Are conservatives really rights-deniers?

That ruling unsettled many Canadians throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s. Segregation in Canada was uneven and unpredictable: one town might be fully integrated while another enforced a colour bar. In Ontario, public outrage over discriminatory signs—“No Jews allowed” or “No Catholics allowed”—led to the first provincial law banning such notices. The real turning point came in the early 1950s in the small Ontario town of Dresden. Once a terminus of the Underground Railroad, Dresden still had businesses that refused to serve black customers. A local man, Hugh Burnett, grew tired of the indignities faced by his community and decided to act.1The story of Hugh Burnett’s fight to end Ontario’s colour bar is told in the new Well, That Didn’t Suck video, “The Right to be Served.” Well, That Didn’t Suck is sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Historical Education and Trent University. Burnett helped form the National Unity Association and pressured town council to end discrimination. When council refused—and local voters even rejected integration in a referendum—Burnett and his allies took their case to Queen’s Park and to the Progressive Conservative government of Leslie Frost. Frost’s government had already outlawed racial discrimination in hiring in 1951. When Frost met Burnett, he was struck by the injustice of denying service in public places. The result was the Fair Accommodation Practices Act, banning discrimination by race, colour, creed, and nationality—passed a decade before comparable civil rights legislation in the United States. This was the creation of a new legal right, but it was framed as a continuation of Canada’s inherited liberties. Frost spoke openly about British traditions of freedom while acknowledging that freedom of commerce had to yield to freedom from discrimination. Crucially, the decision-makers here were legislators, not judges. Today, it’s often assumed that Canada’s rights culture flows almost entirely from constitutionalization in the Charter. Without judge-driven rights expansion, the argument goes, Canadians would be at the mercy of discriminatory majorities. Many histories simply assume that rights had to be constitutionalized—and that judicial expansion is the logical and inevitable path. But there was, and is, an alternative tradition. Canada’s early anti-discrimination laws emerged through parliamentary debate and persuasion. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Canadians understood themselves as heirs to a culture of liberty, one that could be expanded when discrimination against black Canadians, women, or the disabled no longer fit that inheritance. In this story, all political parties played roles, but Conservatives often led—first provincially, then nationally, with John Diefenbaker’s Canadian Bill of Rights. The Diefenbaker Bill is often dismissed as toothless because it lacked constitutional status. But Diefenbaker saw it differently, comparing it to the Magna Carta or the Habeas Corpus Act: an expression of parliamentary will that would gain authority through repeated invocation and public respect over time. To rights activists who demand immediate change, this approach can seem frustratingly slow. Yet as Canadian politics churns with criticism of court-imposed policies, and as public anger over Supreme Court criminal-law rulings on mandatory minimums and consecutive sentences grows, it is worth asking whether judge-led rights expansion has always been the wiser path. The Charter was broadly supported in the early 1980s because it largely reflected rights Canadians already accepted in law. Where it did not—as with the constitutional protection of affirmative-action policies—controversy persists. Those policies were unpopular then, and they remain so today. As Conservatives gather in Calgary and as Black History Month approaches, it is worth remembering a time when Conservatives led Canada as rights defenders—not by denigrating the past, but by persuading the public that extending rights was part of our national inheritance. It was change that came slowly, incrementally, and democratically—from Parliament and the people themselves.