At the beginning of Why Canada Cares: Human Rights and Foreign Policy in Theory and Practice, a powerful narrative on human rights in Canadian foreign policy, Andrew Lui challenges a claim entrenched in our national mythology—that Canada has always been a leading advocate of international human rights. He describes Canada as a “human rights laggard” in the decades after World War Two, despite the political rhetoric of Canada as a “human rights leader.”
A salutary, and embarrassing, historic example of this national self-delusion is Canada’s role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Lui quotes a comment by William Schabas that the Canadian government attempted to “scuttle or delay” the process, far from playing a central role, and approached the declaration with a mix of “scepticism, indifference, and outright hostility.” Some Canadian policy makers believed that economic and social rights as well as some civil and political ones...
Diana Juricevic is a member of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. She was formerly an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto and acting director of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and its international human rights program.
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