Poverty: Rights, Social Citizenship, and Legal Activism.

Jeff Karabanow is an assistant professor in the Maritime School of
Social Work at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Poverty, a collection of articulate and thoughtful analyses concerning various political and legal arguments vis-à-vis poverty and marginalization, is a compelling articulation of social exclusion. Each contribution to this edited work profiles the ways in which Canadian society, her social institutions, and her legal foundations create obstacles to social, political, and economic justice. Recent years have seen a transformation of Canadian society from an institutionalized to a residualized welfare-oriented state, with tremendous focus placed upon individual self-help, market-driven economies, and tougher crime and punishment edicts. This book argues that through the retrenchment of the welfare state along neo-liberal agendas, there has been a clear increase in people who exist outside of mainstream culture—populations made up of youth, the elderly, women, immigrants and refugees, Aboriginals, single parents, minorities, and those disabled—who are politically, socially, economically and legally excluded from any forms of societal entitlements.

The first section of the readings deal with constitutional rights protection and explore how the courts can fail to understand the contexts of poverty, marginalization, and exclusion or can be unduly influenced by mainstream media and thus require “reality checks” and “enlargement of mind” to fully appreciate the complexities of such cases. The next sections explore the sense of “adjudicative space” for the building of social citizenship and human rights claims. Case examples of community struggles for social and economic justice demonstrate real legal battles and some small victories. Several authors explore the context of globalization and its powerful effect upon social citizenship. For example, globalization has in one sense weakened the nation state in its focus upon global treaties—as such, creating a deficit in local/national democratic governance. On the other hand, international human rights treaties tend to have little application on the national and local stage. Several authors speak of strategies to build national enforcement mechanisms.           

Underlying the book’s various topic areas is a sense of human dignity and its relationship to social and economic citizenship. Within the current Canadian context of the erosion of social programs and support, these authors are in essence arguing for a restructuring of the social, legal, and political institutions in order to bring those from the margins back into spheres of inclusion. This is a thoughtful and important read for those interested in the plight of a society’s most vulnerable and the role the state should play to provide invaluable rights to all of her citizens.