Embodying Equality: Stigma, Safety and Clément Gascon’s Disability Justice Legacy

Abstract

This article explores two disability justice legacies of Justice Clément Gascon. One legacy is embodied in his personal narrative of disability. Another legacy is jurisprudential and seen in his legal reasoning. On his embodied legacy, the article juxtaposes Justice Gascon’s widely publicized anxiety attack with Justice Le Dain’s private forced resignation following his hospitalization for depression thirty years earlier. This comparison reveals how, in many ways, attitudes around disability have not progressed, but rather reconfigured into more palatable forms. And on his jurisprudential legacy, this article conducts a critical disability theory analysis of Justice Gascon’s dissent in Stewart v. Elk Valley Coal Corp. In so doing, it highlights the ideological undercurrents that shape Canadian law, the link between ableism in society and ableism on the Court, and the importance of incorporating disability in contemporary discourse around judicial diversity.

Keywords: Critical disability theory, anti-discrimination law, human rights, disability justice