Equality Deferred

In Equality Deferred, Dominique Clment traces the history of sex discrimination in Canadian law and the origins of human rights legislation, demonstrating how governments inhibit the application of their own laws, and how it falls to social movements to create, promote, and enforce these laws. Focusing on British Columbia the first jurisdiction to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex Clment documents a variety of absurd, almost unbelievable, acts of discrimination. The province was at the forefront of the womens movement, which produced the countrys first rape crisis centres, first feminist newspaper, and first battered womens shelters. And yet nowhere else in the country was human rights law more contested. For an entire generation, the provinces two dominant political parties fought to impose their respective vision of the human rights state. This history of human rights law, based on previously undisclosed records of British Columbias human rights commission, begins with the provinces first equal pay legislation in 1953 and ends with the collapse of the countrys most progressive human rights legal regime in 1984. This book is not only a testament to the revolutionary impact of human rights on Canadian law but also a reminder that it takes more than laws to effect transformative social change.