In principle, the Supreme Court of Canada has stated that rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms represent a nonhierarchical “complex of interacting values” that must be interpreted in light of one another. Further, equality in particular has been singled out as a right whose interpretive influence traverses the confines of Section 15; it “applies to and supports all other rights guaranteed by the Charter.” One would assume therefore that the more severe, complex, and intractable the oppression suffered – the kind that often manifests in a “cluster” of rights violations – the more likely it is that it will receive judicial recognition. However, the poor track record of women's multiple rights claims at the Supreme Court, claims that arise through a combination of an equality rights violation under Section 15 of the Charter coupled with another civil liberty violation, belies this assumption. Even in the rare multiple rights case that could be considered a “win” for women, it resulted from a truncated analysis that would not assist in preventing future subordination beyond the narrow parameters of the case.

The reason for such a fundamental contradiction between philosophy and outcome, I believe, lies in the “watertight compartments” approach to rights. By this, I mean that the courts have constructed rights in multiple rights claims as abstract, discrete, and oppositional, much the same way as it has employed grounds in analyzing discrimination claims, making them resistant to an intersectional analysis. Intersectionality theory demonstrates that discrimination law has required women of color to separate out and compartmentalize the aspects of their experience that relate to racism and those that relate to sexism. Because discrimination law has required them to show either that they experience sexism like white women or racism like racialized men, their experiences of subordination are considered “too aberrant” to be recognized.