The Rights Revolution by Michael Ignatieff Read Free Book Online

— made it impossible to create a country in which French-speakers felt genuinely at home. Recurrently, English-speaking provinces abridged or ignored the rights of French-speakers to educate their children in their own language. Recurrently, Quebecers concluded that a civic union based on equality of rights was a fraud, because it did not allow them to protect what was essential to their survival as a people.
    It would be convenient to believe that these problems now belong to an unhappy past. Unfortunately, Canada’spolitical history since 1968 can be told as the story of the unwillingness of the majority to discard the connection between equality, individual rights, and group assimilation. For this link is still held to be the key to keeping the country together. An essential figure in making this strategy explicit was Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. He believed that rights equality for all Canadians might offer a way out of the emerging constitutional impasse between Quebec and Canada, and between aboriginal peoples and the majority community. 4
    That’s how best to understand the rights revolution he spearheaded between 1968 and 1984. There was a deep symmetry in his approach. Faced with the demand by French Canadians that their language and culture receive special protection, Trudeau replied that what required protection was not the rights of a community but the rights of individuals, and that these rights should not be confined to a particular territory, Quebec, but should apply across the country. In legislation that he introduced in 1969, all Canadians were granted the right to bilingual services in French and English in all federal institutions.
    With Native peoples, Trudeau believed that the problem lay in their inequality as individuals, which in turn was the fault of the Indian Act. Under its terms, aboriginal peoples were made wards of the national government. They did not enjoy an equality of rights with other Canadians. Their social subjugation and misery could be corrected only if they were accorded full citizenship rights as individuals. 5
    To both groups, therefore, the government offered arenewal of the national union based on equality of rights. In the aboriginal case, the policy was intended to bring an end to the distinct-group status imposed by paternalist legislation. If aboriginal peoples wished to maintain their customs and traditions, that was a private matter for them to decide. What the government would facilitate was their incorporation as individuals into the national community. In other words, the politics of assimilation remained intact.
    In the Québécois case, the intent of bilingual language rights was to break down the barriers between English-and French-speaking Canadians, to assimilate them both into a bilingual national community. Individuals could maintain their group identities as a private matter, but their shared identity would be as citizens of one nation.
    In both cases, the Trudeau approach conceived of groups as aggregations of individuals and thought of group identity as a chosen affiliation that could be — and should be — broken off if group purposes conflicted with individual ones.
    When Trudeau spoke of a just society, what he meant was a unified national space in which all Canadians would recognize each other as rights-bearers. This is one of the oldest visions of political community. It descends from the Renaissance republics of the Italian city states, and from the heritage of the French Revolution. In this model, national unity is enforced by equal rights and civic assimilation. It is an ideal that defines group differences and group demands as sources of division and that seeks to weaken the hold of groups on individuals inorder to incorporate them more fully into the Newtonian space of a national state.
    Accordingly, Trudeau sought to patriate Canada’s constitution — which was a British act of Parliament — and to entrench within it a Charter of Rights and