Lesson 8 — Activity 2: Equality Rights

In fact, our Charter goes a step further and guarantees the rights of disadvantaged individuals or groups to have access to facilities and programs that can improve their circumstances. These are known as equality rights.

Because you have grown up with many of the results of having equality rights, you may not fully appreciate the significance of their inclusion in the Charter. Do you have an elevator in your school? This might have been installed to accommodate a student or staff member who requires the use of a wheelchair. Public washrooms are required to have one cubicle that is large enough to accommodate wheelchairs. As well, there are now all-gender washrooms in order to encourage inclusivity and respect for diversity.

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Earlier, students with special needs attended separate schools or were placed in separate classrooms. Now, all students with special needs attend the same schools as everyone else and are integrated fully or partially into regular classrooms. The common belief was that those with disabilities were incapable of great achievements, so they were never given the opportunities to succeed. Many stories of personal achievements demonstrate the positive results of practising equal rights.

In Canada, women have always been able to join a police force or the military. They could work for airline companies or enter the trades. Their participation in these, however, was not equal to that of men who did the same thing. In the police force, the only positions available for women were desk jobs. Women in the military were not eligible to participate in combat, and they could never be promoted to high-ranking positions. Those working for airline companies were restricted to stewardesses, customer service representatives, or office workers. If a woman entered a trade, her male co-workers were slow to accept her. Today, women are able to take on any position open to men. A woman is just as likely to fly into outer space as is a man.

Inequality Examples

People experience inequality (when people are not treated equal) all around the world. These inequalities threatens all human rights.

You may have heard of ethnic cleansing. This refers to an intentional removal of a specific group of people from a region. It is especially horrible when the method to achieve this involves deliberately killing members of a group. This is genocide. In most cases, a corrupt government will support this action to guarantee its own power. When you think of any nation in Africa, you most probably assume that all the citizens in that nation are the same. This is not always so. Sometimes, governments in Europe formed the nation from members of several tribes.

Probably the worst case of tribal ethnic cleansing occurred in 1994 in an African nation called Rwanda. Hutus (members of one tribe) murdered 800,000 Tutsis (members of another tribe) in 100 days. That was an average of 80,000 people each day. In other situations, religious groups struggle for supremacy.

In Iraq, three powerful groups, the Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds exist. These groups are all members of the Muslim faith, but they are often in conflict with each other. Before the Iraqi War, under Saddam Hussein, the Sunni were the most powerful group. Under Hussein, 180,000 Kurdish people were executed.

An example of discrimination was the apartheid system in South Africa. Black people of African descent were legally treated very differently from white people of European heritage. They were denied basic rights such as mobility rights, freedoms, and financial opportunities. Blacks were subject to arrest without trial and given extended prison sentences.

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You can see that it is very important to have rights that allow everyone to be treated equally.

Self-check!