Canada’s Rights Commitments Are Being Tested Again
On February 2, 2026, the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights (JHC) submitted a shadow report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee ahead of its review of Canada under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
This isn’t a report built from theory. It’s built from people’s lived realities, drawn from community-based research conducted across multiple projects between 2020 and 2025, including surveys, interviews, forums, and participatory policy processes with youth, survivors of gender-based violence, Indigenous and racialized communities, migrants, people with disabilities, and people living in chronic poverty.
What we heard across that work was consistent: Canada’s gaps under the ICCPR aren’t rare mistakes. They’re patterns and they connect.
As the submission states, “these failures are systemic rather than incidental, disproportionately affect marginalized communities, and reflect enduring gaps in prevention, accountability, participation, coordination, and access to effective remedies.”
One of the clearest findings is how hard it remains to access justice when rights are violated. Remedies exist in law, but too often they are delayed, complex, and out of reach, especially for those already navigating racism, violence, disability barriers, poverty, or precarious immigration status.
Across both federal and provincial systems, communities described processes that are exhausting, procedural, and slow, and outcomes that feel symbolic rather than transformative.
The report also highlights how Canada repeatedly waits until harm escalates, rather than acting earlier when risks are known and foreseeable. Whether we’re talking about gender-based violence, policing, mental health crises, or digital harms, people told us the same thing: prevention is underfunded, coordination is weak, and accountability is inconsistent.
That’s not just ineffective, it is a human rights failure.
The report also highlights how young people have described digital spaces as places where civil and political rights are exercised and violated. Harassment, hate, exploitation, privacy breaches, technology-facilitated violence: these are not fringe experiences. They are common, and they land hardest on marginalized youth.
Canada still lacks a coherent, rights-based approach to protect children and young people online. Young people are too often excluded from shaping the policies meant to impact them.
The submission calls for reforms that match the scale of the problem: stronger and better-resourced human rights systems, real accountability in policing, prevention-centred responses to violence (including technology-facilitated harm), and meaningful participation for people most affected by rights violations.
Because, as the report reminds the Committee, “without sustained coordination, accountability, and follow-up, the violations documented in this submission will persist.”
Canada’s review is an opportunity, but only if the response goes beyond formal compliance and commits to change people can actually feel.