Remembering the Famous Five
By Brian Brennan Today is Persons Day in Canada. I was reminded of this, not by a story in the Canadian media – which by now has become blasé about this annual commemoration of women’s rights – but by an opinion column in Wednesday’s New York Times, which headlined it “A Tree Grows in Canada.” The tree metaphor referred to a comment made by a British judge on 18 October 1929 when he ruled that, for the purpose of Canadian Senate appointments, women counted as “qualified persons” in Canada’s made-in-Britain constitution. The British North America Act, declared Lord John Sankey,