Seeking Justice and Belonging: The Complexity of Identity

• Author: Colleen Sheppard
• Pages: 117-130

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Seeking Juice and Belonging:

The Complexity of Identity

   emerge in a social vacuum. Legal protections are

usually the product of signif‌icant social struggles by groups that have

been wronged and are seeking legal redress for those wrongs. In the

Canadian context, the f‌irst anti-discrimination laws were aimed at

prohibiting overt exclusions based on race, national or ethnic origin,

sex, and religion in employment, education, and housing. But laws

crafted to address specif‌ic problems of discrimination may not be

capable of responding to new or previously unacknowledged forms

of discrimination. Therefore, a second wave of anti-discrimination

reform was necessary to add new grounds, such as sexual orientation,

disability, family status, and pregnancy, as well as explicit prohibi-

tions of grounds-based harassment.1 A few jurisdictions have added

the grounds of social condition and being in receipt of social assist-

ance to address poverty and economic disadvantage.2 Most recently,

gender identity and expression and genetic-based discrimination

have been the focus of human rights reform.3 Accordingly, one of the

most important and dynamic developments in anti-discrimination

law has been the expansion of anti-discrimination protections to

recognize additional grounds of discrimination.