that modernity affords people the luxury and opportunity to create the world as they see it. Others, such as nimosôm note the destructive, colonial aspect of modernity. nimosôm used to ask fundamental questions about contemporary life, such as, ‘What have we given up in exchange for the modern life?’ and ‘What stories have we forgo en in order to live in today’s world?’ (J.R. McLeod, 1976: 2). In 1976 he wondered about the changes that had occurred over the last one hundred years: ‘And we have wondered what our ancestors would say to us if they could be with us today. I, myself, o en wonder about some of the things I have done in my lifetime. I have broken and worked down four hundred acres of land on James Smith. What would a man from 1876 or 1776 or even further back say to me, to all of us, if he were here today?’ (ibid.). He added: ‘Have we exchanged the buffalo for welfare payments? Have we traded our own religion for the white man’s churches? Our medicine for his? Indian languages for English?’ (p. 3). I return to my original question: what motivated my grandfather Gabriel Vandall to fight for Canada during the Second World War? I believe that he was profoundly motivated by experiencing the embodiment of colonialism, physically, and also from being torn from an Indigenous relationship to the land. Perhaps, paradoxically, he joined the army, not necessarily to ‘to fight for the Queen’ or something to that effect, but I believe he fought for his dignity and respect. He fought to find meaning in the world, and to shape it with his life, with narrative and story. Our family had experienced profound political and spiritual turmoil: soldiering allowed him in his life to connect to an embodied past: to an embodied experience.

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My grandfather John R. McLeod was motivated by similar albeit slightly different reasons. My grandfather had also experienced the brutalizing effects of colonization. He, as mentioned before, had gone to the residential school (at Gordon’s) and had experienced a great deal of turmoil and hardship as a result of that experience. Yet, despite this, he was profoundly motivated to maintain the Cree language, and to maintain a distinctive Indigenous Cree political identity. Narrative memory connects us to the past, but the memory is also embodied in the land and in our bodies. Through the lives of two of my grandparents, I can see their struggle to find meaning in the world, as a reaction to colonization, but also as a way of bringing the past to the present. Both of my grandfathers drew on intergenerational memory to form their lives, drawing on the rich memory that preceded them. mosôm Gabriel had come from a family which had resisted British expansion, but found meaning in his life by being a solider, like those before him. My mosôm found his place in the world by going back to old Cree ceremonies, and also to old memory of treaties and Indigenous political governance structures. One cannot maintain a distinct identity in the contemporary world without knowing the past. Otherwise, one will simply have a distorted sense of one’s place in the world, shi ed and transformed by a colonized understanding of the world, wherein the memories and narratives of ancient ancestors are hidden and shrouded. Both of my grandfathers, in their own ways, embodied this memory, in their actions and deeds. mistasiniy: Envisioning Universal Citizenship Indigenous people remain conscious of a shared humanity with nonIndigenous ‘mainstream’ Canadians and the element of universalism inherent in humanitarian concerns; at the same time, they insist on protecting Indigenous national identity. The dilemma, then, is in balancing historical justice concerns while being part of the larger community – Canada. In this sense, universalism can be understood as reaching for some level of commensurability between communities – the ability to see oneself in the Other. There is an old Cree story that provides a narrative basis for enacting commensurability. mistasiniy Big Stone is a story about envisioning and imagining a wider sense of citizenship and community. The story involves a young Cree boy who was separated from his band. He was eventually taken in by a grandfather buffalo who shielded him

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from others in the buffalo camp and raised him as his own. The grandfather taught him how to survive. Eventually, the boy transformed into a stone that was then honoured by Cree-speaking people: the story tells of the interrelationship between people and other beings. In 1966, this stone was destroyed when a large tract of land in the nearby Qu’Appelle Valley was flooded in the construction of a dam. Parts of the stone were kept and a cairn was erected. Ironically, the dam created was named the Diefenbaker dam. I say ironically because Diefenbaker was a man who improved the lives of many Indigenous people; he actually took the time to talk to Cree people in the streets of Prince Albert. Place names commemorate events and beliefs and also, as they change, mark shi s of collective memory. The spiritual and metaphysical elements of the story of mistasiniy Big Stone are not necessarily the most important. Rather, following Rudolf Bultmann (1955), it is the cultural symbolism of the narrative I want to explore. The story talks about values, about the inclusion of a young orphan into a group of buffalo and also how the boy comes back into human society. The story is about allowing others into your group, of thinking beyond narrow borders and seeing yourself in the Other: it is in this sense that the old Cree story provides a narrative basis for envisioning and imagining a wider sense of citizenship and community. Not only do we find the a empt to think beyond a narrow sense of nationalism within old Cree stories, but also within the discourse of J.S. Woodsworth. In his important work, Nation Building, Woodsworth attempts to contextualize the new demographic shi s in Western Canada: the massive influx of citizens who did not share his Anglo-Protestant upbringing. Despite his own starting position, his own lived experience, and indeed in many ways, his position of privilege, he was able to think beyond these contingencies and imagine a larger politic possibility: ‘We cannot re-erect the narrow neighbourhood boundaries. We are citizens of the world and must face the problem of world organization. If the world is not again to be plunged into war, this world organization must be worked out on the principles of justice and the spirit of love. Permanent peace can come only through the development of goodwill’ (1917: 1). O entimes, Western democratic liberal tradition tends to ignore the historicity of the creation of nation states and empires. It also tends to ignore a wider conception of citizenship and interrelationships. Old Cree narratives, such as mistasiniy, and indeed the discourse of J.S. Woodsworth, point to the possibility of a wider sense of identification

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of one’s self with other beings and interconnections between humans and other beings. Citizenship involves the ability to participate in the political structures of one’s country and to be able to contribute meaningfully to the public debate regarding policies. ‘Rights’ are an integral part of citizenship, protecting the individual from the coercive will of the majority. However, ‘rights’ discourse in Western society o en focuses too much on individual human needs and wants creating, in some ways, a culture of narcissism and excessive individualism. Treaty rights, on the other hand, have the potential to widen the liberal fixation on individual rights, providing a more collective way of envisioning political space. At the same time, we must also try to avoid a narrow form of Indigenous nationalism; the la er fails to see the communality in all of human experience and the shared concern for human welfare regardless of ethnic and/or linguistic background. Although Woodsworth’s writings rarely explicitly addressed Indigenous issues, an omission that is notable, one could argue, I think, that he nevertheless helped to establish a discursive space wherein Indigenous people could begin to play a larger role in shaping the political discourse of our country. Woodsworth embodied the spirit of the social gospel movement, with strong ties to the working class and the poor. One could argue that with the emergence of the CCF in 1932, under Woodsworth’s leadership, the relationship between Christianity and Indigenous peoples in Canada began to change. Instead of being primarily a coercive tool of assimilation, Christianity through the social gospel movement, could be seen as providing an avenue for reducing the conceptual space between mainstream Anglo culture in Western Canada and Indigenous people by creating a climate of empathy, through its embodiment of the so-called Golden Rule – the ethic of responsibility. This perhaps became most concretely manifested in Saskatchewan through the CCF’s involvement with Indigenous political organizations, including their sponsorship of the 1946 meeting (discussed above), that resulted in the creation of the Union of Saskatchewan Indians, an amalgam of several previously existing Indigenous groups. Finally, the concept of citizenship, which is essentially grounded in the notion of connections between beings, has to be widened to include a more explicit consideration of the earth around us, beyond mere human interest. One could argue that the subordination of Indigenous people within this country is related in some measure to the

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overexploitation of land and resources. An honouring of treaties has the potential to correct past injustices and also to help us as a society to move towards an environmental sense of justice as well.

NOTES 1 It is a Cree convention that Cree names should appear in lower case and in italics. 2 atâhkakohp was a major Cree leader during the time of treaty negotiations. 3 A er the public hanging of eight Indigenous men in North Ba leford in 1885, their bodies were put in a mass grave and were covered with cement so that their bodies could not be retrieved. It should be noted that every year there are still feasts held to honour these men. 4 See Public Archives of Canada (1885: 587–8). 5 See Daniel Coleman, in this volume. 6 John Tootoosis was a highly influential Cree leader of the twentieth century who helped found the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations.

REFERENCES Atimoyoo, S. (1969). Sixth Annual School Commi ee Conference, SheratonCavalier, Saskatchewan, 1–2 May 1967. From the private papers of John R. McLeod. Barman, J., Hébert, Y., & McCaskill, D. (1987). The challenge of Indian education: An overview. In J. Barman, Y. Hébert, & D. McCaskill (Eds.), Indian education in Canada, vol. 2, The challenge, 1–21. Vancouver: UBC Press. Blue Quills Native Education Council. (1970). Untitled Document. From the private papers of John R. McLeod. Boyden, J. (2005). Three day road: A novel. Toronto: Penguin. Bultmann, R. (1955). Essays, philosophical and theological. London: SCM Press. Co-ordinators’ Meeting. (1979). Minutes, 19 Dec. Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Dyck, N. (1991). What is the Indian ‘problem’? Tutelage and resistance in Canadian Indian administration. St John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland Press. Dyck, N., & McLeod, J.R. (1973). Report on the recent events of the removal of the students from Kinistino Schools and the expansion of the James Smith Schools. Private papers, John R. McLeod.

264 Neal McLeod Eriksen, T.H. (1991). Ethnicity versus nationalism. Journal of Peace Research 28(3), 263–78. Fanon, F. (2004) [1961]. The wretched of the earth. Trans. by R. Philcox, with commentary by J.P. Sartre & H.K. Bhabha. New York: Grove. Fleras, A., & Elliot, J. (1992). The nations within: Aboriginal state relations in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Foster, J.E. (1999) [1987]. Indian and white relations in the Prairie West during the fur trade period: A compact. In R. Price, The spirit of the Alberta Indian treaties, 181–202. Edmonton: Pica Pica. James Smith Band Audit. (1973–74). Indian and Northern Affairs. From the private papers of John R. McLeod. Longboat, D. (1999). First Nation control of education: The path to our survival. In J. Barman, J. Hébert, & D. McCaskill (Eds.), Indian education in Canada, vol. 2, The challenge, 22– 42. Vancouver: UBC Press. McLeod, J. (2005). Gabriel Vandall, WW II veteran. Neal McLeod, Interviewer, 17 April. Jeff Sanderson, Transcription/translation. James Smith Reserve, Saskatchewan. McLeod, J.R. (1975a). Minutes from Treaty Six General Meeting, 11 Dec. Anna Crowe, Interpreter/transcription. Onion Lake Band Hall, Onion Lake, Saskatchewan. From the private papers of John R. McLeod. — (1975b). Addresss by John R. McLeod to Treaty Six Commemoration Meeting. Presented to the All Chiefs Conference, 20 April. Private papers of John R. McLeod. — (1976). Treaty Six Commemoration Meeting, 19–20 Jan., Thunderchild Reserve, Saskatchewan. National Indian Brotherhood. (1972). Indian control of Indian education. Policy paper presented to the Minister of Indian Affairs by the National Indian Brotherhood. O awa: National Indian Brotherhood. Northian Newsle er. (1974). The louse that roared. In Joan Drummont (Ed.), Northian Newsle er, March – April. Reprinted from the Saskatchewan Indian, Jan. 1974. Opekokew, D. (1980). The First Nations: Indian government and the Canadian confederation. Saskatoon: Federation of Saskatchewan Indians. Pitsula, J.M. (1996). The Thatcher government in Saskatchewan and treaty Indians, 1964–1971: The quiet revolution. Saskatchewan History 48(1), 3–17. Public Archives of Canada. (1885). The papers of Sir John A. Macdonald to Edgar Dewdney, 20 Nov., 587–8. Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College. (1973). Proposal for a ‘new’ school to serve Li le Pine. Lucky Man Poundmaker, under the direction of the Band Councils of Li le Pine, Sept. From the private papers of John R. McLeod.

Universal Citizenship and Indigenous Cree Identity 265 Sluman, N., & Goodwill. J. (1984). John Tootoosis. Winnipeg: Pemmican. Tobias, J. (1973). Le er from John Tobias to John R. McLeod, 2 May. From the private papers of John R. McLeod. Tootoosis, J.B. (1977). Interview. Murray Dobbin, Interviewer, 9 Sept. Poundmaker Reserve, Saskatchewan. In Towards a New Past, A1178–79, Saskatchewan Archives Board. Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan. Tootoosis, W. (1999). This was one of the predictions, that our traditions will come back some day. In P. Kulchyski, D. McCaskill, & D. Newhouse (Eds.), In the words of elders: Aboriginal cultures in transition, 311–60. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Union of Saskatchewan Indians. (1946). Constitution and Minutes of Meeting, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Vandall, B. (2005). Gabriel Vandall, WW II veteran. Neal McLeod, Interviewer, 17 April. Jeff Sanderson, Transcription/translation. James Smith Reserve, Saskatchewan. Wheaton, C. (1999). The role of treaties in the history of Saskatchewan Indian Politics 1910 to 1992. Journal of Indigenous Thought 2(2). Retrieved 18 May 2009 from h p://www.sifc.edu/Indian%20Studies/IndigenousThought/ fall99/cathypaper.htm. Woodsworth, J.S. (1917). Nation building. Reprinted from The University Magazine, Feb. 1917.

12 Canadians of Tomorrow: J.S. Woodsworth and the New Ethnicities david chariandy

In 1913, Woodsworth published a series of articles entitled ‘Canadians of Tomorrow’ in which he explored, with considerable anxiety, the fate of his own ideals of cooperation and social justice in light of the increasing presence of ethnic minorities in Canada. Woodsworth introduces his concerns by describing his recent encounter with a foreign-born census-taker. ‘Vat nationality you?’ the census-taker appears to have asked. ‘I looked down,’ Woodsworth tells us, ‘I’m afraid somewhat contemptuously, at my li le foreign interlocutor ... Here was a question concerning which I had no hesitation. Though living in the midst of Poles ... and Germans and Jews I did not forget that I was of the old Canadian Loyalist stock. I fancy I was several inches taller as I proudly proclaimed my nationality – “Canadian.” “Canadian,” repeated the census enumerator, with a puzzled expression. “Canadian – not many of dem kind in dis country!”’ (Woodsworth, 1913, as quoted in Mills, 1991: 48). ‘Yes, we laugh,’ Woodsworth concludes to his imagined audience, ‘but those words are prophetic and the time of their fulfillment is not far distant’ (ibid.). Using Woodsworth’s work as a springboard, I want to explore some of the thoughts and anxieties that continue to be articulated about the prospect of ever heightening numbers of ethnic but especially racial minority immigrants in English Canada. I hope to be critical in this regard, foregrounding some the ideological and affective baggage that we may have inherited from Woodsworth’s era, while at the same time avoiding those reductive statements of blame (or pardon) that we sometimes aim at the most important historical figures and movements. A literary critic by training, I am immediately struck by how the rhetoric of the aforementioned anecdote suggests a subtle break in

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Woodsworth’s ordinarily cautious and even outright negative views on Canadian ethnic diversity. Woodsworth caricaturizes the diminutive and ineloquent census-taker in a manner that we would now consider politically incorrect; and by remarking ‘Yes, we laugh,’ Woodsworth suggests that he imagines the debate on ethnic minorities occurring among an Anglo-Canadian audience without the presence, or at least comfortable participation, of ethnic minorities themselves. However, Woodsworth also appears to exhibit what Daniel Coleman1 so convincingly describes as ‘wry civility.’ Although Woodsworth might well be entitled to do so, he does not begin his anecdote by congratulating himself for the important outreach and advocacy that he had performed on behalf of ethnic minority immigrants through his All People’s Mission. He does not here adopt that posture of ‘courtesy and fair-mindedness manifested by “us” – white British Canadians – towards incoming immigrant others.’2 Instead, Woodsworth chooses to foreground his own deep-seated prejudices, and perhaps too, with fine rhetorical cunning, the prejudices of his audience. He thereby offers us a glimpse of an individual who is modest enough to be conscious and forthright about his own limitations in pursuit of the greater good. But he also offers us a glimpse of the deeper truth about social justice legacies in general – that they sustain themselves neither through self-congratulation nor hero worship, but through courageous introspection and critical reappraisal. Of course, almost a century later, we are no nearer the moment that Woodsworth and many other individuals have anxiously imagined: the moment when very few Canadians, ‘real Canadians,’ continue to inhabit Canada. While Canada’s ethno-racial demographics have shi ed significantly since Woodsworth’s time, and while, in particular, Canada is now home to many more racial minorities than Woodsworth ever thought prudent to accommodate, the obvious fact is that they too are Canadian, if not always in how they are perceived and treated, then at least in how they identify themselves – sometimes proudly and gratefully, sometimes with considerable ambivalence or needful ferocity. Canadian history is filled with moments when ethnic and racial minorities have had to strenuously assert their ‘Canadianness’ and respective entitlements as citizens when they find them contested or summarily revoked. This is illustrated by the redress movement of the Japanese following their internment during the Second World War, or the campaign of Maher Arar today, or even (on a considerably less urgent though very meaningful scale) by the responses of today’s

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second-, third-, or seventh-generation visible minority Canadians still confronting the question ‘so where are you from ...?’ Though Woodsworth’s anxieties about a Canada without ‘real’ Canadians might seem antiquated in our current era of official multiculturalism, these anxieties, in essence, have persisted throughout the decades and show absolutely no signs of disappearing any time soon. One relatively recent and telling articulation of these anxieties can be found in an article entitled ‘Multiculturalism: A Twentieth-Century Dream Becomes a TwentyFirst-Century Conundrum,’ by Allen Gregg (2006), once the official pollster for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. Gregg offers statistical evidence that confirms, in his mind, that Canadians (meaning, automatically, white Canadians?) ‘have had their fill of multiculturalism and hyphenated citizenship’ (p. 40). Gregg harkens back to a time when ‘Canada grew as a white, European, and Christian nation of immigrants grateful for the opportunity to start over in a new land’ (p. 44); and he suggests that these positive a itudes and social circumstances have diminished precisely upon the increase in visibleminority immigration. Gregg produces compelling statistical evidence to confirm the fact that ‘poverty and disenfranchisement in Canada are becoming increasingly race-based’ (pp. 40–1); but he also opines that ‘ethnic groups are self-segregating’ into ‘ethnic enclaves’ (p. 40), and that the ‘national unity in Canada is threatened by the growing atomization of our society along ethnic lines’ (p. 41). However valuable Gregg’s article may be in rekindling the critical appraisal of Canadian multiculturalism, it appears to present ma ers in a one-sided and sometimes outright suspect way. For instance, ‘ethnic enclaves’ are described as the result of something called ‘self-segregation,’ and not of factors such as poverty, ‘chilliness,’ systemic discrimination, and the general absence of services and connections required by new immigrants in what we never usually describe as ‘white enclaves.’ Moreover, the article appears to present a nostalgic and, indeed, deeply amnesic narrative whereby Canada is imagined as having been ethnically harmonious throughout its distant past (no religious or ethnic conflict among European se lers back then!), and infallibly tolerant of visible minority immigrants in the twentieth century (no internments, riots, turning back of refugees, etc.), until this unique moment of ‘crisis,’ when, despite our glowing record and very best intentions, our collective patience has finally run out. Gregg’s article exhibits a doxa that some might wish to ascribe solely to neoconservatism; but it also might reflect feelings and a itudes that have persisted among the le ist progressives

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who are the true heirs of Woodsworth’s legacy, and who, like Woodsworth himself, have exhibited at times relatively compassionate and ‘liberal’ a itudes towards ethnic and racial minorities. My fear is that, among these la er individuals (whom I frequently consider compatriots and role models), there may persist an underexamined assumption that the latest generations of racial minority immigrants automatically present challenges to the work of forwarding expansive social justice in Canada, and not, at least potentially, some new and valuable solutions. To identify the ‘sources’ of this lingering assumption in the work of someone like Woodsworth, and to point out the alternative a itudes now very much available, is not, I believe, to foolishly romanticize the cultural practices of all ethnic and racial minorities, nor to discount the fact that some of these practices might, in certain cases, be abhorrently misogynist, homophobic, racist, and fundamentalist. Nor is it to suggest that we can at all afford to forget the precious and hard-won work for social justice that has been accomplished and sustained by people who happen to be white – work that all Canadians, especially today, need to remember, vigilantly maintain, and, of course, supercede. I am concerned, however, about the narratives that we want to tell about ourselves as advocates of social justice within Canada at this particular moment of crisis and opportunity. I am concerned about who exactly gets privileged within our current narratives, who surreptitiously gets portrayed as both inheritors and agents of just causes, who possesses cultural legacies that are automatically presumed to be compatible with universal human rights and genuine democracy, and who, on the other hand, possesses cultural legacies that are just as automatically presumed to be limited or outright threatening. I offer this with li le bi erness and great hope, for I do believe that we are on the verge of articulating a new vision of social justice in Canada, a vision wherein no one ethnic group or cultural history is represented, either blatantly or unobtrusively, as the stewards of the best thus far achieved or else the pioneers of the work that urgently beckons. A young critic with relatively limited experience, I am tempted to believe that this broader vision of social justice is only just about to emerge, powered in part by a multilateral and interethnic movement that I o entimes find myself working within, and which I would here, very tentatively, like to name ‘the New Ethnicities.’ I will return to ‘the New Ethnicities’ later in this chapter, outlining the demographic and ideological terms of its emergence, particularly in relation to that now very conspicuous ‘concern group’ in Canada and other Western nations

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today: second-generation visible minorities. I will also return to Woodsworth’s unusual article entitled ‘Canadians of Tomorrow,’ and point out, ironically or not, that an inspiringly mutual endorsement of ethnic plurality and universal social justice is one that Woodsworth himself appears to have provided almost a century ago. Nevertheless, I will begin this chapter by suggesting that Woodsworth (and many others) also bequeathed to contemporary Canadians at least two ideologies or discourses that have made it very difficult to both articulate and realize just such a concertedly pluralist vision of social justice within Canada. The first of these ideologies or discourses is the relatively ‘civil’ form of racism that Woodsworth practised and which we today have readily inherited and developed: the so-called new racism, which bases itself not on pseudo-scientific claims about biological differences among humans, but on similarly questionable and rigidly absolutist beliefs about cultural differences among humans. Ironically or not, the second of the ideologies or discourses is markedly different if not entirely opposite: a studious posture of ‘disinterest’ with respect to ma ers of ethnicity and culture in both proclaiming and securing the rights of individual citizens. This posture of ‘disinterest’ is evident in Woodsworth’s practical outreach work among new immigrants of his time, as well as in his broader (if imperfect) strivings towards the implementation of universal human rights in Canada. This posture is also very evident in the legal procedures through which Canada, as a modern liberal democratic state, has sought to recognize its citizenry – that is, as individuals or ‘human beings,’ and not, at least in principle, as members of ethnic groups. The posture and official policy of ‘disinterest’ offers clear advantages over naked practices of racism and ethnic bigotry; yet ‘disinterest’ also threatens to turn a blind eye to forms of bigotry and discrimination already calcified within our society, as well as to the historically crucial role that ethnic traditions and experiences have played in broader human rights struggles. The ideologies of ‘new racism,’ liberal ‘disinterest,’ and, now, most recently, cynical versions of official and corporate multiculturalism, have together orchestrated to set rather severe constraints on the ways we understand the relationship between ethnic and racial minority cultures and broader social justice ambitions. By returning to Woodsworth in light of the contemporary shi s and opportunities created by ‘the New Ethnicities’ movement, I hope to indicate ways of thinking and acting beyond these constraints.

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Strangers within Our Gates Daniel Coleman and Alan Mills3 respectively have already drawn our a ention to the subtle and sometimes very blatant forms of ethnocentrism and racism that Woodsworth articulated, most notably in his book Strangers within Our Gates, published in 1909. It is not necessary to dwell elaborately on all of the awkward and disappointing facts of this book; but we should nevertheless be quite aware of the uncompromisingly negative a itudes Woodsworth held towards specific racial minorities, particularly blacks and Asians,4 even as he was prepared to be relatively sympathetic to the plights of certain ethnic European immigrants. In musing on blacks, for instance, Woodsworth succumbs to the pitiful practice of deferring to American expertise – in this case to John R. Commons, who, in 1903, offers this deeply cynical analysis of black freedom in America: ‘The very qualities of intelligence and manliness which are essential for citizenship in a democracy were systematically expunged from the negro race through two hundred years of slavery. And then, by the cataclysm of a war of emancipation, in which it took no part, this race, a er many thousand years of savagery and two centuries of slavery, was suddenly let loose into the liberty of citizenship and the electoral suffrage’ (as quoted in Woodsworth, 1909: 191). Woodsworth declines to outright agree with Commons’ secondthoughts about the abolition of slavery and/or the rights of blacks to be genuine citizens of America. However, Woodsworth does reprint Common’s diatribe in Strangers before concluding, most diplomatically, ‘whether we agree with the conclusion or not, we may be thankful that we have no “negro problem” in Canada’ (ibid.). Ironies abound, of course. There were, demonstratively, a significant number of blacks in Canada in Woodsworth’s time – whole communities and townships, in fact, not only in Upper and Lower Canada and the Maritimes, but also communities in British Columbia and in neighbouring regions of the Prairies. And ever more ironic (especially from hindsight) is that fact that in the very year in which Commons published his diatribe (thereafter cited by Woodsworth), W.E.B. du Bois published his now classic text The Souls of Black Folk (1989 [1903]). Indicatively, du Bois begins his book not by listing the great many ways in which American blacks were both violently and subtly disenfranchised, and the ways in which they rose to challenge their circumstances for the good of America as a whole. Rather, du Bois begins by indicating, with truly wry humour, the only

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question that people like Commons and Woodsworth seemed willing to put to blacks themselves: ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’ Allen Mills makes the provocative and very valuable case that Woodsworth was not a racist per se, but one who ‘employed the term “race” to denote a particular cultural or ethnic and not a physical type’ (1991: 44). This is an idea that must be tempered, as Mills himself acknowledges, by Woodsworth’s professed interest in eugenics, and by the fact that, until relatively late in life, ‘Woodsworth still flirted with the notion that mental illness and criminality were racially linked’ (p. 226).5 Nevertheless, Mills’ argument is important in that it directs us to a style of racism that Woodsworth performed and which has emerged as the preferred modality today: the ‘new racism,’ which takes as its governing metaphor not ‘biology,’ but ‘culture’ as a primary or absolute determiner of beliefs, habits, etc. The new racism works by that logic whereby we would be loath to suggest that people of African descent are inferior, but rather more comfortably suggest that Jamaicans pose a threat to our values and ways of life. Arguably, those most burdened today with ‘the new racism’ are practising Muslims, who have been forced to confront, on almost a daily basis, the prejudices of those who find it convenient to blame ‘Islam’ for global terror, rather than exploring the variety of social factors, many of them non-religious, that have decidedly influenced today’s grim stand-off between Western and non-Western absolutists. One comparatively minor yet highly indicative example of ‘the New Racism’ was an article published on the front page of the 4 May 2004 issue of the Vancouver Sun and entitled ‘Blame Parents for Soaring Indo-Canadian Youth Crime: Young Males Get Too Much Money, Freedom, Report Says’ (O’Neil, 2004: A1). As the headline suggests, it outlines a report which concluded that South Asian culture was to blame for youth crime – specifically the habits of South Asian mothers, who apparently spoil their sons too much, and thus encourage them to think relatively li le about taking the lives of others.6 I should here confess that I myself have performed no careful research on whether or not motherly spoiling is a direct and primary cause of criminality. However, I do wonder why the study seems to ignore factors other than ‘culture’ that may have contributed to youth alienation and crime among South Asian youth in Surrey. In other words, is it at all significant that British Columbia faced a systemic gu ing of social services in the very years that it appears to have witnessed a surge in youth crime?7 Is it at all possible that transcultural factors such as unemployment, the lack of affordable housing, the lack of decent and affordable day care, and

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systemic forms of racial discrimination might, at least potentially, contribute to the disenchantment and desperation that can, at times, lead to violent crime? In the practice of ‘the new racism,’ such transcultural issues and concerns are rarely addressed. Instead, a reified notion of ‘culture’ trumps all other explanations, and effectively takes the place of the old pseudo-science of ‘race’ in providing the primary determinant of social standing and engagement. If, on the one hand, we have indeed inherited ‘the new racism’ from Woodsworth’s era, we have simultaneously and paradoxically inherited a political ethos that, at least in theory, is concertedly ‘disinterested’ in such particularities as race and ethnicity, and remains commi ed to the universal accordance of rights and freedoms. As mentioned, this ethos of ‘disinterest’ is apparent, in embryo, in the practical work of compassion, outreach, and advocacy that Woodsworth performed on behalf of ethnic immigrants through his All People’s Mission; and it is worth remembering that the title of Strangers within Our Gates refers very deliberately to the biblical injunction to be ethically mindful of those who do not necessarily share your culture or beliefs. As such, the studious itemizing of ethnic particularity in Strangers is indicative of a major tension or outright contradiction in Woodsworth’s thought, one all the more ironic given Mills’ convincing argument that Woodsworth, though very prepared to develop hierarchies of preferred races for Canada, nevertheless rarely resorted to classic postures of tribalism or cultural conservatism. In emphasizing national unity, Mills8 argues, Woodsworth exhibited a ‘disdain for the traditional and the customary,’ and thereby privileged ‘an account of community that sees li le virtue in cultural diversity or in traditionally derived cultural identities.’ This duplicity in Woodsworth’s thought bears affinities with what numerous commentators see as the duplicity of Western modernity in general: its ability to radically undermine the authority of older and ethnically biased models of identity and social being in favour of such universal categories as ‘the human,’ and yet its simultaneous ability to generate new and seemingly ‘scientific’ forms of racism and bigotry (see Goldberg, 1994; Gilroy, 1993).9 Regardless, in Canada a er the Second World War, the nascent a itudes of ‘disinterest’ that we witness in Woodsworth’s thought might be said to have come to real fruition in the complex push for universal human rights in the 1960s, which benefited from the work of such immigrant blacks as Daniel H. Hill, the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and which included, as more general points of victory, the emergence of the official Charter

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and the concomitant li ing of the traditional restrictions on non-white immigration to Canada in 1967. Notwithstanding the enormous work and hope that went into the push for ethnically and racially ‘disinterested’ applications of law and policy in Canada, many, including the philosopher Charles Taylor, have pointed out the weaknesses of ‘disinterest,’ or, more specifically, of procedural liberalism, in the ongoing struggle for social justice within modern nation states. While a noble ideal, and of course a welcomed alternative to earlier ‘ethos’ and laws that were blatantly racist, the policy of ‘disinterest’ can also be the means whereby forms of ethnocentrism that have already saturated social and institutional relations are allowed to persist unchallenged. As Taylor elaborately explains (1992), the posture of ‘disinterest’ does not really take into account the ways in which politics in recent years have been interpreted increasingly as a politics of representation, whereby our identities and social standing are influenced not only by fair (‘colour-blind’) laws and official policies, but also by the degree to which we are actively represented and recognized (or, conversely, misrecognized and ignored) by the dominant institutions and cultural forums within our society. Taylor famously proposes that multiculturalism policies might act as a corrective within the context of liberal democracy for the blind spots produced by ‘disinterest.’ While some admirable social justice advocates and scholars have bought Taylor’s idea in essence, though o entimes arguing for a ‘multiculturalism’ that functions as an open-ended social ideal (Angus, 1997), or is more radical than typically instituted (Giroux, 1994), other le ist scholars warn about the limitations of se ing such high expectations for multiculturalism. As Bannerji (2000) and many others have suggested,10 official state-sponsored multiculturalism has poorly addressed racism and racial hierarchies (see also the 2004 Diène Report).11 Official multiculturalism exhibits many other problems. It seems unable to appreciate the complexities of ethno-racial identification, the social hierarchies within ethnic groups, and the complex intra-ethnic identifications and solidarities that have defined the most progressive ‘ethnic’ movements (see Chariandy, 2005). Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, ‘multiculturalism’ as a term and ideal has been trafficked in the most ambitious and cynical ways in neoliberal and corporate discourses. Witness the many ads surrounding us that sport rainbows of coloured faces and tell struggling individuals and households that societal respect (not to mention democracy itself) is but a shopping spree away. Witness too Stephen Harper’s relatively recent announcement, in front of a Sikh

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audience in Toronto, that gay marriage is ‘a threat to any Canadian who supports multiculturalism ... a threat to a genuinely multicultural society.’12 Indicatively, Harper’s comments were quickly challenged by representatives from the Sikh com munity, who, with admirable patience, explained to the media that ethnic and racial minority communities have within them a variety of beliefs, values, and orientations, all irreducible to some single ‘conservative’ ethnic voice or position.13 The New Ethnicities The aforementioned critique of Harper’s strategically monolithic representation of Sikh desires and identity indicates the emergence of the movement I would like to call ‘the New Ethnicities,’ a movement demonstrating the positive alternatives we now have to ‘the new racism,’ or the procedural liberalism that fails to recognize ethnic specificity and the cultures of racism, or the cynical ‘multiculturalism’ of the corporate and political elite. I am here borrowing (and adapting) the term ‘New Ethnicities’ from the cultural critic Stuart Hall (1989), who discerned in Britain of the 1980s a shi in ‘black’ (i.e., non-white) cultural politics. Hall describes this shi as one from a relatively straightforward struggle to come into mainstream representation, predicated on a monolithic and o entimes conservative notion of black experience (à la Harper), to a more nuanced politics of representation, in which the politics of race and ethnicity are explicitly negotiated and articulated among a variety of equally compelling factors such as gender, sexuality, and class. In Canada, the emergence of such ‘New Ethnicities’ would appear to accompany, at least to some significant degree, the relatively recent a ainment of a critical mass of visible minorities in Canada, especially in the urban and suburban districts of major cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. One needs to be cautious in offering this narrative. Although the current conspicuousness of racial minority representation in Canada is decidedly influenced by relatively recent (i.e., post-1967) waves of immigration and non-white visibility, one cannot afford to lose sight of the presence and influence of older racial minority groups in Canada, such as the Black Loyalists who in the late 1700s migrated to the Maritimes to side with the British, the Chinese who in the 1800s helped build the railways, and so forth. When Joy Kogawa writes her novel Obasan (1981) about internment of the Japanese during the Second World War as seen through the eyes of a young girl, she is of course writing from the perspective of the third

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generation of a Japanese family in Canada, still fighting for due recognition as citizens. By failing to recognize the historic presence, voice, and influence of visible minorities in Canada (especially in those regional and rural spaces we still do not adequately explore) we stand in danger of reaffirming the narratives of priority and countryside inhabitation that certain forms of racism (i.e., European ‘Volkish’ nativism) so heavily depend on. This said, there is good reason to believe that a discernible ‘new’ phase of ethnic and racial minority cultural politics in Canada has been animated, though certainly not initiated, by the demographic leverage provided by the increase of non-white immigrants in major cities. Alongside of these demographic changes, there is an unprecedented coming into representation of racial minorities in contemporary Canadian cultural forums and institutions – though, once again, this is a claim that needs to be carefully qualified. Black literature, for instance, has a 200-year history in Canada; and much more careful and appreciative work needs to be performed on archives such as these. However, in the past li le while – perhaps only in the past fi een years – racial minorities appear, at least superficially, to gain far greater agency over self-representation, as well as far be er access to the cultural institutions and forums from which they were not too long ago systemically restricted. The upshot of all of this is what I would like to call a shi from racial minorities being passive ‘objects of representation,’ as they were o en imagined in Woodsworth’s writings, to being active ‘producers of representation.’ As a teacher of English, I have followed this shi most closely in literary debates, noting that racial minority authors like Joy Kogawa, Wayston Choy, Rohinton Mistry, Austin Clarke, M.G. Vassanji, Dionne Brand, and George Ellio Clarke are now among the most read, celebrated, and internationally recognized of Canadian authors in general. This coming into representation, while exciting, and undeniably achieved through genuine talent and dauntless perseverance, is most certainly not a guarantor of what I would call progressive politics. As Stuart Hall (1989) argues most forcefully, it is not necessarily the case that representations of racial minorities by racial minorities themselves – especially in an era of cynical multiculturalism and globally rapacious neoliberalism – will challenge us aesthetically and intellectually. Neoliberalism has proved itself extraordinarily supportive of minority art and ‘voice,’ on the condition that such expressiveness remains largely ‘entertaining’ and does not directly contest the status quo or remind us of issues that are impolitely discomforting. As such,

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the shi to ‘self-representation’ for racial minorities is no clear victory in and of itself; however, the possibilities glimpsed by this shi seem clear: the transformation of ethnic subjects from passive objects of representation to active (if not always critically active) creators of representation; and the production of expressive culture that is informed, to varying degrees, by the existential realities of living difference. When sophisticated forms of racial minority representation manage to emerge, they most o en are the result not only of the talent and sheer doggedness of individual artists and writers, but also of the generosity and hard work of funders and funding agencies, art promoters, professional critics, and ‘ordinary’ readers, viewers, and listeners. Many of the individuals working in these crucially supportive capacities are of course racial minorities themselves, with a passionate desire to usher into artistic representation one’s particular hopes and failures, beauty and ugliness. But, o en enough, these workers are of different backgrounds, and they would certainly include the many admirable white progressives who, at crucial moments, have promoted racial minority culture, and who, in consequence, saw their ‘own’ movements greatly enriched. The New Ethnicities, then, is a movement that from the very inception has exhibited (and, in fact, been constituted through) interethnic connections and dialogues. It is a movement which suggests that cultural and political work proceeds not from some categorical imperative to preserve ethno-racial ‘identity’ or ‘tradition,’ naively assumed to be monolithic and sacrosanct, but, rather, from an open-ended effort to negotiate the best of one’s heritage in light of other equally indispensable concerns and factors such as class, gender, sexuality, the environment, disability, etc. The New Ethnicities represents the desire to understand a particular legacy of ethnic or racial identity as something that vitally contributes to the universal struggle for social justice within Canada (and, indeed, throughout the world), and not something that needs to be je isoned in the pursuit of ostensibly ‘higher’ values. Notably, First Nations activists and writers in Canada have presented us with profoundly robust and compelling traditions of social justice;14 and we most certainly need to be er appreciate these traditions and their inspiring commitments to universal human (and non-human) rights. However, it is possible that we might also need to be er appreciate the positive workings of ‘ethnicity’ within modern Canadian social justice movements that ordinarily represent themselves as transcending such particularities. The la er task takes us back to J.S. Woodsworth, and perhaps, more specifically, to the first few pages of Allen Mills’

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helpful book Fool for Christ. Mills includes at the beginning of the book a cartoon from the Winnipeg Free Press in which Woodsworth is running freely outside of a fortified parliamentary stronghold dominated by Tory and Grit towers. In one hand Woodsworth carries a sword, and in the other he carries a cross bearing the le ers CCF. Most striking and unexpected, though (at least to me), is the fact that Woodsworth is wearing a tartan kilt and hat, and that he is, thereby, an explicitly ‘ethnic’ figure, whereas the menacing figures in the parliamentary stronghold are not. I should confess that I am not entirely able to decipher the cartoon. Is the highlighting of Woodsworth’s ethnicity intended to subtly celebrate or ridicule Woodsworth’s ambitions? Regardless, the cartoon does suggest an alignment of social justice efforts with ethnicity, an alignment that might have either explicitly informed Woodsworth’s work or else influenced how his work might have been received or rejected. If certain types of cultural chauvinism among le ists are able to persist unchallenged when individuals are able to imagine that other people’s social movements are informed and thereby limited by their stubborn mindfulness of ethnic traditions, whereas ‘ours’ are truly universal in scope by virtue of our ability to think ‘above’ such pe y ma ers, then perhaps greater critical thought upon the ‘ethnic’ particularity in legacies such as Woodsworth’s (the specific influence of his Sco ish and Methodist background, for instance) might do us all a lot of good. Canadians of Today When Woodsworth wrote ‘Canadians of Tomorrow,’ his worry was quite clearly of foreign-born ethnic minorities, and of the degree to which these ‘new-comers,’ possessing strange accents and unfamiliar customs, were compatible with Canadian-born British Canadians. Today, in an officially multicultural Canada, foreign-born ethnic minorities, and particularly visible minorities, still face considerable challenges as to their fair acceptance within the Canadian social fabric. However, social commentators today are now identifying a rather new group of ‘strangers within our gates’ to be concerned about. As briefly indicated near the beginning of this chapter, Allen Gregg argues that a series of recent events have contributed to the current ‘crisis’ over the fate of Canadian cultural pluralism. Notably, Gregg mentions the transit bombings in London, the rioting of Arab and African youth in suburbs outside of Paris, the whitepower demonstrations against Lebanese in a suburb outside of Sydney,

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and a Boxing Day murder in downtown Toronto. As Gregg himself admits, each of these events directly involved second-generation visible minorities; and Gregg goes on to argue that this specific social group poses a relatively new problem for modern Western states, including Canada. Gregg points out that Canada did not begin accepting visible minority immigrants in real numbers until the 1970s, and that, ‘consequently, two-thirds of all native-born visible minorities in Canada are under sixteen years old’ (2006: 47). Gregg also points out that ‘it appears that first-generation non-white immigrants actually enter Canada with a greater sense of belonging than white immigrants, but within a generation that feeling diminishes among visible minority groups, while white immigrants report a growing sense of belonging and involvement’ (p. 46).15 Much as Woodsworth gestured to America when formulating his anxieties about Canada’s future ethnic relations, Gregg looks to recent social conflicts in Europe. Specifically, Gregg argues that ‘in England and France, it appears that the recent violence is rooted in second-generation visible-minority groups with li le fealty to their adopted state [adopted state?] ... And there is growing concern that a similar sense of alienation is developing among the same class of people in Canada’ (p. 43). Gregg is by no means alone in his concerns. In newspapers, magazines, and talk shows throughout the nation, the degree of threat posed by alienated second-generation visible minorities is being hotly debated; 16 and the recent arrests of the seventeen terrorism suspects in Toronto (some of them Canadian-born, it appears) has clearly heightened these debates. Arguably, these debates indicate a shi in how anxieties over a multicultural citizenry are expressed – a shi from first-generation immigrants, and cultural threats originating from without, to second-generation immigrants, and cultural threats originating from within. I believe that the current prominence of second-generation visible minorities in these nationwide debates on multiculturalism and ‘homegrown terror’ will sorely test us. As with 9/11, it will test our ability to appreciate the difference between murderous and completely inexcusable criminal acts and intentions, and entirely legitimate expressions of dissatisfaction and dissent from those who want a fairer Canada and world. The debate on second-generation visible minorities will also test to the breaking point our traditional strategies for representing and interpreting ethno-racial difference in English Canada. In ways we are only beginning to appreciate, ‘the new racism,’ liberal ‘disinterest,’ and neoliberal multiculturalism each fail when confronting the specific circumstances that disenfranchised second-generation youth now face.

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‘The new racism’ places an emphasis on cultural incompatibility and difference; but the discomforting fact is that the second generation are not at all the sorts of ethnic strangers or aliens that Woodsworth and others imagined. If members of the second generation are indeed critically influenced by their parents’ culture (and of course a considerable portion of the second generation actively resist their parents’ culture), the second generation, being socialized entirely within this nation, are also, quite obviously, the product of Canada, including the Canada of a frightfully dismantled welfare state, where those who confront ‘intersecting oppressions’17 are le without options, and the Canada where we turn a blind eye to the realities of racial hierarchy, or else fool ourselves into believing that official ‘disinterest’ or corporate-sponsored multiculturalism will alone offer a remedy. Notwithstanding the degree of hope and expectation that has become a ached to the meteoric rise of Barack Obama in American politics, and the global shi s in nonwhite representation that this may produce or already have confirmed, it is very possible that at present the so-called alienated class of second-generation visible minorities, growing each day in the midst of the current economic recession, and relatively distinct from the coloured middle class – may never meaningfully participate in the politics of representation. By this, I certainly do not mean to suggest that they will not be represented. As Gregg’s article begins to indicate, a highprofile debate is steadily growing on the unique problems that ‘they’ pose for ‘our’ society. Rather, I mean to suggest that they might never be able to exert their own agency in the nationwide or global politics of representation. Indeed, Dionne Brand offers us a glimpse of this potential fate when describing working-class second-generation black youth: ‘They’re not immigrants so they’re not grateful for the marginal existence they’re afforded ... They think their mothers dupes for slugging it out in hospitals and nursing homes. They see a weakness in that and in the promise of making it. They’ve been roughed up, ground down and sidelined in this city’s classrooms. Nobody knows what they really think and they’re not saying except in the jammed-tight basement parties or dance hall parties ... They’re not on the street like my generation before them; their view is inward, nursing wrath’ (1994: 101–2). The hurt, ‘wrath,’ and frustrated social withdrawal of these youth are all, of course, deeply sorrowful and disturbing. Yet ever more sorrowful and disturbing is the fact that Brand made these observations ten years ago, when circumstances, for ‘the alienated class,’ were not quite as bad as they are today.

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A longer essay would balance this grim vision of second-generation existence with something different: not with the many examples we could find of second-generation visible minorities ‘making it’ in Canada, and living comfortable and perhaps even lavish lifestyles, but, more importantly, with second-generation visible minorities and their allies who, regardless of their societal standing, are both creatively and ethically confronting the social hierarchies still surrounding us. In aspiring to be a member of that la er group, I would like to think that their uncompromised articulation of ethnic pluralism and universal social justice is entirely new. Happily, my admi edly modest work on J.S. Woodsworth has at least partly relieved me of that illusion. For in ‘Canadians of Tomorrow,’ the very same article in which Woodsworth proudly (and perhaps half-mockingly) proclaims his Loyalist Anglo-Saxon heritage to the foreign-born census-taker, Woodsworth comes to this rather startling conclusion: ‘Our British-Canadian ideal has been of a homogeneous people with a common language and common “mores” ... But now with our heterogeneous immigration we must frankly recognize that the old ideal is incapable of realization, and that for good or ill Canada is to be the home of a composite race or of mixed races. If true unity is a ained it will come not because of a common past nor through the coercion of majorities but in the varied experiences of a common life and the participation in a great vivifying common hope’ (1913: 48). As Allen Mills argues most convincingly in Fool for Christ, these are unusual words for Woodsworth; for if Woodsworth did, in brief moments, express rather radical endorsements of Canadian cultural pluralism, he was also ‘to his dying days ... uneasy with a multi-ethnic conception of Canadian identity’ (1991: 43).18 The Woodsworth criticizing ‘the coercion of majorities’ and celebrating ‘the varied experiences of a common life and the participation in a great vivifying common hope’ is not the typical Woodsworth. But this is, all the same, an inspiringly contradictory Woodsworth (ibid.). Is this at all an appropriate conclusion: ‘an inspiringly contradictory Woodsworth’? In the second chapter to this book, Mills19 voices in a typically thoughtful way a similar conundrum. ‘Can the legacy and influence of Woodsworth be celebrated even as there is recognition of his contradictions and solecisms?’ Jacques Derrida never counted among his suits an in-depth knowledge of Canadian social and political thought, but he did respond to the general problem of contradictory legacies in this fashion: ‘Let us consider first of all, the radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance ... An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist

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only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. “One must” means one must filter, si , criticize, one must sort out several different possibilities that inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret. If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it’ (1994: 16). If Derrida is to be believed, a legacy (and its potential to be celebrated) strangely depends on its ability to confront us with contradiction. Derrida’s thought here begs further thought and debate. But in light of the specific concerns addressed in this essay, it suggests a conclusion that is equal parts caution and sincere celebration. From the perspective of ‘the New Ethnicities’ (at least), the legacy of J.S. Woodsworth is rife with contradictions – and that, precisely, is why it remains so important.

NOTES 1 Daniel Coleman (in this volume). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid; Allen Mills (in this volume). 4 Ibid. Coleman also observes that Woodsworth (1909: 170) typically uses flood metaphors to refer to the ‘hordes’ of East and South Asians ‘swarming’ (p. 171) in upon the people of Canada (specifically British Columbia) and threatening to ‘swamp’ (p. 188) them. Contradictorily, Woodsworth argues that ‘Orientals’ living in Canada should be treated be er, but he also proposes that they ‘may be able to do much of the rough work, for which it is difficult to secure sufficient white labour’ (p. 154). Ultimately, Woodsworth argues that they should only be let into Canada with extraordinary caution (pp. 154–5) – and, indeed, he states quite unambiguously that ‘the Oriental cannot be assimilated’ (p. 189). 5 Mills points out the following comment by Woodsworth that appears to resort to fully biological explanations of racial difference: ‘It may be true, in a general sort of way, that human nature is the same the world over. But it is also true to say that there are very great variations. An Englishman differs from an Italian; a white man from an oriental or from a negro. They react very differently to the same stimuli and, in practice, the stimuli are usually quite different. Why insist that under the same circumstances – to say nothing of different circumstances – they must all act in the same way?’ (Woodsworth, 1909, as quoted in Mills, 1991: 224–5). 6 In the words of the study itself: ‘Police held that violent crime is strongly influenced by the culture of this current generation of Indo-Canadian

Canadians of Tomorrow 283 youth,’ concludes the recently released report, called ‘South Asian-Based Group Crime in British Columbia: 1993–2003’ (Tyakoff, 2005: n.p.). There appears to be a consistent pa ern where Indo-Canadian criminals are from families who provided their sons with money, freedom, favouritism, and a discipline inconsistent with their siblings (primarily female), coupled with the culture’s distrust of the police and an emphasis on preserving face or honour.  7 The article itself suggests as much: ‘The report cites Vancouver Police Department statistics that the number of South Asian-based homicides has soared from an average of three a year from 1994–97, to an average of about ten a year for the five years from 1998 to 2002’ (Tyakoff, 2005: n.p.). Moreover, at least at one point, the report appears to contradict its somewhat simplistic conclusion by noting this: ‘Immigrants from India are in many cases too focused on making a living to help guide their children, who in turn are struggling with racism, social acceptance, and the mixed messages they receive at home and at school, according to those interviewed for the study’ (ibid.).  8 Mills (in this volume).  9 Coleman (in this volume). 10 Ibid. 11 At the invitation of the Canadian government, and in accordance with his mandate as a representative of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Doudou Diène, a Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance, visited Canada from 15 to 26 September 2003. ‘The purpose of the visit ... was to assess the present situation in Canada, with regard to the question of racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia, and hence the state of relations between the various communities, against the country’s characteristically multi-ethnic and multicultural background’ (from the summary of the Diène Report). While the resulting ‘2004 Diène Report’ acknowledges the legal and political provisions for racial equality, it also laments ‘the lack of any intellectual strategy’ in ‘Canada’s undoubted efforts to combat racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia’ (para. 78). Two paragraphs from the Diène Report are especially pointed in this respect: ‘This silence or lack of visibility regarding Canada’s cultural diversity shows what li le emphasis is placed on the cultural factor in the fight against racism and discrimination. The ideological mainstay in the build-up of racism and discriminatory practice throughout North America, from slavery to colonization, was the cultural contempt in which the dominated communities, whether native or African, were held. It is due to this long-term build-up that racism has come to imbue the

284 David Chariandy culture, mentalities, behaviours, and even the deepest subconscious layers of the peoples of the region. Any a empt to eradicate the racist culture and mentality therefore requires, apart from the force of law, mobilizing intellectual tools to dismantle its deep-rooted causes, mechanisms, processes, expressions, and language. The law forbids, condemns, redresses and remedies but does not necessarily bring about a change of heart’ (para. 79). ‘The cultural depth of racism also colours the deepest layers of the emotions and sensitivities of discriminatory experience. Like most countries, Canada does not appear to have grasped the magnitude of this submerged part of the racist iceberg. And yet it is only by taking account of this intangible dimension of racism, through an appropriate intellectual and ethical strategy, that it will be possible in the longer term, with the help of legal strategy, to ensure the eradication of racism and discrimination. There is now an urgent need for this strategy in view of the resurgence of racist acts and behaviours, which resurface like natural reflexes in countries which are otherwise well equipped with sound and exhaustive political and legal strategies for combating their long-term racist experience. The main areas which this intellectual and ethical strategy must tackle include the building of identity, the writing of history, education programmes, value systems, images and perception. The interviews with the representatives of the communities show that, despite all the efforts made to turn Canada into an egalitarian State respectful of its ethnic and cultural diversity, the intellectual a er-effects of the legacy of racial discrimination le behind by European colonization still persist through the denial of those communities’ cultural specificity’ (para. 80). 12 Harper’s comments were reported by Brian Laghi, O awa Bureau Chief, on 8 Feb. 2005. 13 Anne Lowthim, executive director of the World Sikh Organization of Canada, was quick to criticize Harper’s comments, which appear to assume that one cannot be both an ethnic minority and a homosexual: ‘Ethnic communities are not monolithic in their views,’ she said, ‘there are homosexuals in every culture, race, nation of the world’ (Laghi, 2005: n.p.). 14 See Neal McLeod (in this volume). 15 One problem with this claim is that Gregg fails to explore if these types of exclusion are the result of the a itudes and work of non-whites. 16 See, e.g., the front-page article in the 12 November 2005 Globe and Mail entitled ‘Could it happen here?’ (Valpy, 2005: A1, A5) and referencing the riots of second-generation Arabs and Africans in France. See also the frontpage article in the 3 June 2006 National Post entitled ‘Never mind foreign terrorists, why is Canada growing its own extremists?’ (Bell, 2006: A1). 17 Geraldina Polanco and Cecily Nicholson (in this volume).

Canadians of Tomorrow 285 18 In Fool for Christ, Mills shows how Woodsworth consistently argued for ‘the necessity of sociological and normative unity for the preservation of democracy. Woodsworth’s view, simply, was that heterogeneity produced political disintegration and corruption’ (1991: 45). Mills also argues that ‘Woodsworth was capable of sympathetic understanding of the plight of the non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant. But what was never in doubt was the priority he gave to assimilation and uniformity over the competing claims of heterogeneity and pluralism’ (p. 47). Even in his articles entitled ‘Canadians of Tomorrow,’ when Woodsworth would appreciatively ‘glimpse’ an ethnically plural Canada, Mills notes that Woodsworth also provides ‘what can only be described as a lament for the Anglo-Canadian nation’ (p. 48). Ultimately, argues Mills, Woodsworth was never in doubt of ‘the priority ... to assimilation and uniformity over the competing claims of heterogeneity and pluralism’ (p. 47). Woodsworth might have sighted the possibility that ‘the old Anglo Canadian vision of the nation was obsolete,’ but he, nevertheless, ‘had not adopted a multi-ethnic model’ (p. 49). 19 Mills (in this volume).

REFERENCES Angus, I. (1997). A border within: National identity, cultural plurality, and wilderness. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens’s University Press. Bannerji, H. (2000). The dark side of the nation: Essays on multiculturalism, nationalism, and gender. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Bell, Stewart. (2006). Never mind foreign terrorists, why is Canada growing its own extremists? National Post, 3 June, A1. Brand, D. (1994). Bread out of stone: Recollections, sex, recognitions, race, dreaming, politics. Toronto: Coach House. Chariandy, D. (2005).‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ Austin Clarke and the new politics of recognition. Journal of West Indian Literature 14(1&2), 141–65. Commons, J.R. (1903). Chautauquan (November) as quoted in J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers within our gates, or coming Canadians (1909), 191. Toronto: F.C. Stephenson. Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. Trans. P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Diène, D. (2004). Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and all forms of discrimination. In Doudou Diène, Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. United Nations Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights, March.

286 David Chariandy Retrieved 5 May 2009 from h p://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/ TestFrame/5022691f46469606c1256e61003d4117?Opendocument. du Bois, W.E.B. (1989) [1903]. The souls of black folk. New York: Bantam. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Giroux, H.A. (1994). Insurgent multiculturalism and the promise of pedagogy. In D.T. Goldberg (Ed.), Multiculturalism: A critical reader, 325–43. Cambridge: Blackwell. Goldberg, D.T. (Ed.). (1994). Multiculturalism: A critical reader. Cambridge: Blackwell. Gregg, A. (2006). Multiculturalism: A twentieth-century dream becomes a twenty-first-century conundrum. Walrus 3(2), 38–47. Hall, S. (1989). New Ethnicities. In K. Mercer (Ed.), Black film, British cinema, BFI/ICA Documents 7, 27–31. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Kogawa, J. (1981). Obasan. New York: Anchor. Laghi, B. (2005). Tories blast Harper for same-sex warning. 8 Feb. Retrieved 24 Jan 2006 from h p://www.anticorruption.ca/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php? t=248&sid=f820ac4b6d7d9fc3bff93038eb6dd201. Mills, A. (1991). Fool for Christ: The political thought of J.S. Woodsworth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. O’Neil, P. (2004). Blame parents for soaring Indo-Canadian youth crime: Young males get too much money, freedom, report says. Vancouver Sun, 4 May, A1. Taylor, C. (1992). The Politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition, 15–73. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tyakoff, A. (2005). South Asian-based group crime in British Columbia (1993– 2003). O awa: Multiculturalism Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage. Valpy, M. (2005). Could it happen here?–as riots rage across France, troubling parallels emerge among children of Canada’s visible-minority immigrants. Globe and Mail, 12 Nov., A1, A5. Woodsworth, J.S. (1972) [1909]. Strangers within our gates, or coming Canadians. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — (1913). Canadians of tomorrow. Manitoba Free Press, 29 May.

Index

Abele, F., 207 Aboriginal peoples, 3 –4, 19 –21, 24, 35 n5, 36 n19, 51, 182–3, 193, 207; reserve communities, 44, 46, 182–3, 195 n8, 249, 257; treaty rights, 33, 75, 182, 250, 262; violence, 209, 245, 248 –9; violence against women, 209, 218 n7 Abramovitz, M., 118 –20 activism, 4 –6, 8 –10, 17, 19, 21, 26, 29 –30, 32, 49, 62, 100, 183 –4, 190, 192–3, 200, 210, 214, 216, 252–3, 277; feminist, 184, 223; grassroots, 84; human rights, 24 –5, 27, 29, 33, 37 n30, 138, 184, 224 –5; political, 4, 6, 26, 62; social gospel, 7, 12–13, 19, 46, 91, 262 advocacy, 42–3, 54, 144, 184, 267, 273; groups, 59; and NGOs, 30, 138 Ahenakew, David, 254 Ahenakew, Edward, 250 –1 Akenson, Donald, 239 n10 Alfred, Taiaiake, 53 All People’s Mission Chur . See Methodist Chur Allen, R., 12

Amnesty International, 58, 138. See also NGOs Anzaldúa, Gloria, 211 Arbour, Louise, 142–3, 147, 154 n17 Atimoyoo, Smith, 255 Ba house, C., 224 Balibar, D.T., 227 Bank of Canada, 54 Bannerji, H., 274 Barman, Jean, 255 Bastara e, Mi el, 154 n17 Benne , R.B., 54, 163; government, 75 –6 Biehl, João, 194 n1, 194 n3 Binnie, Ian, 154 n17 Blau, J., 118 –20 Blomley, Ni olas, 184 Blue Quills Native Education Council, 255 Boyden, Joseph, 246 Brand, Dionne, 276, 280 Brandeis, Louis Dembetz, 175 n6 Bre on Woods agreement (1944), 101 Britain. See Great Britain

288 Index British Columbia Federated Labour Party, 47 B.C. Federationalist, 17 British Labour Party, 18 British North America Act, 75 Broadbent, John Edward (Ed), 59 Brodie, Janine, 23 Brodsky, Gwen, 22–3, 29 –30, 126 Brown, Wendy, 24, 37 n30, 196 n21 Bryce, J., 165 Bultmann, Rudolf, 261 Bureau of Social Resear , 15 –16 Bush, George W., 106, 169 Cameron, Barbara, 151 Campbell, Gordon, 82, 142 Canada Assistance Plan (CAP), 119, 126, 148; repeal of, 145; standards, 156 n26; women’s equality, 146 Canada Social Transfer (CST), 147–51 Canadian Bill of Rights (1960), 10, 141; Bill of Rights, 9 –10, 23; movement for, 9 –10, 23 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), 9, 22–3, 33, 59, 126, 141–2, 172, 224; the Charter, 23, 43, 59 –60, 120; rights, 23, 28, 127, 131, 141 Canadian Trades and Labour Congress (TLC), 74 Canadian Welfare League, 7, 10, 15 capitalism, 29, 44, 76, 91, 96, 101, 103, 114 –16, 120, 125, 131, 182; free market, 27, 108 n3, 109 n10, 129, 166 Cardinal, Harold, 254 Carroll, W.K., 190 Chambers, Ross, 231 Chariandy, David, 20, 32–4, 36 n16, 63 n3, 208, 212, 222, 238

Charlo etown Constitutional Accord (1982), 120; social arter, 120, 131, 149 –50 ild care, 99, 136, 203, 205, 214; Child Care Act (Bill 303), 151; day care, 35 n7, 272 ildren, 12, 14, 79, 122, 128; domestic workers, 202–3, 206, 214; poverty, 153 n9; residential s ools, 250, 252, 255 –7 Choy, Wayston, 276 citizenship, 15, 20, 52, 104, 116, 137, 174, 199 –201, 203, 214, 268; concept of, 262; democracy, 116, 118, 271; Indigenous peoples, 33, 246, 248 –9, 250, 253 –4, 260 –2; rights of, 22, 24 –5, 116 –18, 120, 181, 188, 262; universal, 22–3, 33, 43, 246 –7, 249, 253 –4 Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), 203 civil liberties, 9, 80, 125 civil rights, 10, 23, 72, 74 –5, 96, 104, 125; defined as, 93 –7, 104, 108 n5, 121–3, 140; logic of, 99; movement, 254 civil society, 21, 25, 27, 43, 59, 67, 83, 96, 108, 226, 238; concept of, 45, 67, 227; divisions in, 105. See also nongovernmental organizations Clark, Charles Joseph (Joe), 59 Clarke, Adele, 185 Clarke, Austin, 276 Clarke, George Ellio , 276 class, 16, 22, 24, 26, 34, 45, 65 –7, 80 –5, 93 –4, 97–8, 205, 231–2, 262, 277; defined as, 108 n6, 205; democratic rights, 42, 121–4, 129; inequalities, 124; new movements, 12–13, 45, 275; working class, 7, 16,

Index 289 22, 28, 66, 70, 91, 96 –107, 109 n10, 114 –16, 165, 182, 184, 193 Clément, D., 9, 22–3 Coleman, Daniel, 19 –20, 25, 32–3, 36 n16, 51, 63 n3, 213, 239 n5, 267, 271, 282 n4 Coleman, Violet, 248 Colewell, M.J., 163, 175 n4 collective bargaining rights, 47, 69, 72, 76, 79 –83, 100; Charter protection, 28 –9, 70, 81, 100; public sector, 78 –9; Wagner Act, 66 Colley, Linda, 239 n10 Commons, John R., 271–2 communism, 49; communist, 50 –1, 252; parties, 99; threat of, 99, 106 Communist Party of Canada, 74 community, 5, 12, 14, 20 –1, 23, 26, 32–3, 51–3, 56, 60, 127, 180 –4, 208, 211–14, 257, 260 –1, 273; global, 58, 139; organizations, 30, 32, 82, 200, 213, 218 n7; rights, 127 conservatism, 174, 273. See also neoconservatism Conservative Party of Canada, 51, 72; government, 75; policies, 193 constitution, 6, 9, 18, 23, 27, 52, 75, 85, 95, 104 –5; and courts, 59, 81, 144; culture, 24, 31, 131, 162–74; neoliberal, 31, 120; social and economic rights, 29 –30, 126 –32, 140 –4, 146, 148 –50, 152 n2 Constitution Act (1982), 120, 141, 153 n12 Cook, R., 7, 12–13 Cooper, F., 194 n4 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), 7–10, 42–3, 48,

115, 136, 167–8, 193, 216, 221, 262, 278; Regina Manifesto, 9, 132 corporate sector, 100, 104, 125, 148, 152 n2, 171; defined as, 108 n3, 109 n10, 167–8 Court Challenges Program, 148 Crawford, Robert, 239 n10 Cree people. See Plains Cree people Criminal Code, 71, 74; criminal law reform, 9, 74 Culhane, Dara, 35 n5, 185 cultural rights, 92, 122, 138 Daly, H., 205 Davies, Libby, 184 Day, Ri ard, 227–9 Day, Shelagh, 150, 152 n1, 153 n6, 156 n27 democracy, 29, 69, 100 –1, 104, 109 n19, 114 –18, 121, 123 –4, 129. See also liberal democracy democratic socialism, 42–3, 48, 50, 70, 76 –7, 83, 85, 126, 221. See also social democracy Derrida, Jacques, 281–2 Devereux, C., 239 n3, 239 n4 Dhruvarajan, V., 207 Diefenbaker, John, 10, 261 Diène, Doudou, 224 –6, 237, 283 n11; Diène Report (2004), 273, 283 n11 Dixon, Fred J., 45, 69 Douglas, Thomas (Tommy), 10, 55, 115, 184 Downtown Eastside, 3 –5, 18 –19, 31–2, 35 n5, 36 n19, 185, 190 –1, 194 n5, 218 n9; health services in, 180 –93, 195 n9; homelessness, 4, 35 n3, 141–2, 180, 182; missing women, 181, 209, 218 n7; single

290 Index room occupancy ‘hotels’ (SROs), 3, 186, 188, 192; urban poor, 31, 180 –1, 183, 185 –6, 188 –90, 193 –4, 195 n16; Woodward’s non-market housing, 3 –5, 18 –19, 35 n7, 35 n8, 142. See also Vancouver Dra e, Daniel, 82 Dreaver, Joe, 253 Dy , Noel, 256, 258 Dyer, Ri ard, 231 du Bois, W.E.B., 271 economic globalization, 161, 163. See also globalization economic rights, 29, 92, 138, 140 education, 12, 23, 44 –5, 121, 149, 255; adult, 86 n9; primary and secondary, 12, 99, 122; postsecondary, 148, 150; residential s ools, 210, 249, 250 –2, 255, 257, 260; right to, 118, 122, 128 –9; universal access to, 23, 117 Elliot, James, 254 Ellio , Denielle, 19, 31, 35 n4, 196 n21 employment, 9, 10, 16, 22, 68, 78 –80, 96 –7, 119, 121; forms of, 78 –9, 82, 84, 202; precarious, 79, 82; standards, 78, 80, 121, 202–4 employment equity laws, 80; equal pay for equal work laws, 199 Employment Insurance (EI) program, 119, 163. See also Unemployment Insurance program Epps, T., 175 n8 equality, 124, 129 –30, 140 –1, 162, 223, 254; formal, 137, 141; inequalities, 17, 78, 114 –15, 124 –5, 128, 138 –9, 141, 161, 223, 238; rights, 80, 116 –17, 120, 126, 140 –1,

146; substantive, 139, 141, 153 n6; systemic inequality, 24 –5, 30 Eriksen, T.H., 254 Esping-Andersen, G., 118 Fabian, Johann, 239 n7 Fabian Society, 48 Fabre, C., 121, 127–8, 130 family, 12, 15, 16, 154 n16, 183, 195 n18, 202, 245 –6, 259 –60, 276 family allowance, 9, 22, 132 n1 Fanon, Franz, 245 Farmer, George S.J., 45 Fasson, D., 194 n4 Federated Labour Party of British Columbia (FLP), 17, 53, 68, 216 Federation of Saskat ewan Indian Nations, 251, 254, 257, 259, 263 n6 Fiamengo, J., 224, 239 n3, 239 n4 First Nations, 3, 53, 222, 239 n8, 277; equality and special status, 254 Fleras, Augie, 254 food, 15, 32, 99, 122, 248; food banks, 136 –7, 141; and clothing, 136, 138, 140, 144 –5, 184; and shelter, 32, 99, 138 –40, 144 –5, 184, 214; subsidies, 99 Forbath, W.E., 165 Foreign Domestic Movement (FDM), 203 Foreign Investment Review Act, 55 Forsey, Eugene, 48 Foster, J.E., 247 Foster, Kate A., 240 n12 Foucault, Mi el, 222, 235 Francis, Daniel, 240 n11 free trade, 47, 56, 61, 125, 171, 174 freedom of association rights, 9, 28, 70, 73 –5, 81

Index 291 Fren Canadians, 20, 59, 91, 236, 240 n16; culture, 232 Froc, K.A., 132 n9 Fudge, Judy, 68 gender, 26, 34, 51, 105, 182, 213, 215 –16, 222; equality, 78, 140; immigration, 200 –1, 231, 275, 277; labour, 200 –1, 206, 209 –10, 212; rights, 78, 140 –1, 200, 222 Gibbon, John Murray, 228, 232–8, 240 n11, 240 n12, 240 n14, 240 n15 Ginger Group, 48 Glasbeek, Harry, 82 global economy, 23, 101–6, 109 n13, 109 n18 global market, 101–4, 106, 110 n22, 131 global North, 161 global order, 51; global capitalism, 103 –4, 109 n18, 125, 131; global system, 58, 92, 105. See also international order global South, 161 global terrorism, 106 –7, 125 globalism, 26, 32, 55 –61, 91–2, 101–4 globalization, 56, 61, 104, 110 n20, 110 n22, 131; economic, 101, 161, 163 Goldberg, David Theo, 226 –7 Gonthier, Charles, 154 n17 Goodwill, J., 251 Go wald, Klement, 50 government, 100, 103 –7, 132, 145 –51, 162–3, 165 –6, 173 –4; policies and programs, 101, 103, 108 n8, 130 –1, 137, 139, 141–51, 173 –4, 183 –4, 190, 195 n9, 199, 204 –5, 213, 247, 249 –51, 253 –5; provincial

jurisdiction, 120, 126, 132 n7, 152 n12, 163, 166, 171, 173 –4; regulation, 50, 84, 167, 190; role of, 110 n22, 114, 120 –1, 125, 129, 136, 141–51, 163, 222, 246 –8, 249 Gramsci, Antonio, 65 –7, 69 Gramscian, 26, 65 –6, 69, 80, 83 –4, 85 n2 Great Britain, 11, 43, 162, 225, 239 n10, 275; Conservative Party, 102; Labour Party, 53, 162 Great Depresssion, 7, 48, 71, 73, 98, 116, 121, 137 Gregg, Allen, 268, 278 –80, 284 n16 Gurstein, P., 195 n14 Hage, G., 207 Hall, Stuart, 230, 275 –6 Harper, Stephen, 184 –5, 274 –5; government, 148 Hartz, L., 164 Harvey, David, 211 Hayward, Victoria, 240 n12 health care, 10, 19, 23, 28, 30 –1, 99, 121–2, 149, 181–94; access to, 136, 186 –9; insurance, 30, 163, 172; neoliberal context of, 31, 172, 189; right to, 10, 117–19, 122, 128 –9; U.S. health insurance providers, 30, 172; universal access to, 23, 30, 117, 174, 190 Health and Social Services Delivery Improvement Act (B.C.), Bill 29 (2002), 28 Heaps, A.A., 48, 72, 75 Hébert, Yvonne, 255 hegemony, 21, 54, 65 –7, 125, 214, 246, 249; counter-hegemonic, 27, 67, 69, 71, 83 –4, 218

292 Index Henderson, J., 239 n4, 239 n5 Hill, Daniel H., 273 Hobson, J.A., 57 Hogg, Peter, 154 homelessness, 4, 35 n3, 141–3, 180, 182, 218 n7 Horn, M., 175 n3 Horowitz, G., 164 House of Commons (Canada), 8, 47–8, 70, 72, 74, 151, 162–3, 167. See also Parliament housing, 4, 12, 19, 121, 143, 146, 149, 182–4; access to, 136, 138, 140, 185, 187; affordable, 35 n8, 146, 186, 272; non-market, 4 –5, 35 n7, 35 n8; right to, 128 –9, 140, 143 –5, 150; single room occupancy ‘hotels’ (SROs), 3, 186, 188, 192; social, 4, 142; transitional, 187 Huebener, Paul, 240 n17 human rights, 9 –10, 20, 26 –30, 92, 122–6, 131, 136 –7, 140 –1, 146 –51, 152 n2, 162, 174, 200, 222, 247, 270; accountability gap, 29 –30, 126, 146 –7; defined as, 22–30, 33, 37 n30, 92, 107, 114 –15, 121–3, 136 –8, 146, 153 n7, 162, 184; employment, 10, 122; health care, 10, 122, 172; individual, 30, 33; movement, 9, 254; poverty, 30; protection of, 22, 72, 114, 200; social programs, 30, 136 –8; social security, 10, 122; universal, 22–3, 269 –70, 277. See also social rights Human Rights Commission(s), 23; B.C. Human Rights Code, 142; Ontario, 273 human welfare, 9, 114, 132, 262

Iacobucci, Frank, 154 n17 Ignatieff, Mi ael, 37 n30, 114 –15 immigration, 4, 11–13, 20 –1, 33, 37 n21, 37 n22, 37 n23, 37 n27, 45, 51–2, 221, 227–38, 275; family class and economic, 21, 37 n27; migrant or temporary foreign, 21, 32, 201–4, 217; visible minorities, 268 –70, 275–6, 278, 281; women of colour, 28, 208 Immigration Act, 71–2, 224 income security, 21–3, 117–18; benefits, 21, 23, 105, 118 –19, 132 n1, 185 Independent Labour Party (of Manitoba), 47, 70, 216 Indian Act, 44, 183, 195 n8, 247, 249 –50, 253 Indian people, 44, 46, 240 n15, 246, 249, 254 –5; League of Indians, 250 –1, 253; White Paper, 253 –4 Indigenous people, 33, 51, 53, 210, 240 n15, 247, 254, 260; equality, 33, 246, 254, 283 n11; governance, 210, 236, 249, 260; reserve system, 44, 46, 240 n15, 250; selfgovernment, 53, 256 –7; special status, 254; treaty rights, 33, 247, 249, 250, 253, 262 individual rights, 21, 23 –4, 30 –1, 127, 270; defined as, 33, 107 n2; Indigenous people, 33, 246, 254, 262 Industrial Disputes Investigation Act, 72–3 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (the ‘Wobblies’), 45 International Bill of Rights, 27, 92 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCRC). See United Nations

Index 293 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). See United Nations International Labour Conference (1919), 75 International Labour Organization (ILO), 56, 75, 81, 86 n13, 217 n1 international law and treaties, 81, 104, 139 –42, 144 –5, 148 –9; arbitration, 170; the Charter, 127, 133 n10, 144, 155 n23; principle of, 143 –4 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 61, 101–2 international order, 56, 58, 60 –1; international capital, 109 n14, 221–2; international system, 26, 51, 106. See also global order Irvine, William, 47 Ivens, William, 45, 69 Kalayaan Centre of Vancouver, 212, 218 n9 Kennedy, David, 170 King, William Lyon Ma enzie, 9, 48, 55, 72–3, 75 Kogawa, Joy, 275 –6 Kulba, T., 239 n4 Kundera, Milan, 50 Kwan, Jenny, 184 labour, 17, 19, 32, 70 –9, 99 –100, 184, 199, 202; domestic, 202–3; history, 28; law, 22, 67, 79; precarious, 199 –202, 207–9, 213; U.S. New Deal labour policy, 74, 162–3, 174 n3 labour movement, 8, 17, 27, 36 n17, 45, 70, 72, 75, 80 –2

labour rights, 26, 28, 32, 70, 72, 76, 84, 201, 212; the Charter, 28, 37 n32, 81; health and safety standards, 68, 76, 84; history of, 67–85, 99 –100; minimum standards, 70, 72, 76, 78, 80; occupational accident insurance, 121; workers’ compensation, 68, 76, 80. See also collective bargaining rights Laghi, Brian, 284 Laurier, Wilfrid, 46; government, 228 Lavoie, Denise, 151 Lawson, Alan, 239 n8 Layton, Ja , 55 League of Indians, 250 –1, 253 League of Nations, 49, 57–8, 60 League for Social Reconstruction (LSR), 48, 174 n3 LeBel, Louis, 154 n17, 155 n19 legal aid, 148, 150 –1; cuts to, 146 Lewis, David, 55 L’Heureux-Dubé, Claire, 154 n17 liberal democracy, 76, 100 –6, 110 n20, 110 n22, 115, 121, 123 –5, 274; global, 102, 106 liberalism, 46, 55, 118, 121, 123, 126, 227, 274 –5; libertarian, 128, 166. See also neoliberalism Liberal Party of Canada, 48, 75; the Liberals, 72, 151 Lipset, S.M., 164 Live-In Caregiver Programme, 32, 200 –8; defined as, 203 Lo , F.O., 250 –1 Longboat, Dianne, 254 Lord, Bernard, 171 Luxemburg, Rosa, 43 Lynk, M., 29 Lynn, D., 205

294 Index Macdonald, John A., 164, 249 MacInnis, Grace, 7 Ma ey, Eva, 227, 229 Macpherson, C.B., 107, 123 –4, 128 Major, John C., 154 n17 Man e, Elizabeth, 164, 167 Manitoba Single Tax League, 45 Marshall, T.H., 22, 116 –18 Martin, Paul, 55 Marxism, 46, 48 –9, 77, 174; nonMarxist, 42 McCall, Leslie, 215, 218 n13 McCaskill, Don, 255 McClung, Nellie, 45 McKay, Ian, 5, 14 –15, 18 –19, 21, 36 n17, 240 n12 McLa lin, Beverley, 154 n17, 155 n19 McLeod, Abel, 250 McLeod, Jerry, 244, 257 McLeod, John R., 227, 246, 256 –7, 260 McLeod, Neil, 32–3, 37 n29, 222, 226 –7 McNaught, Kenneth, 15, 18, 51, 56, 63 n1 McNaughton, Janet, 240 n11 Médecins sans frontières, 58 –9 Medicare, 185 Methodist Chur , 6 –7, 10, 16, 19, 46; All People’s Mission, 10 –12, 15, 46, 228, 267, 273; Canadian Methodist Conference, 10, 16; Wesley College, 12, 46; ‘Young People’s’ groups, 13 Mignolo, Walter, 239 n7 Mills, Allen, 18, 20, 26, 63 n1, 71, 77, 193, 221–2, 238, 267, 271–3, 277–8, 281, 282 n5, 284 n18 Ministerial Association on the Trades and Labour Council, 17 minority rights, 9, 23, 33, 130 Mistry, Rohinton, 276

Monture-Agnus, Patricia, 209 Morton, W.L., 8, 36 n14 Mosse, D., 194 n4 Morris, Alexander, 247 multiculturalism, 32–3, 105; development of, 227, 232, 235, 237, 268, 270, 274 –6, 278 –80; policy, 53, 224 –5 Mun , R., 205 Murdo , James, 72 Murphy, Emily, 223 Murray, Thomas, and Harriet Anne, 248 National Indian Brotherhood, 255 nationalism, 105, 110 n22, 240, 253, 261; Cree, 249; Indigenous, 262; internationalism, 43; nationalization, 168; pan-Indian, 250 National Service registration, 15 –16 nation state. See state neoconservatism, 79, 268 neoliberalism, 50, 61, 83, 101, 118, 120, 161, 170, 172, 174, 185, 189, 200, 276, 279; deregulation and privatization, 103 –4, 131, 173; governance, 23 –4, 30 –2; policies, 101–4, 119, 185 –6, 189; threat to, 118 New Democratic Party (NDP), 7, 42–3, 50, 184, 221 NGOs (non-governmental organizations), 30, 45, 58, 61, 138, 152 n3, 153 n5, 187, 190, 195 n15 Ni olson, Cecily, 25, 32–3, 221–2, 284 n14 Nightraveller, Val, 258 –9 Norman, Ken, 153 n6 Norris, Kat, 209

Index 295 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 30, 61, 125, 152 n2, 161, 171; health care system, 30 –1, 172; investor rights, 172–3, private property, 167; takings rule, 31, 169 –70, 172 Nozi , R., 128 Obama, Bara , 280 One Big Union, 45 –6 Ontario ‘Days of Action,’ 82 Ontario Human Rights Commission, 273 Pa ard, R., 194 n4 Parliament, 6, 8 –10, 18 –19, 27, 34, 48 –9, 54 –6, 59, 61, 77, 80, 91, 103, 108 n8, 151, 153 n12, 164 –5, 175 n4, 184, 216, 238; legislature(s), 47, 59, 99, 153 n12, 165 –6; Member of, 6, 8, 10, 36 n11, 47, 70. See also House of Commons Pearson, Lester B., 55 Pe , J., 189 Pender Street Health Clinic, 191 pension(s), 99; Canada Pension Plan, 55; disability, 121; Old Age Security, 9, 55, 75, 121, 132 n1, 163, 216 Philip, M. NourbeSe, 224 –5, 237, 239 n5 Plains Cree people, 226, 245 –50; language and education, 256 –61; rights of, 352 Polanco, Geraldina, 25, 32–3, 221–2, 284 n14 Political Equality League, 45 political rights, 10, 23, 91, 95 –8, 104, 121–3, 125, 140; legitimacy, 100, 103, 105, 110 n22; logic of, 99 –100

Porter, John, 228 Portland Hotel Society, 184, 187 Poundmaker, Chief, 251 poverty, 4, 126, 136, 153 n6, 185; the Charter, 126 –7; human rights, 138 –9; national poverty rates, 126; systemic, 30; urban poor, 31, 180 –1, 186, 188 –94, 195 n16 Poverty and Human Rights Centre, 144, 152 n3 Pra , Geraldine, 209 privatization, 31; deregulation of medical services, 173; policing, 180, 182; property, 103; state sector, 103 –4, 131; work, 28, 79 Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, 268 Progressive Party of Canada, 47, 70 –1 property rights, 27, 74 –5, 93, 116, 125, 152 n2, 161–2, 174; concept of, 107 n2, 126, 167; private property rights, 9, 93, 167–8 Providence Health Care, 187 public health, 10, 177, 180 –1. See also health care public service(s), 9, 30, 141, 153 n12; policy, 21, 30, 174; programs, 30, 148 Quebec Act (1774), 240 n16 Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, 142, 154 n16, 156 n36, 172–3; Quebec Charter, 154 n17, 172; human rights norms, 156 n36 Quebec government, 31, 148, 151, 173 –4; Bloc Québécois, 151; Chaoulli case, 30 –1, 171, 173 –4; Gosselin v. AG Quebec (2002),

296 Index 132 n8, 142–3; Ministry of Health, 173; welfare regime, 142 race and ethnicity, 9, 20, 26, 33 –4, 51, 200, 222–3, 228, 237, 262, 268, 270 –1, 273, 275 –7, 280; anti-racists, 24, 225; Diène Report (2004), 273, 283 n11; ethnocentrism, 271, 274; identity politics, 33, 212, 284 n14 racism, 14, 33 –4, 96, 105, 221, 223 –7, 238, 270 –7, 282, 283 n11; systemic, 33, 223, 273; visible minorities, 237, 268 –70, 275 –6, 278 –81 Ratner, R.S., 190 Raza , Sherene, 209 Réaume, D., 153 n6 Redfield, P., 194 n4 Regnier, Robert, 256 rights, 9 –10, 22–4, 28, 92, 114, 117–18, 125, 144 –5; defined as, 22– 4, 92–3, 105, 107 n2, 115, 117–18; revolutions, 9, 21, 94 Roe, G., 195 n13 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 162; New Deal, 74, 162, 174 n3 Ross, Carol, 143, 156 n25 Rowe, R., 133 Royal Commission on Te nical Education, 17 Saskat ewan Indian Cultural College, 255 –6, 258 Sassoon, Showsta , 66 S neiderman, David, 29 –31, 175 n8, 221 Sco , Frank, 9, 48, 59 Sharma, N., 207 Shewell, Hugh, 22, 29 –30, 153 n7, 156 n32, 221 Sluman, N., 251

Small, D., 195 n14 social assistance, 119 –20, 126, 137, 142–3, 146 –8, 150 –1; cuts to, 119, 138 –9, 142, 146; family allowance, 9, 22, 132 n1 social arter, 120, 149 social democracy, 43, 50, 55, 77–8, 164. See also democratic socialism social justice, 19, 32, 34, 114, 211, 216, 222–3, 274, 277– 8, 280; activism, 19, 21, 32, 34, 49, 216, 274 social movement, 12–13, 23 –4, 82, 162, 213, 275, 277– 8 social programs, 22, 29 –32, 136 –9, 141–2, 146 –7, 151 social rights, 22, 91, 104, 114 –22, 125 –7, 131–2, 140, 222; defined as, 24, 29 –30, 99, 117–18, 121–2, 129, 143, 149 social safety net, 137, 152 n3 social security, 10, 121, 147; right to, 10, 117–18, 122 social services, 19, 46; in B.C., 28, 272; right to, 122; support of, 117–18, 184 Social Union Framework Agreement (SUFA), 149 social welfare, 26, 46, 163, 166, 180, 193, 195 n15, 199, 222; cuts, 31–2, 82, 189 –90; defined as, 115 –18; policies, 21–2; right to, 117–18. See also welfare state socialism, 45, 47, 49 –50, 52, 54 –5, 77–8, 109 n10, 122, 164, 168; Christian, 6 –7, 10, 13, 36 n17, 48, 91, 184, 262; socialist, 8, 42–4, 77; revolutions, 77, 91, 94; state, 58, 127; ‘threat’ of, 99. See also social democracy Socialist Democratic Party (1910), 45

Index 297 Socialist Party of Canada (1902), 45 Spivak, Gayatri, 214, 218 n12 standard of living, 122, 136, 140, 144 –5 Stasiulis, D., 207 state, 58, 101–4, 116 –18, 164, 167; citizens, 128, 132, 161–2; economic conditions, 118 –19, 125; nation state, 58, 91, 95, 101–4, 131, 261; role of, 31 102, 104, 110 n22, 119 –20, 128, 131, 165, 167 Stewart, Basil, 239 n9 Supreme Court of Canada, 28; rights’ cases, 43, 133 n10, 144; Baker v. Canada (1999), 133 n10, 155 n23; Chaoulli v. Quebec (2005), 30, 171–4; Dunmore (2001), 81; Falkiner v. Ontario (Ministry of Community & Social Services) (2002), 154 n14; Finlay v. Canada (Minister of Finance) (1993), 146; Gosslin v. Quebec (A orney General) (2002), 132 n8, 142–3, 156 n31; Government of the Republic of South Africa v. Grootboom (2001), 140; Health Services (2007), 81; Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Inc. v. Manitoba HydroElectric Board (1992), 154 n13; R.W.D.S.U. Local 558 (2002), 81; Re: Amendment of the Constitution of Canada (1981), 154 n13; Re: Objection by Quebec to a Resolution to Amend the Constitution (1982), 154 n13; R. v. Keegstra (1990), 144; Slaight Communications Inc. v. Davidson (1989), 155 n24; United States v. Burns (2001), 155 n23; Victoria (City) v. Adams (2009), 143 –4, 156 n25 Taylor, Charles, 53, 60, 236 –8, 274 Teeple, Gary, 27–9, 121, 127, 221

Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFW), 21 Temporary Non-Immigrant Employment Authorization Program (1973), 203 Ti ell, A., 189 Tobias, John, 257 Tootoosis, John B., 250 –2, 255, 263 n6 Tootoosis, Wilfred, 252 Trades and Labor Council, 17 trade union(s). See unions Treaty of Versailles (1919), 70, 75 Trilateral Commission (1973), 100 –1 Trudeau, Pierre Ellio , 9, 55; and the Charter, 59 –60; Just Society, 254; White Paper, 254 Tu er, Eric, 26 –9, 32, 37 n29, 63 n2, 133 n18, 162, 174 n3, 221, 239 Tully, James, 53 Tushnet, M., 166 Underhill, Frank, 48 unemployment, 22, 74 –5, 97–8, 116, 122, 205, 272; insurance, 9, 75, 80, 99, 121, 137, 163, 216 Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, 119; right to, 122. See also Employment Insurance (EI) program Union of Saskat ewan Indians, 253 unions, 7, 16, 22, 45 –8, 54, 68 –70, 73 –4, 78 –9, 81–3; 121; compensate workers, 28 –9; legislation, 75 –6, 102; minimum standards, 74 –5, 80; right to unionize, 22, 79, 116, 122; unionization, 22, 73, 82; and women, 78 –9 United Farmers of Alberta (UFA), 70 –1

298 Index United Farmers of Ontario (UFO), 70 United Nations (U.N.), 60, 101, 104, 109 n14, 138 –9; Security Council, 106 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), 146 United Nations Durban Conference, 225 United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (UNHCR), 91, 122, 147, 225, 283 n11 United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCRC), 107 n1, 122, 140, 144 –7, 149 United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 107 n1, 122, 131, 138, 140, 142, 144 –8 United Nations Proclamation of Tehran, 139 United Nations Security Council, 60; emergency legislation, 106 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 10, 22–3, 91, 101, 104, 107 n1, 121–3, 152 n4; principles of, 101, 104, 121, 139 United Nations Vienna Declaration, 139 United States (U.S.), 61, 94, 105 –6, 118, 152 n2, 162, 175 n7, 225, 236; Bill of Rights, 171; constitutional culture, 164 –7; Republican Party, 102; social rights, 120, 122, 132 n4; Trade Promotion Authority Act (2002), 170

universalism, 43, 222, 226, 277, 281; income benefits, 132 n1; principle of, 22–3, 95, 118 Valverde, M., 239 n4 Vancouver Agreement (2000), 183, 195 n9 Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, 181, 184, 186; Health Authority, 187 Vancouver Native Health Society, 191 Vancouver Philippine Women Centre, 209 Vancouver, B.C., 3 –4, 8, 11, 16 –18, 31, 36, 45 –7, 68, 136, 138, 142, 180 –8, 209, 212, 275. See also Downtown Eastside Vancouver/Ri mond Health Board, 183 Vandall, Burton, 246 Vandall, Elaine, 257 Vandall, Gabriel (Gabe), 244 –5, 247, 259 Vandall, Joseph, 245 Vassanji, M.G., 276 violence, 181–3, 209 –12, 248, 280; against women, 209, 218 n7; and civility, 227, 238; peacemaking, 57 wages, 15, 17, 76, 97, 100, 149; ‘living wages,’ 16; minimum wages, 17, 75, 146, 163, 199, 202; right to, 128; social wage, 76, 109 n12; unskilled labour, 17; women, 68, 70, 76, 78 Ward, P.W., 239 n5 welfare state, 9, 22, 79, 99 –100, 117–18, 142–3; development of, 6, 9, 21–4, 46, 76, 79, 99 –100, 116 –18, 181, 199, 216; dismantling of, 22, 103, 189, 221, 279; Keynesian, 43,

Index 299 99, 118, 192, 221; neoliberal, 23, 103, 118, 131, 189; right to welfare, 22, 116 –19, 124 –5, 131, 180 –1; work-for-welfare, 119. See also social welfare Wheaton, Cathy, 254 Win , Ernest, 46 Winnipeg, Manitoba, 11, 16; ‘foreign district,’ 4; North, 6, 8, 11–12, 18, 46 Winnipeg General Strike (1919), 7, 17–18, 45 –7, 69, 71, 81, 114, 199 Wobblies. See Industrial Workers of the World women, 123, 129; feminist, 24, 223, 226; rights, 59, 139 –40, 146, 223; workforce, 28, 78, 133 n10, 200, 206, 208 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 45 Woodsworth, Charles J., 6 Woodsworth, Ellen, 4 Woodsworth, James Shaver, 6, 25 –6, 237–8; early years, 5 –7, 10, 17, 19, 44, 46; federal politics, 8 –10, 19, 47–8; historical ba ground, 8 –10, 15 –19, 26, 42, 44 –7, 50 –1, 199; publications: ‘Canadians of

Tomorrow,’ 266, 270, 278, 284 n18; My Neighbor: A Study of City Conditions, a Plea for Social Services, 5, 14 –15, 19; Re-construction: From the Viewpoint of Labour, 199; Strangers within Our Gates or Coming Canadians, 13 –15, 19 –20, 51, 207, 221, 223, 228 –9, 233, 236, 238, 271, 273 Woodward’s Department Store, 3 –6, 18 –19, 35 n7, 142 work, 119, 185, 208; defined as, 217 n1; feminization of, 79; hours of, 75, 163; job-for-life, 201; nonstandard, 201; part-time, 79, 208; precarious, 208 –10; privatization of, 28; right to, 122; self-employed, 79; temporary, 79 workers’ rights, 9, 22, 28, 32, 67, 70, 73 –4, 79, 84, 200; access to, 136; benefits, 222; legislation, 75 –6, 221; protection for, 9, 12, 28, 70, 74 –5, 201; ‘workers’ revolt,’ 7 World Bank, 61, 101–2, 125, 170 World Trade Organization, 61, 125 Zeliotis, George, 172 Ziegler, O., 11–12, 16