I was away at a friend's cottage on Saturday, and so I missed what sounds like a lovely walk along the western waterfront including a stop at the farmer's market. I shall instead mention Pat Carney who died recently at the age of 88. She was the first woman in every government portfolio she held under Mulroney's Conservative government. She was the first woman Conservative member of Parliament elected in B.C. and the first woman from B.C. to be appointed to the Senate.
But for me, the following is where she played her most important role. Last year, she wrote about "the most chilling moment" of her political career, when she voted against her own government's anti-abortion bill in 1991. The bill came within a single vote of being enshrined in law. She is the reason Canadian women are not facing the kinds of restrictive legislations that are appearing in other countries.
“There was no doubt about how I would vote. I had told my voters that I believed a decision on an abortion was the right of a woman, her conscience and her doctors,” she wrote in the Globe and Mail. “For personal reasons,would not have an abortion, but that was my choice; I knew other women had their own reasons to make a different one.”
The government demoted her after the vote.
