Who Counted as a Person?

In 1927, five Alberta women, Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby and Henrietta Muir Edwards, asked whether the word "persons" in the British North America Act included women, which would allow them to sit in the Senate. On April 24, 1928, the Supreme Court said no. On October 18, 1929, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London overturned that ruling.

The federal government itself acknowledges that the decision did not include all women, such as Indigenous women and women of Asian heritage and descent. Manitoba goes further: the Famous Five limited their calls for equality to a select type of woman, largely excluding racialized, disabled, 2SLGBTQ+ and Indigenous women.

There is darker still. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung supported sterilization in the 1920s. From 1928 to 1972, under Alberta's Sexual Sterilization Act, 2,834 people were sterilized; First Nations and Métis people made up more than 25 per cent of them.

Should the date be erased? Manitoba suggests widening it instead, by also telling the story of Indigenous women's leadership. In 1979, one of the first recipients of the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case was Mary Two-Axe Earley, a Kanien'kehá:ka woman from Kahnawà:ke who was fighting to regain the status the law had taken from her. The "us" rarely widens all at once: we must keep asking who is still left outside.