"ALL RIGHTS MATTER": A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE ONTARIO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION'S SYSTEMIC CHANGE INITIATIVES IN

This dissertation examines the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s (OHRC) partnership engagement with police services via the use of voluntary Project Charter agreements. Through an analysis of OHRC policy documents spanning from 1962 to 2016, qualitative research with three municipal police services (Ottawa, Toronto, and Windsor) and the OHRC, utilizing methods developed out of the epistemological insights and normative commitments of Critical Race Theory, Feminist Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies, the analysis centres on the duality of law and the race-neutral logics that work to constrain the viability of human rights-driven anti-racist structural change. This work engages the notion “All Rights Matter” to describe a flattened approach to human rights that restricts focussed consideration of the operation of structural racism. The “All Rights Matter” approach employed within these voluntary Project Charter agreements obfuscates areas of institutional inaction or resistance and deflects attention away from inaction, or failure, toward addressing structural racism and community concerns of racial profiling and misuse of force. This flattened approach to difference is intimately connected to a diversity management posture favouring business vernacular and rationales over equity. The five chapters comprising the dissertation reveal the emancipatory limitations of rights claims – vis-a-vis racism in particular – within the Ontario context. Chapters one and two offer theoretical and historical background to the “All Rights Matter” approach. Chapter three attends to the role of policing in reproducing a racially inequitable social order, the OHRC’s partnership-oriented adoption of diversity management, and the settlement agreement that brought about the Ottawa Police Race Data Collection Project. The case studies of the Toronto and Windsor police services examined in chapters four and five illustrate how these partnerships with the OHRC serve as containment strategies, quelling public pressure to address racism within these services. By way of conclusion, the dissertation underlines the importance of severing human rights approaches from a diversity management framework that extracts value from racialized groups without addressing inequitable racial orders and the pressing need for human rights accountability and legally-enforceable public interest remedies.