Historians of the Cold War have tended to focus on the repression of political dissidents during that period, but only recently has attention been shifted to the simultaneous suppression of other types of non-conformity, such as sexual variance and non-traditional gender roles. Parallel to the repression of internal political dissent which accompanied the international Cold War, another, more subtle, campaign was proceeding. This was the attempt to re-establish the social order, based on family life and traditional sex roles, which the war had tended to undermine.

This article describes the emergence of imprisonment as part of the collection of child-support debt in Alberta, Canada. This approach to child poverty arose in the context of political conservatism, a shift in the feminist movement, and changes in the legal environment. Findings indicate that incarceration for support debt is increasing and that Blacks, Aboriginals, the unemployed, and those without post-secondary education are over-represented among those imprisoned for support debt. It is argued that child-support enforcement as an implement of social policy has limits, especially among low-income payors.

Western mediators have accepted at face value claims as to the general acceptability and voluntariness of Chinese mediation. Their failure to attend to the cultural context in which Chinese mediation practices are embedded has led to a partial and uncritical impression. Those who cite current mediation practices in China either as positive examples or as models to follow should note mediation's implication in the social control exercised by an authoritarian government and the maintenance of feudal, or patriarchal, norms.

This article explores and questions the colonial anxieties that mixed-race progeny of European and Aboriginal ancestry posed to government and religious officials in late 19th and early 20th century British Columbia. Drawing from federal, provincial, and local correspondence, missionary documents, legal statutes, and various court records detailing provincial and federal liquor infractions, I examine the social, legal, and political debates about racially-mixed peoples and'their “proper” place in the province. Pervasive fears about mixed-race peoples, I contend, were not merely symbolic or metaphorical but were deeply imbricated in material concerns about land. Specifically, federal and provincial authorities argued that race-mixing in British Columbia potentially undermined their efforts to appropriate Indigenous lands and to build the province into a “respectable” white settler society. Throughout this period, mixed-blood peoples elicited a penetrating colonial gaze from government administrators and missionaries alike. Although authorities relied on a variety of spatial and legal techniques to govern racially-mixed peoples, I suggest that liquor prohibitions at both the federal and provincial levels were integral to keeping mixed-race peoples in their place: or rather, “out of place.”

The following is an edited transcription of the keynote presentation at the SSHRC-funded conference On the Margins of Trans Legal Change. This public conference was hosted by McGill University’s Faculty of Law and Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, in partnership with Thompson Rivers University’s Faculty of Law. The keynote presentation was a conversation between Dr. Viviane Namaste and Dalia Tourki, where they asked each other questions.

Supporters of the Meech Lake Accord of 1987 describe it as a compromise that will allow Québec to accept the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982 (and the new Charter of Rights) and to once again participate actively in on-going constitutional discussions. Before “accepting” the constitution, Québec demanded, among other things, the right to participate in the nomination of judges to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to counter what has long been perceived by Quebecers as the centralist potential of a federally appointed Supreme Court. The experience of foreign federations indicates, however, that provincial participation in the appointment of high court judges serves essentially to reinforce the political legitimacy of the court and to facilitate judicial centralization of powers in the federation. The author suggests that this part of the Accord is better thought of not as a victory for Québec, as is often claimed in Québec, but rather as a major political concession made by a Québec government apparently unaware of the stake of this reform, namely the consolidation of the decision-making authority of a central institution of the Canadian State.

Over the last few decades the Supreme Court of Canada has been working out what the constitutionalization of Aboriginal rights entails. Early jurisprudence took a rights-based approach to the protection of these rights, affording them a significant degree of protection from legislative infringement. In more recent decisions, however, the Supreme Court has markedly reduced the degree of protection these rights will enjoy. The judiciary has developed a set of general principles concerning the justification of judicial activism, principles ultimately grounded in a vision of Canada as a constitutional democracy and the role of the judiciary in such a democratic structure. This work examines the ways by which the judiciary might attempt to deploy the principles, and the vision on which they depend, in efforts to justify its recent activism in the realm of Aboriginal rights.

This paper addresses some of the tensions for social cohesion presented by Canada's medicare system. This system, which constitutes the country's best-loved social program, is broadly governed by the five principles of the Canada Health Act. Independently and together, these principles promote social cohesion. Medicare is however also under threat from various elites, who favour elements of its privatization, and whose principal strategy is here termed privatization by stealth. The argument that privatization is disruptive of social cohesion is advanced in general terms and with specific reference to the case of Ontario's Community Care Access Centres, which broker public funds to non-profit and for-profit home care agencies across the province.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a study of the reputations of provincial human rights commissions in Canada among interested community organizations, women's groups, and minority groups. The focus of the study was on the reputations of commissions for effectiveness, responsiveness, and fairness in handling human rights complaints and implementing programmes against discrimination. The study was designed to test for an hypothesized relation between levels of public funding of commissions and their reputations in the above areas. It was anticipated that the lower the commission's funding the poorer the commission's reputation. Results of the study show that while commissions have generally poor reputations among community organizations, their low ratings are not related to levels of funding. The suggestion made is that poor reputations may be related to other factors such as high community expectations of rights delivery in an increasingly rights-conscious political culture and the structure of human rights procedure.

In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found that Canada’s management of child welfare discriminates against First Nations children. The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, one of the complainants, maintains a web-based campaign called “I Am A Witness,” providing details on the hearings and legal materials and asking visitors to act towards ending discrimination against First Nations children. What does it mean to bear witness to such discrimination? The concept of “witnessing” circulates through Indigenous oral traditions, communication and media theories, and the common law. This article explores the I Am A Witness campaign, arguing that as it evokes various theories of witnessing and builds public awareness of legal processes, it shifts spaces of and perspectives on legality beyond Western categories, creating a public that is enabled to bear witness to, and respond to, ongoing injustices against Indigenous peoples.

Drawing primarily from the Canadian case, this paper explores the process of birthright citizenship determination for children born abroad through the use of assisted reproductive technologies. The determination of parentage is central to these cases, raising issues of how parental status is defined in the law—through biology, intentionality, and/or matrimony. Moreover, the complexities of defining who is a child and who is a parent, in order to determine who is a citizen, reveal fundamental contradictions in the consent-based model of liberal citizenship.

The fact that we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Report of the SSHRC Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law and that the event is cast as a celebration of the Arthurs Report signals two key features of legal research and legal education in Canada today.

To begin, it tells us that, at least in certain scholarly circles, the Report has had an impact. That impact can be seen both in the mirror of the past, and in the lens of the present. Looking backwards, the early success of this Association and the founding of its review - the Canadian Journal of Law and Society – attest to the immediate galvanic effect of the Report; its continuing influence is manifest, notably, in the decision of the SSHRC last year to create a separate adjudication panel for law and society research. Between these salient bookends, one observes that the Report has been called in aid of numerous projects, programmes and initiatives. Let me mention only two (with which I had some prior association) that took on a relatively permanent institutional form: the Law and Society (later Law and the Determinants of Social Order) Programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research that flourished between 1986 and 1996; and the re-establishment in 1997 of a multi-disciplinary federal law reform agency – the Law Commission of Canada – that was charged with pursuing a law and society research mandate.

In its judgement on the constitutionality of a unilateral declaration of independence by Quebec, the Supreme Court claimed to be guided by the implicit or explicit constitutional principles of democracy, federalism, rule of law, and respect for minorities. French-English duality, as part of a “multination” conception of Canada, was not among these, despite being crucially implicit in the Court's reasoning. Had the principle of duality been articulated, it would have enhanced the theoretical cohesion of the judgement; more importantly, it would have furthered a necessary dialogue outside Quebec, insofar as national reconciliation requires the recognition of Quebec's distinctiveness by the rest of Canada. The secession reference was therefore a significant opportunity missed.

In 1992, Ontario completely changed its adult guardianship laws. Ontario's reform was the outcome of a long and thorough legislative effort aimed at shifting the political balance from a paternalistic to an autonomy-respecting adult guardianship system. Since the proclamation of Ontario's new adult guardianship laws, no empirical research (or any other scientific research for that matter) was conducted with regard to the actual success, failure, implementation, or other dimensions of the new regime. This article presents the findings of an exploratory study of the elder guardianship experience, as viewed from the narrow yet important perspective of Ontario's Consent and Capacity Board. The findings provide a glimpse of Ontario's elder guardianship reality and establish the main questions and important dimensions that should be further examined in future studies in this field.

Abstract — Examining recent (1990 to 1993) reported Canadian cases on custody and access, I document a movement toward a re-privatisation of “family” to a traditional patriarchal nuclear form. Patterns of privatisation, readily apparent in economic and social policy are also evident within family law. Custody and access determinations in a separation or post-separation setting represent a moment where these implicit tactics become visible; the result is serious limits placed on the freedom and safety of women and their children. Focus on issues of custodial mothers' mobility, wife abuse and allegations of child physical and/or sexual abuse reveals a propensity on the part of the judiciary to prioritise paternal access to children as a criterion of the “best interests of the child.” Like joint legal custody, which the Canadian courts are still reluctant to impose on unwilling parents, de facto joint custody is occurring under sole custody orders. These tendencies ensure the separated or divorced “family” will be “re-onstructed” and re-privatised along familiar patriarchal lines.

The article considers the temporary labour migration program in Canada, which catapults workers from the global South into work and wider relations in the global North, in the context of debates swirling around Anglo-American labour law. There is widespread consensus that labour law is experiencing a sustained moment of crisis in the face of neoliberal globalization. Not widely considered is how this crisis relates to temporary labour migration and the global South-North relationship and, in turn, how this relationship may impact emergent approaches tasked with transforming or transcending the field. Critical interventions seeking to confront the “southern question” within the socio-legal imaginary have gone largely unnoticed by labour law scholars. Transnational labour law may hold potential for an alternative account of the racialized production of unfree migrant labour. But only if its adherents can truly confront the dynamic unfolding through temporary labour migration—that of the “South of the North.”

Socially responsible corporate governance (SRCG) is a product of the interaction of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. These two transnational business governance schemes have converged around the principles of accountability, sustainability, and due diligence. This article will examine to what extent SRCG can be useful in promoting worker protection. It will contend that, as a reflexive regulation, SRCG is normatively indeterminate and may easily be subject to regulatory capture by the traditional actors of corporate governance. This article will argue that these risks may be alleviated by the interaction of SRCG with transnational labour law (TLL). Transnational labour law increases SRCG’s responsiveness to the value of worker protection by offering labour more direct sources of participation to strengthen SRCG’s enforcement and alleviate risks of capture. Moreover, the principles of TLL weave a coherent and meaningful framework which can be used to assess the quality of the various corporate governance initiatives.

This article presents first, a summary of the findings of the first phase of the human dignity and social exclusion initiative (HDSE) of the Council of Europe and second, an analysis of the implications for social policy of the four themes identified in the report's conclusions. These four themes are: i) trends in risk, ii) the changing role of the state in relation to risk, iii) convergence in social policy approaches in Europe and iv) the challenge confronting social NGOs in defending the least advantaged in risk society. Thus, the article uses the framework of risk, social exclusion and social rights to explore the implications of social policy trends for the lives of the least advantaged people and to comment on effective strategies for combating poverty and exclusion in the changing environment identified by the HDSE report.