RIGHTS, NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL-MOVEMENTS IN CANADIAN CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICS

Strategies involving rights discourse are necessarily shaped by dominant ideologies of rights. This not only limits the utility of such strategies in advancing progressive goals, but also creates risks of negative political consequences. These points are discussed in relation to the rights strategies of two social movement organizations, the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), in the campaign leading up to a recent referendum to amend the Canadian constitution. Each organization's rights-based claims were (re)presented in media accounts in terms of the classical liberal discourses of dominant rights ideology. This contradicted the organizations' wider political positions and contributed more generally to a construction of the 'women's movement' that excluded and implicitly delegitimated nationalist (Quebec and First Nations) and socialist women's movements in Canada.