Canada’s first female cabinet minister, Conservative Ellen Louks Fairclough, died Saturday in a nursing home in Dundas, Ontario.
“I had a fairly tough hide when I entered politics, but it grew to be two feet thick by the time I retired from public life,” Fairclough wrote in her 1995 memoir, Saturday’s Child.
She was the only woman in Parliament when she arrived in Ottawa. In opposition, she fought for pay equity for women. When the Progressive Conservatives were elected in 1957, Diefenbaker reluctantly appointed her secretary of state. It was Fairclough who initiated Dominion Day celebrations on Parliament Hill.
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