This Month in
Labour History

The right to vote

When we think of nations run by dictators, we know people don’t have the right to vote.  So, what should we call Canada at a time when half the population could not vote?

In the 1902 Ontario provincial election, Margaret Haile was the first woman ever to stand in a provincial election. She herself was not allowed to vote in the election. In 1917, Canada’s federal electoral law stipulated that “idiots, madmen, criminals and judges” were not allowed to vote.  Women were not included in the ban they just didn’t count and so couldn’t vote, as were many others.  After years of lobbying and protest by “suffragists”, with support from other groups like unions, governments started to make changes. In 1916, women won the right to vote in Manitoba and so the pressure was on all Canadian politicians.

During the First World War Prime Minister Robert Borden was looking for votes and the idea that women should take part in the political life of the country got its first big boost.  However, Borden was more a political opportunist than a supporter of equal rights for women.  On September 20, 1917, Parliament passed the Wartime Elections Act. Women who were British subjects and who were wives, mothers and sisters of soldiers serving in the First World War to vote on behalf of their male relatives.  Women in military service, mainly nurses, were also allowed the vote. On December 17, some 500,000 women voted for the first time in a federal election and surprise – Borden’s coalition government won!

On May 23, 1919, the government extended the right to vote to Canadian women who were; British subjects, 21 years of age, and otherwise meet the qualifications for a man to vote, women were now entitled to vote in a Dominion election. Getting women the vote however, only the beginning.  Because of their race men and women of colour; Chinese, East Indian women, and Japanese women weren’t allowed to vote at the provincial and federal level until the late 1940s. Aboriginal men and women covered by the Indian Act couldn’t vote for band councils until 1951 and couldn’t vote in federal elections until 1960.

It was not until the 1963 general election that the right to vote was truly universal. Racial and religious discrimination was finally removed from electoral legislation. The adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 has since its passage protected electoral rights of Canadians.

First women elected to Parliament was Agnes MacPhail of Grey County Ontario in 1921. Douglas Jung made history when he won the federal riding of Vancouver Centre in 1957, becoming the first Chinese-Canadian elected Member of Parliament. On June 25, 1968, Lincon Alexander became Canada’s first black MP. That same election saw Leonard Marchand become the first elected member from Canada’s First Nations people.