Madelyn Holmes - Working for the Common Good: Canadian Women Politicians

WORKING for the COMMON GOOD

WORKING for the COMMON GOOD

Canadian Women Politicians

MADELYN HOLMES

FERNWOOD PUBLISHING
HALIFAX & WINNIPEG

Copyright 2017 Madelyn Holmes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Editing: Mark Ambrose Harris

Cover design: John van der Woude

eBook: tikaebooks.com

Printed and bound in Canada

Published by Fernwood Publishing

32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0

and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program, the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, the support of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage and the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Holmes, Madelyn, 1945-, author

Working for the common good : Canadian women politicians / Madelyn

Holmes.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55266-952-5 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55266-953-2 (EPUB).--

ISBN 978-1-55266-954-9 (Kindle)

1. Women politicians--Canada--Biography. 2. Women--Political

activity--Canada--History. 3. Women legislators--Canada--Biography.

4. Canada--Politics and government. 5. Women--Canada--Biography.

I. Title.

HQ1391.C3H65 2017 305.43320971 C2016-908075-7

C2016-908076-5

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have happened without the support of distinguished Canadian womens historian Susan Mann. I contacted her after reading her germinal journal article Thrse Casgrain and the CCF in Quebec, which had been published many years ago in the Canadian Historical Review in June 1985. After our initial three-hour lunch meeting at Montreals Grande Bibliothque, Dr. Mann encouraged, advised and critiqued my work throughout the multi-year writing and research process. She marked up countless drafts with incisive editorial comments and filled in gaps in my knowledge of Canadian political history.

I am especially indebted to the women members of Parliament profiled in this book, who shared reminiscences with me during personal interviews. I visited Margaret Mitchell in her Vancouver condo on the very day that Jack Layton died, August 22, 2011. While the television was playing in the background, she nonetheless spent several hours responding to my personal questions. Earlier in the day I met briefly with Dawn Black, MLA for New WestminsterBurnaby, who had begun her political career as an assistant to MP Pauline Jewett. Just before the radio reporters arrived at her constituency office, Black printed out Laytons farewell letter for me and talked about her own education under Jewetts guidance. In Vancouver, as well, I was able to track down landmarks where Grace MacInnis had lived as a child and as an adult.

I appreciated meeting with Lynn McDonald on two occasions in 2011, once at her home in Toronto, where we were surrounded by the volumes of the collected writings of Florence Nightingale that McDonald has edited, and once in my apartment in Montreal. Additionally, she supplied me with informative email messages about her anti-smoking legislation as well as boxes filled with Hansards from the 1980s.

I am particularly grateful for the memorable two days Alexa McDonough spent with me in Halifax in mid-July, 2012. In the Halifax Public Gardens, in her condo across the street, and in a drive and walk through Halifax, she guided me through her personal connections with her beloved city. I stayed at the Lord Nelson Hotel in whose ballroom McDonough had launched her political career.

I would like to thank several other people who shared their knowledge on various aspects of this project. Elaine Joly-Ryan, retired Quebec judge, helped me substantially to put the biographical information about Thrse Casgrain into historical perspective. Alison Prentice, womens educational historian, reviewed the chapter on Agnes Macphail, especially the section concerning Macphails pre-parliamentary career as an Ontario school teacher. A special thank you to Ed Broadbent for a phone interview on October 17, 2012, in which he gracefully responded to questions about the three women MP s, Margaret Mitchell, Pauline Jewett and Lynn McDonald, who were part of the NDP caucus during his tenure as party leader.

I relied heavily on several libraries for both primary and secondary source materials. In order to understand the range and depth of the political engagement of Thrse Casgrain, I found the thirteen boxes of the Casgrain Papers in the Library and Archives Ottawa to be an invaluable resource. I made extensive use of Canadian parliamentary documents in the Bailey/Howe Library at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont, as well as at the McLennan Library at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. In addition, the Grande Bibliothque and the Word Bookstore in Montreal provided much-appreciated sources.

My sincere thanks to Fernwood Publishing, in particular to managing editor Jessica Antony and production manager Beverley Rach, for bringing this project to fruition. I am especially grateful to Mark Ambrose Harris for his excellent work as copy editor.

My husband, Lewis Holmes, remains my most valuable critic; as he wields his experienced editorial red pencil, he uncovers places that require further clarity or alterations in style, tone or grammar.

Chapter One

WORKING FOR THE COMMON GOOD IN THE CCF/NDP

This book began with my discovery of Thrse Casgrain. As an American, recently attuned to Canadian politics, I came across her autobiography on the shelves of the Grande Bibliothque in Montreal. Not only was I fascinated to read of her lifelong engagement as a political activist but also about her participation in Canadas social democratic party.

Founded as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation ( CCF ) in 1932 during the throes of the economic depression, this party experienced a second birth in 1961 with the establishment of the New Democratic Party ( NDP ). The partys official written documents, namely The Regina Manifesto of 1933 and the Winnipeg Declaration of Principles of 1956, proclaimed the supplying of human needs as its philosophical goal. Throughout the ensuing years, while policies have changed along with the contemporary political climate, the fundamental ideals of social democracy have continued to serve as the backbone underlying the actions of the party.

When I started to read histories about the CCF / NDP , I uncovered very few womens voices in the partys federal archives. As a womens historian, this absence of women sounded familiar and intriguing. In a previous book entitled American Women Conservationists: Twelve Profiles, I had tracked down the names of important women conservationists whose contributions had been relegated to footnotes in histories written about efforts to protect the natural environment of the United States.

Could it be true that from 1932 to 2011 women had played a subsidiary role as provincial grassroots organizers and had been absent from policy-making bodies such as the political partys governing councils or parliamentary caucuses? I started to search for other Canadian women social democrats, in addition to Thrse Casgrain, who had made their mark on the federal history of the CCF / NDP . In researching the history of the CCF / NDP prior to Casgrain, I found information on only one woman, Agnes Macphail; looking at this history after Casgrain, there was documentation of only one woman, namely Grace MacInnis, before the field of Canadian politics opened up slightly to women following the womens liberation movement of the 1970s. In this period, more women became politicians, and I was able to select the women I wanted to profile. I made my decisions based on their ideas and the policies they supported.