Equality Instituted? Reviewing the Role of Human Rights Commissions in Canada since the 1970 Royal Commission Report on the Status of Women

In 1967, the Canadian government established the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in response to international pressures for state governments to evaluate women's equality within their countries. The 1970 report produced by the Royal Commission was significantly grounded within a rights-based framework which called on the state to ‘protect’ and ‘promote’ women’s rights through quasi-legal institutions. Specifically, the Royal Commission called for the establishment of federal, provincial and territorial Human Rights Commissions to investigate complaints under, and enforce compliance with, human rights legislation. This paper explores the feasibility of treating Human Rights Commissions within Canada as fertile sites for feminist mobilizing efforts and state policy critiques. As evidenced by Statistics Canada’s Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report (2011) gender-based inequity has remained a persistent feature across multiple areas within Canadian society, despite the wide establishment of Human Rights Commissions. I review the roles of both provincial and federal Human Rights Commissions in the fifty years since the Commission’s report in relation to gender-based equity (including expanded intersectional understandings of gender-based rights) and consider the extent to which Commissions have been specifically involved in the protection and promotion of women’s rights. I also focus on how some of the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s lesser known public-interest activities could provide clues to how Commissions can be engaged in broader systemic efforts rather than simply tackling episodic discrimination. I conclude with considerations of how strategically employing Human Rights Commissions within broader feminist mobilization efforts in Canada requires applying greater scrutiny to their policy and systemic functions. This exploration of Canada's reliance on Human Rights Commissions for equity advancement offers a multi-level case study into the possibilities and persistent limitations of utilizing state institutions for human rights driven systemic change.