Greetings ...
Thanks again for your interest. Perhaps I should preface my further
comments by underscoring that the opinions I express here are not those of
the Project nor any government agency. They are solely my own.
On Thu, 26 Mar 1998, Tom Walker wrote:
> Peter,
>
> 1. How do you respond to the Canadian Human Rights Commission's call for
> recogniziing poverty as a human rights issue in Canada.
>
I have heard about this in the news, but have not actually read this
document. Is the Commissioner suggesting that the "international
community" recognizes some form of social rights? The traditional
post-war welfare state can be conceived as being underpinned by some
notion of social rights of citizenship, as defined by T.H. Marshall in
his classic Citizenship & Social Class (1950). According to this view,
the 18th century saw the emergence of legal rights, the 19th century
democratic rights, and the 20th century social rights (the right to at
least a modicum of social provisions to, in some countries, the right to
enjoy a standard of living close to that prevailing in society). The
Commissioner seems to be overstating the extent to which governments have
officially endorsed this position, for such official endorsements would
seem to be isolated to countries in northern Europe. Nonetheless, the
notion of social rights of citizenship has been an important legitimizing
device for the welfare state, albeit one that is heard less in the last
few decades (although "rights talk" in general seems to be proliferating
at a furious pace).
If the suggestion is that appeals to judicial institutions should be the
mechanism by which poverty (or discrimination against the impoverished) is
to be ameliorated, I am very skeptical. There will be difficulty in
developing legally judiciable definitions of poverty and descrimination
(policy analysts can't even seem to agree on this subject).
There will be difficulty selecting which forms of income-based
descrimination should be banned, for capitalist markets are, to a great
extent, a series of income descriminating transactions. If taken too
far, Human Rights Legislation (which owes more to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights tradition of rights) will conflict with the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which owes more to the American notion of
rights), and the latter, as constitutional law, will prevail. The Charter
is relatively biased towards the liberal anti-statist conception
of "fundamental freedoms," and "poverty" is not one of the ennumerated
grounds for nondescrimination (re: section 15).
Even if these challenges could be resolved, judicial institutions are not
well suited to enforcement or proactive policy making. It would also have
to be excepted by provincial human rights commissions to effect Canada
writ large (something that doesn't even exist for more conventional
categories of nondiscrimination). It is for these reason that this set of
recommendations will not go very far. I understand the moral challenge
being made here, but I personally think issues of poverty alleviation
should be debated within legislatures, not courts. The Commission's
position seems to be more of a reaction to recent deficit reduction
efforts than a sober and systematic study of the role of legal rights and
labour market operations.
As policy analysts, we need to be more wary of these sorts of contraints
in order to develop of policies with a meaningful effect, as my original
uk-policy posting put forth.
Thanks again for your attention.
Cheers, Peter Stoyko
