The Rights Revolution by Michael Ignatieff Read Free Book Online Page A

Freedoms. The charter that he intended to leave as his legacy did not grant group rights to Quebecers or aboriginal peoples. Its entire spirit was to protect individuals from the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of majorities.
    For the majority community of English-speaking Canadians, his vision has proven enduringly attractive. No privileges for any groups, but equal rights for all. No distinct societies or peoples, but one nation for all. All provinces to be treated the same. All individuals to be treated with justice. This vision was supposed to pull the country together. In reality, it came close to pulling the nation apart. Why this should be so is of enduring importance, not just to Canada but to all multinational, multi-ethnic states seeking constitutional renewal to reconcile group differences.
    The core difficulty is not with the project of civic equality itself. There is no possibility of maintaining a national community of any kind unless every individual within it, regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or national origin, can count on an equality of rights. Québécois and aboriginal peoples have no possibility of genuinely belonging to Canada unless they are treated with fairness and respect.
    The problem with equality of individual rights is that it is simply not enough. It fails to recognize and protectthe rights of constituent nations and peoples to maintain their distinctive identities.
    The importance of this is still not apparent to a majority of Canadians. In the eyes of most, aboriginal peoples and French-speakers are minorities. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the rights of minorities from encroachment. So why, most Canadians ask, are Québécois and aboriginal peoples unwilling to make do with minority-rights protections? The answer is that these groups do not see themselves as minorities at all. Minority-rights protections fail to recognize that these groups are nations, not collections of individuals with similar characteristics.
    Most Canadians in the majority community, when faced with this demand for recognition, have little difficulty acknowledging the fact that Native peoples are different and that Quebecers speak a different language. These differences can be welcomed as part of the multi-ethnic, multicultural heritage of Canadians. But recognizing cultural differences is not the point. The recognition these groups seek is political. The claim they make is that unless they enjoy collective rights of self-government over language and land, they cannot securely enjoy their rights as individuals.
    Aboriginal peoples and Québécois distinguish the type of claim they are making from the types of claims that immigrants make to defend their own languages and cultures. Immigrants, so their argument goes, arrive in a country as families or individuals, and they accept, as a condition of immigration, that they should learn thelanguage of the majority and obey the laws of the state. Under the provisions of most liberal states, immigrants are entitled to speak their own language at home, to teach their children their native tongue as a second language, to celebrate their festivals, to organize together as community groups, and to practise their religion. But these are not group rights; these are individual rights, based in entitlements to freedom of religion and assembly, and used by groups to maintain a cultural heritage of an essentially private kind. The group rights claimed by aboriginal peoples and Québécois are political, rather than cultural, and they are collective, rather than individual. They are claims to nationhood based on historical priority, on the fact that they were present at the creation of the state, and that the state’s very legitimacy depended — or ought to have depended — on their collective consent. Where this consent was never secured — as in the case of aboriginal peoples — it must be secured now.
    But this political claim — to