Ken Burch posted:
”The problem with opposing Charlottetown was that there was so much in that that was amazingly socially progressive, the NDP couldn't really have opposed it without sounding like it had gone right-wing on all of those issues, like it was pandering to uptight, narrow-minded Alberta rancher/preacher types. I can't even imagine how a Left case against Charlottetown could have sounded, how the argument could have been made that there was still a way to get the social progressive stuff in Charlottetown enacted if it were to lose. If you had to frame a Left argument against that Accord, Kropotkin, how would you do so? How would you make the case that it was possible to vote against the "social charter" and still find a way to get the things in the social charter by other means?”
The Charlottetown Accord if passed would eliminate First Nations Women’s constitutional protection under the charter who lived on reservations. Judy Rebick and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women lead an active campaign against Charlottetown in support of indigenous women across Canada.
By Judy Rebick. From the nine page article which is worth reading in its entirety,
”...The ad hoc Committee won many of its demands, but Quebec never signed the Constitution. In 1984, Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney began the process of persuading Quebec to sign. His 1987 amendment, the Meech Lake Accord, divided both the country and the women’s movement over its proposed “distinct society” clause for Que- bec. The ad hoc Committee opposed Meech Lake, concerned that the distinct society clause would jeopardize what they had worked so hard to achieve and had thought were iron-clad equality rights in the Consti- tution. So the women’s movement in English Canada mobilized against the Meech Lake Accord. And when Mulroney initiated the so-called Canada Round of constitutional negotiations in 1992, NAC took a high- ly controversial position against the proposed Charlottetown Accord, working alongside Aboriginal women from across the country to or- chestrate its defeat. Protecting the equality rights won in the 1982 Con- stitution became a central focus of the Canadian women’s movement; one could even say a defining feature...”
i hope this helps both VOD and KB in shedding some light on both Meech Lake and Charlottetown and why Rosemary Brown may have been so vocal against the constitutional reform.
Thank you. I guess my impression of the anti-Charlottestown coalition was that it was largely made up of right-wing white men whose attitude on culture and social issues was "just shut up, do what you're told, and settle for being generic 'Canadians'" who are supposed to be fixated on trying to live and act as much like white 'Christian' men damn well tell you to do".
And there was the fact that Alberta was so stoked that Charlottetown was defeated, and it's always hard to believe that anything progressive comes of anything most Albertans would celebrate.
My last question is...has anything that would have been guaranteed in the social charter even come close to being won through other means in the years since that referendum?
Even though I ask that, I recognize that the Accord did need to be beaten.
My earlier views on the issue were misinformed.
