Review of Poverty: Rights, Social Citizenship, And Legal Activism

Margot Young, Susan B. Boyd, Gwen Brodsky & Shelagh Day, eds., Poverty: Rights, Social Citizenship, and Legal Activism (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 389 pp. Louise Arbour has likened the present state of human rights in the international context to a pillar of glass: these rights are invisible, decorative, and support nothing. (1) Her sharp metaphor seems equally applicable to the treatment of human rights--in particular, social and economic rights--on the domestic front. Many Canadians take pride in the fundamental rights and freedoms entrenched in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, (2) but as the essays in Poverty: Rights, Social Citizenship, and Legal Activism (3) show, many fail to see how those rights are infringed by the existence of poverty. This failure to see can also be observed in Canadian courts: for example, Gosselin v. Quebec (Attorney General), (4) the very case that instigated Poverty, illustrates how the courts have resisted using the Charter to protect economic and social rights or to hold governments accountable for policies that perpetuate poverty. Within Canadian society, one can easily observe a divide between those who see poverty as a personal misfortune, and those who see it as a systemic, socially created (or at least reinforced) problem--a failure of the state rather than the individual, and, more specifically, a failure of the state to protect basic human rights. (5) Over recent years, those who align with the latter view have witnessed--likely with some disbelief, and perhaps despair--the neoliberal restructuring of the Canadian welfare state and the reinforcement of neoliberal attitudes by the courts. (6) For instance, in Gosselin, a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada found that the Quebec welfare/ workfare program that differentiated between recipients based on age did not offend Louise Gosselin's right to equality (a 5:4 split of the Court), nor did its pittance of financial support offend her right to security of the person (a 7:2 split of the Court), as guaranteed by the Charter. (7) To those who strive to use the law to combat poverty this decision can justifiably be seen as a setback, but the essays in Poverty show that it can also be a site for creative rethinking of the challenges of using the law to protect economic and social rights. After making some general comments on the collection as a whole, I will discuss the essays in each of its five sections, followed by brief concluding comments.