Canada is the state concerned with this complaint. Canada is signatory to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) which is the relevant rights document with which this complaint is concerned.

Lousie Arbour:W hat is it in Canadian society that prevents the poor and marginalized from claiming equal enjoyment to the full range of their rights recognized under law, including economic, social and cultural rights?

"Where there is social and economic inequality, people experience profound differences in access to political power, access to justice, and access to the goods and social conditions that support well-being more broadly: food, shelter, healthy environments and health care.”

How can such glaring disparities prevail in a country such as this, a wealthy, culturally diverse, cosmopolitan democracy? Can such entrenched marginalization really be dismissed as the fault of the marginalized, as some would tacitly suggest?

The real issue is not regulation or State action in and of itself: but rather, what is being regulated, and in the interests of whom: the market, national elites, the aggregate interest of the majority, or the disadvantaged and the vulnerable.
Poverty and exclusion is too readily accepted by majorities as regrettably accidental, or natural or inevitable, rather than the outcome of conscious policy choices. All underlying agendas and preferences must be brought to the surface if these debates are to lead to policy decisions that produce just outcomes.

The reason ‘rights talk’ is resisted by the powerful is precisely because it threatens (or promises) to rectify distributions of political, economic or social power that, under internationally agreed standards and values are unjust…These truths are laid bare in Canada’s very hesitant recognition and selective implementation of some of its international human rights obligations.
But sixty years of disclaiming or belittling the equal status of socio-economic rights as enforceable human rights, fundamental to the equal worth and dignity of all Canadians, rings hollow and disingenuous in the light of international and comparative experience.

The possibility for people themselves to claim their human rights entitlements through legal processes is essential so that human rights have meaning for those most at the margins, a vindication of their equal worth and human agency. There will always be a place for charity, but charitable responses are not an effective, principled or sustainable substitute for enforceable human rights guarantees.