Volume 29, Number 17 · November 4, 1982
Un-Canadian Activities
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Fragile Freedoms: Human Rights and Dissent in Canada
by Thomas R. Berger
Clarke, Irwin (Toronto), 298 pp., $17.95; $9.95 (paper)
Portrait of Canada
by June Callwood
Doubleday, 378 pp., $14.95
Formal civil liberties are not highly valued in Canada, where disorder is feared more than oppression. While Canadians of course regard themselves as free people in a free society, they prefer to rely on tradition, compromise, and the common law to safeguard their liberties. 'This business of rights, that's not our concept of government,' Sterling Lyon, then premier of Manitoba, asserted in an interview last fall.[1] 'We know what our rights are. We enjoy them. We don't have to state them. This rather American approach to it is really not ours. We don't worry about things like that. We do what's right.'
Review, 2290 words
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