Human Rights and Poverty: A Twenty-First Century Tribute to J.S. Woodsworth and a Call for Human Rights

Gwen Brodsky, “Human Rights and Poverty: A Twenty-First Century Tribute to J.S. Woodsworth and a Call for Human Rights, in Human RIghts, Human Welfare and Social Activism: Rethinking the Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth, J. Pulkingham ed., (Toronto:U of T Press, 2010)

The Canada for which J.S. Woodsworth and the Co-operative Common- wealth Federation (CCF) party struggled – a society in which everyone has an adequate standard of living, including access to adequate food, clothing and housing, health care, workers’ rights, and social programs are vigorous (MacInnis, 1953), is not the Canada of today. This is a moment in Canadian political history when government commitment to social programs is at a low ebb. It has become shockingly ordinary that people in Vancouver, and other major cities in Canada, have to line up at food banks, beg, steal, sleep in doorways and on church pews, and sell their bodies to support themselves and their children. …