A fluently bilingual mother of eight, well connected politically and from an affluent family, Cairine Wilson spent over 30 years in the Canadian Senate, and was best known for her support of the causes of refugees. Throughout her Senate career, Cairine Wilson also supported issues involving the rights of women and children, more progressive divorce legislation, and was a proponent of Medicare. See Note at end about the Persons case.
In the 2000 federal election, for the first time homeless people were able to vote.
In 2002 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the section of the Canada Elections Act that prevented inmates serving sentences of more than two years from voting in federal elections was against the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. All incarcerated electors may now vote in federal elections, by-elections and referendums. [unless they have been convicted of election-related offenses.]
In 1970, a newly revised Canada Elections Act lowered the voting age and the minimum age to be a candidate from 21 years to 18.
The name of the candidate's party was first shown on election ballots in 1974.
In 1993 for the first time qualified voters living outside Canada were allowed to vote by special ballot in their home riding.
Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada
For years women's groups in Canada signed petitions and appealed to the federal government to open the Senate to women. By 1927, Emily Murphy decided to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada for clarification. She and four other prominent Alberta women's rights activists, now known as the Famous Five, signed a petition to the Senate. The question asked was "Does the word "persons" in Section 24, of The British North America Act, 1867, include female persons?"
On April 24, 1928, the Supreme Court of Canada answered "no." The court decision said that in 1867 when the BNA Act was written, women did not vote, run for office, nor serve as elected officials; only male nouns and pronouns were used in the BNA Act; and since the British House of Lords did not have a woman member, Canada should not change the tradition for its Senate.
British Privy Council Decision
With the help of Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, the Famous Five appealed the Supreme Court of Canada decision to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England, at the time the highest court of appeal for Canada.
On October 18, 1929, Lord Sankey, Lord Chancellor of the Privy Council, announced the British Privy Council decision that "yes, women are persons ... and eligible to be summoned and may become Members of the Senate of Canada." The Privy Council decision also said that "the exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours. And to those who would ask why the word "persons" should include females, the obvious answer is, why should it not?"
Political Expediency and the vote rigging of 1917:
In 1917, when it appeared that the Allies were losing the battle on the Western Front, and that volunteer enlistments would not meet the need for new Canadian troops, the Prime Minister, Robert Borden, brought in a conscription bill. Canadian legend has it that French-speaking Quebec was hostile to conscription, but Quebec's attitude was hardly unique. Conscription was an issue that might sink the government.
To avoid an electoral defeat, the Borden ministry forced through two acts that widened the franchise to include pro-conscription elements and expelled from the franchise people assumed to be hostile to the draft. Serving military personnel otherwise not qualified were given the vote (including female military nurses), as were, at home, "spouses, widows, mothers, sisters and daughters of any persons, male or female, living or dead, who were serving or had served in the Canadian forces." (p. 58) At the same time conscientious objectors, individuals born in an enemy country, and naturalized citizens whose mother tongue was that of an enemy country were disenfranchised. This resulted in tens of thousands of people losing the vote, out of an electorate of only a little over two million.
Finally, the new acts allowed a political party that received military votes (and the Conservatives were assured of getting the vast majority of them) to redistribute those votes to any electoral district where those votes might be useful.
Such blatant rigging of an election led to thorough reforms when the war was over (reforms which, to be fair, were introduced by the Borden government). The Dominion Elections Act of 1920 established a near-universal federal franchise for adult Canadian citizens, men and women. Women's suffrage had been making progress on the provincial level before 1917; the actions of the Conservative government in granting some but not all women the federal vote destroyed most of the existing arguments about women's unsuitability for politics. The electoral rolls of 1917 had included 2,093,799; the rolls in 1921, the next election, topped 4,400,000. The number of electors (registered voters) in Canada’s general election in 2008 23, 677, 639. The number of ballots cast in Canada’s general election in 2008 13 929 093.
A History of the Vote in Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Government Publishing -- PWGSC, 1997.
ISBN 0-660-16172-9
Continued Exclusion of the Franchise After 1920
First, the federal franchise was not quite universal. The Dominion Electoral Act allowed racial exclusions already existing in a given province to stand. This meant that British Columbia was able to keep people of Japanese, Chinese, or "Hindu" (East Indian) origin from participating in federal elections, and Saskatchewan likewise was able to prohibit voting by "Chinese." Aboriginal people in all provinces were not allowed to vote federally unless they gave up all rights they might possess as members of a band -- a step that almost none of them were willing to take. Also, resentment of the Doukhobor religious sect in British Columbia resulted in members losing the franchise in a revision of the Act in 1934, ostensibly because they were conscientious objectors.
During the interwar period a number of British Columbia Members of Parliament were willing to justify these exclusions. An independent MP named A.W. Neill was something of a star in these debates. In 1936 he argued against Japanese enfranchisement, saying a petition from the affected community was "sob stuff" and "claptrap." Similarly only "sickly sentimental" parliamentarians favored the enfranchisement of Doukhobors. During the Second World War, when Japanese-Canadians were expelled from British Columbia and interned elsewhere in Canada, Neill was happy to support a bill excluding the internees from voting in other provinces: "This is a white man's country, and we want it left a white man's country."
