Equality in Canada: A tale of non-normative groups struggling with grounds of discrimination
Keywords:
Grounds, equality, discrimination, families, Canada, Motivos de discriminación, igualdad, discriminación, familias, CanadáAbstract
This article intends to address the limits associated with a rigid grounds-based approach to equality, requiring claimants to categorize their identity within an enumerated ground to “deserve” the protection of the equality guarantee. To this end, I first shed light on the irreconcilability of rigid grounds with post-structuralist accounts of identity, and then lay claim to an approach to equality that extends its reach to fluid, intersectional groups. Thereafter, taking Canada as a case study, I parse out the Canadian equality jurisprudence, particularly the cases offering an analysis of the aforementioned grounds. I then move to sketch out two proposals to overcome the risks associated with the current equality jurisprudence, by focusing on marital status discrimination. I ultimately offer a cursory overview of the complex interplay between approaches to equality and the organization of interest groups, and illustrate the issues around the organization of “post-identity groups”.Este artículo se propone abordar los límites relacionados con un enfoque de la igualdad rígido y basado en motivos de discriminación (grounds), exigiendo que los demandantes categoricen su identidad como un motivo enumerado para “merecer” la tutela de la garantía de igualdad. En primer lugar, arrojo luz sobre la irreconciliabilidad de los motivos rígidos con concepciones posestructuralistas de la identidad, y después propongo un enfoque de la igualdad extensivo a grupos fluidos e interseccionales. Analizo la jurisprudencia canadiense sobre igualdad, sobre todo los casos que ofrecen un análisis de motivos. En ese punto, esbozo dos propuestas para superar los riesgos asociados a la jurisprudencia actual sobre igualdad, centrándome en la discriminación por estado civil. Por último, ofrezco un somero repaso de la compleja interacción entre los abordajes de la igualdad y la organización de los grupos de interés, e ilustro los problemas que acechan a la organización de “grupos posidentitarios”.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1066
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
OSLS strictly respects intellectual property rights but it is our policy that the author retains copyright, and articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution No-Derivatives licence is our default licence, further details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 If this is not acceptable to you, please contact us.
Use of this licence means that you are free to republish the article in this version or revised, however, we ask that you cite this version and provide a link to its location. The licence also allows others to use and copy the article, but only with acknowledgement, for non-commercial purposes, and with no derivatives, as stated on the website indicated above. Examples of commercial purposes are republication in a subscription-only journal, or in a book marketed in a conventionally commercial way by a publisher.
As soon as an accepted article is edited by OSLS and approved by author(s) and editor(s), it will be stored in our repository; and, as soon as possible, it will be published on onatifirstonline.wordpress.com, from which readers will be able to download it. If it is included in an issue of OSLS, when the issue is ready for publication, the article will be assigned a DOI and published within the issue on http://opo.iisj.net/index.php/osls/index in its final form.
The permission you grant to us includes the rights to disseminate the bibliographic details of the article, including the abstract supplied by you, and to authorise others, including bibliographic databases, indexing and contents alerting services, to copy and communicate these details.
For information on how to share and store your own article at each stage of production from submission to final publication, please read our Self-Archiving and Sharing policy.
The Copyright Notice showing the author and co-authors, and the Creative Commons licence will be displayed on the article, and you must agree to this as part of the submission process. Please ensure that all co-authors are properly attributed and that they understand and accept these terms.
