Round 4: How do you get from... | The Canadian Encyclopedia

Editorial

Round 4: How do you get from...

How do you get from the narwhal to women’s suffrage?

In this round of six degrees of Canadian history, we dive with a species of whale known to descend at least 1,500 m, and surface at women’s suffrage. The narwhal, perhaps best known for its spiralled tusk, is a whale living in Canada’s Arctic waters. How on Earth does it connect with the hard-fought battle for women’s right to vote in provincial and federal elections?

The following article is from our Six Degrees of Canadian History series. Past series are not updated.

Narwhal

Narwhals gather to eat codfish in Nunavut.

The narwhal (Monodon monoceros) is a toothed whale living in Canada’s Arctic waters. It is best known for its straight, spiralled tusk, which is one of two teeth in the upper jaw that projects through the lip. Reaching up to 3 m in length, this tusk, possessed by adult males and very rarely by females, may be used to establish and maintain dominance. Double-tusked narwhals occur occasionally.

Sadly, narwhals face a potentially serious threat due to rapidly changing sea ice conditions in the Arctic caused by climate change.

Climate Change

Slave Lake Forest Fire

Climate change occurs when long-term weather patterns begin to shift. These periods of change have occurred throughout the Earth’s history over extended periods of time. However, since the Industrial Revolution the world has been warming at an unprecedented rate. Because of this, the current period of climate change is often referred to as “global warming.” Human activities that release heat-trapping greenhouse gases, such as the burning of fossil fuels, are largely responsible for this increased rate of change.

The implications of this global increase in temperature are potentially disastrous and include such extreme weather events as drought, which occurs regularly in Palliser’s Triangle.

Palliser’s Triangle

Palliser’s Triangle is the most arid part of the prairies. The area is named after John Palliser, a 19th-century explorer who described the region in southern Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba as “desert, or semi-desert in character, which can never be expected to become occupied by settlers.” However, botanist John Macoun bolstered hopes of settling the area in the 1870s when he concluded that Palliser's Triangle was suited to growing wheat. At least five major droughts have parched the land since then, including the famous “dust bowl” during the Great Depression (see also Prairie Dry Belt Disaster; Drought in Palliser’s Triangle).

John Palliser was a contemporary of Sir Sandford Fleming, with whom he discussed possible transcontinental railway routes.

Sir Sandford Fleming

Sir Sandford Fleming

Chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), Sir Sandford Fleming also played a key role in the development of a worldwide system of standardized time. The old system of keeping time — in which every major city set its clocks according to local astronomical conditions — was made obsolete by modern railways, whose schedules required a uniform recognition of time among various locations. Fleming advocated the adoption of a standard or mean time and hourly variations from that according to established time zones. He was instrumental in convening an International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884 at which the system of international standard time — still in use today — was adopted.

Fleming’s minister, George Monro Grant, wrote Ocean to Ocean (1873), a popular account of his journey to the Pacific with Fleming's 1872 CPR expedition.

George Monro Grant

George Monro Grant — also known as former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s great-grandfather — was a Presbyterian minister, writer and principal of Queen's College at Kingston, Ontario, from 1877 to 1902. In 1877, Queen’s was a small and financially unstable denominational college. Grant therefore spent much of his energy raising an endowment fund and acquiring major scholars, especially in the humanities. During his long presidency, Queen’s became one of the first Canadian universities to admit women to regular classes (1879) and establish a Women’s Medical College (1883).

While Grant promoted causes related to the women’s suffrage movement, such as co-education, he was skeptical of prohibition, one of the suffrage movement’s major planks.

Women’s Suffrage

Although occasional instances were recorded of women voting in pre-Confederation Canada until 1849, Canadian women were systematically and universally disenfranchised (not allowed to vote) until the early 20th century. Apart from the temporary and selective enfranchisement of women under the Wartime Elections Act, women were first granted the right to vote federally in 1918. Manitoba became the first province to enfranchise women for provincial elections in 1916, followed that same year by Saskatchewan and Alberta. Québec was the last province to grant women the vote, in 1940.

Monumental as these advancements were, the right to vote was not extended to all women. In fact, Asian, South Asian and Indigenous women — and men — were disenfranchised well into the 20th century (see also Right to Vote).

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