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TURNING OFF THE TAPS l 1141 TURNING OFF THE TAPS: PUBLIC POLICY IN CANADA Lois M. Wilson “NEVER RETREAT, NEVER explain, never apologize. Get the thing done and let them howl” (In Times Like These, vii). Those oft-quoted words were spoken by Nellie McClung, a prominent Canadian Methodist campaigner for women’s suffrage (1918), for appointment of women to the Senate (1929), and for women’s ordination (1936). Born in 1873, she was a suffragist, temperance activist, politician, church worker, writer, public speaker, wife, and mother. She believed motherhood was the highest achievement for women but because of deep Christian conviction felt compelled to emerge from her home to redeem humankind with Methodist evangelical fervor. She cut her political teeth on the campaign for national prohibition conducted by the Women’s Canadian Temperance Union (WCTU). In Canada, it was the temperance movement that first spurred women to seize opportunities for social and political action. McClung knew the 1906 Election Act of the Dominion of Canada read, “No woman, idiot, lunatic, or criminal shall vote.” Prior to winning women’s suffrage in 1918, she was active in organizing a hilarious, satirical Women’s Parliament in Winnipeg in 1914 where women and men reversed roles, and men became the sex without a vote. To the charge that women would not want to sit in Parliament, she said that “there are women who have stood before wash tubs so long that they would be glad to sit any place” (Hancock, 83). She understood women’s suffrage and women’s ordination as two sides of the same coin. She worked for women’s ordination in the United Church of Canada for twenty years before the first woman was finally ordained in 1936. McClung became a public figure in church and society , her most lasting contribution to women and public policy being a thirteen-year struggle that came to be known as the Person’s Case. An Albertan, Emily Murphy had been made the first ever police magistrate after suggesting that prostitutes should be tried by a special court presided over by women. Later she was to hear a case involving a breach of the Liquor Act when the counsel for the defense rose and objected to her jurisdiction as a magistrate. His argument was that she was “not a person ” within the meaning of the Statutes and had no right to be holding court. This objection was based on the common law of England. “A woman is not a person in matters of rights and privileges, but she is a person in matters of pains and penalties” (McClung, In Times Like These, 29). In Canada, senators are not elected but appointed by the sole decision of the prime minister. Historically, only men were appointed. In 1919 Murphy requested the Canadian government to appoint a woman to the Senate. The Minister of Justice responded that he could not appoint a woman because within the meaning of the British North American (BNA) Act women were not persons. Murphy’s brother pointed out to her that Section 60 of the Supreme Court Act provided that any five persons could petition for an orderin -council directing the Supreme Court to rule on a constitutional point in the BNA Act. Murphy filed a petition and recruited four other women, including Louise McKinney (first woman to be elected to a legislature in the British Empire), Irene Parlby (elected to the provincial legislature in 1921), Henrietta Edwards (National Council of Women and an authority on laws that affected women), and Nellie McClung. The pivotal question was posed, “Does the word ‘persons ’ in Section 24 of the British North American Act, 1867, include female persons?” The case was finally heard in March 1928, and the ruling was that only men were fit for appointment. The five women appealed, and the question proceeded for decision to the Privy Council in London, England. On October 18, 1929, the decision was announced, and it reversed the decision of Canada’s Supreme Court. Lord Chancellor of Great Britain stated that the “exclusion of women from all public office was a relic of more barbarous days and that an appeal to Roman law and to early British decisions was not in itself a secure foundation on which to build an interpretation of the BNA Act of 1867” (Hancock, 95). Women, it seems, were recognized legally as persons! The first woman senator, the Honorable Cairine Wilson, was appointed in 1930. Fifty years later, on October 18...

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