This paper addresses current tensions and initiatives respecting the manner by which provincial human rights commissions are confronting the pressures of financial restraint. It also focuses attention on theoretical debates respecting the reform or reinvention of governmental bodies. As such agencies are forced to do more with less, we can witness them engaging in an important process of institutional and administrative reconfiguration. This process is significant, touching on matters ranging from case prioritisation, through adjudication, to agency responsibilities regarding public education. The process of change, however, is to be understood more in light of the literature on the reform of government rather than its reinvention. And as all these agencies confront the need to engage in the reform of their services, questions arise regarding the degree to which such reform is subject to public awareness and scrutiny.

Quebec's Human Rights Tribunal is a unique phenomenon in Canada. The creation of a forum to adjudicate human rights violations does not, however, solve the inadequacies and inefficacies of a system designed to resolve complaints of discrimination. In this essay, the author first examines the accessibility of the complaint processing system while attempting to circumscribe and characterize the outlook on intervention of the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse responsible for handling complaints of discrimination. Seventy five percent of the files open yearly are rejected at one point or another of the complaint investigation process. Moreover, most of the pending files are settled between the parties involved. Treatment and settlement of complaints on an individual basis may be satisfactory enough in a context in which a complainant is viewed as a client but it is unsatisfactory in terms of fundamental human rights. Taking into account the peculiarities of the Commission's “clientele,” this essay concludes with a statistical and sociological analysis of the effect of out-of-court settlements and this clientele's prevalent non-accessibility to the justice system. These clients must be satisfied with an administrative reformulation of their right to equality. Such a transformation of how equality rights are determined is troubling.

At a time when divorce proceedings were nearly impossible in Québec, couples would seek an order of “separation from bed and board.” Between 1900 and 1930, the number of legal separation cases steadily increased. A sample of 500 such cases reveals that 83% of applications for separation were brought by wives against their husbands for ill treatment, while the husbands alleged that their wives committed adultery. Custody of the children was generally granted to the mother. After about 1920, judges were more inclined to grant legal separation on the grounds of irreconcilable differences, which demonstrates a shift in the expectations toward married life.

This article explores arguments for and against proposals for statutory changes that would require Canadian judges to consider partner or “spousal” abuse when making decisions about child custody and access, in terms of the likely implications for women. The author discusses, in historic context, the relationships of social change to the evolution of social ideology and professional “knowledge” about gender and family and the influences of these on the evolution of family law, in order to demonstrate that legal changes alone are unlikely to produce positive benefits for abused women and their children. Moreover, an analysis of the legal discourse of judges as reported in the Canadian Reports on Family Law between 1983 and 1996 suggests the need for caution. Instead of judicial sensitivity to the special vulnerabilities of women in abusive situations, the case law indicates that judges are applying an “objective” incidents-based approach to assessments of abuse. Because this approach ignores the special vulnerabilities of women and makes it appear that abuse is symmetrical by gender, women may be disadvantaged if judges are required to deny or limit abuser's access to, or custody of, their children. The author concludes that, if what is intended is the protection of abused women and children, the solution lies less in giving more power to judges than in promoting social change through collective action, the evolution of professional “knowledge” that ultimately will find reflection in law, and the allocation of tangible resources for the benefit of abused women and their children.

Canadian sentencing commissions have recommended that mental illness be considered as a mitigating factor in sentencing. With respect to sexual assault, some feminist literature asserts that over-reliance on psychiatric factors not only absolves the offender, but also serves to reinforce the myth that “normal” men do not rape women and children. In this study, data were collected on 97 Canada-wide sexual assault sentencing decisions from 15 August 1992 through 15 August 1993. This research does not find support for the hypothesis that sexual offenders are typically characterized as suffering from a mental disorder. Furthermore, using multiple regression, an interaction between judicial perception of the severity of the crime and judicial mention of psychiatric factors is found. The data show that psychiatric factors interact with perceptions of force, actually leading to harsher sentences. The impact of this variable turns out to be the opposite of what the literature would expect one to find: judicial perceptions of mental disorder act as aggravating factors in the sentencing of sexual assault offenders when a judge also believes that force has been used in the commission of the offence. The results of this research are then interpreted within the context of labelling theory.

Abstract—This essay documents how the city of Oshawa, Ontario engaged in a campaign of “civic sanitation” through the enactment of a public nuisance by-law that constructed the discursive form of the loiterer. The relationship between visualization and regulation inherent in this “vision” of social hygiene is examined. The author concludes by reflecting on the forged character of law in late modernity.

It is possible to broadly characterize social theory in terms of routine moves which are shaped by a priori contexts, and deep structure moves which seek to delineate those shaping contexts and, sometimes, to call for new ones. Thus, for example, in the environmental literature we see the routine moves of so-called “shallow ecologists,” who tend to privilege natural systems only to the extent that they serve human ends, and the deep structure moves of “deep ecologists,” who value non-human life forms and systems for their intrinsic value. The author discusses those moves and demonstrates two deep structure theories in the progression of the spiritual view of nature from animism to its current form of instrumental rationality, together with the implications of liberal political ideology for environmentalism. He then advocates an alternative approach to social theory, grounded in the notion that institutional innovation, properly understood and “managed” along a trajectory free of the dead hand of deep structure theory, may hold the promise of transformative possibilities that are neither trivial nor unrealizably utopian. The implications for environmental reform are considered, together with an example taken from the practices of industrial production.

The system of temporary protection set out in accordance with the conclusions of the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Excom) offers the necessary guarantees for the protection of the refugee under such a system. However, regimes of temporary protection recently established in a number of states (for example Germany and the United States) do not respect the conclusions of Excom nor the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 and are based on the objective of controlling migratory flows.