In Equality Deferred, Dominique Clément traces the history of sex discrimination in Canadian law and the origins of human rights legislation, demonstrating how governments inhibit the application of their own laws, and how it falls to social movements to create, promote, and enforce these laws.

Focusing on British Columbia – the first jurisdiction to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex – Clément documents a variety of absurd, almost unbelievable, acts of discrimination. The province was at the forefront of the women’s movement, which produced the country’s first rape crisis centres, first feminist newspaper, and first battered women’s shelters. And yet nowhere else in the country was human rights law more contested. For an entire generation, the province’s two dominant political parties fought to impose their respective vision of the human rights state. This history of human rights law, based on previously undisclosed records of British Columbia’s human rights commission, begins with the province’s first equal pay legislation in 1953 and ends with the collapse of the country’s most progressive human rights legal regime in 1984.

This book is not only a testament to the revolutionary impact of human rights on Canadian law but also a reminder that it takes more than laws to effect transformative social change.