Activists in the Age of Rights: The Struggle for Human Rights in Canada, 1945-1960

From 1945 to 1960 Canada began to move into what has been called “the age of rights.” At the end of the Second World War the nation paid lip service to “British liberties,” but both the state and private individuals frequently violated the libertarian rights of political radicals as well as the egalitarian rights of certain unpopular ethnic and religious minorities. By 1960 a discourse of human rights had largely replaced the British liberties approach, and the country enjoyed a far higher level of respect for minority rights, in part because of a number of legal changes—Supreme Court decisions, anti-discrimination legislation, and a Bill of Rights. This dissertation examines this shift, focussing upon the activities of members of the Canadian “human rights policy community.” Relying largely upon primary resources, it presents a number of case studies, demonstrating how human rights activists dealt with the deportation of Japanese Canadians, the Gouzenko Affair, the problem of discriminatory restrictive covenants, the Cold War, the need for an effective fair accommodation law in Ontario in general and the town of Dresden in particular, and the struggle for a bill of rights. In presenting these case studies, this dissertation also focusses upon the activities of a number of key interest groups within the human rights community: the coalition known as the Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Jewish Labour Committee, and a number of civil liberties organizations (especially the liberal Civil Liberties Association of Toronto and the communist Civil Rights Union). Attention is paid to the reasons for their successes and failures; within the general context of economic, social, and cultural changes, special attention is paid to the way in which these interest groups made their own history, using their own history, using the resources available to them.

Accepted: 2017-11-02T20:57:34Z