By Kasari Govender

This month, we celebrate 80 years in Canada in which women have been included in the legal definition of person.

Five Canadian women, later known as the Famous Five, brought their claim all the way to the top court, fighting for legal recognition and the right for women to sit in the Senate. On October 18, 1929, the English Privy Council overturned a Supreme Court of Canada decision and declared that women were legally “persons” and therefore eligible for Senate appointment.

But not all women were included. It took many more years for Asian women to gain full rights of citizenship and personhood, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that aboriginal women were able to realize these same rights.

For many of us, it’s difficult to imagine a time in Canada when women’s basic humanity was denied by the law, because of their sex and their race. For far too many of us though, this sense of injustice is a daily part of life. While once Canadian women were fighting for basic legal recognition as persons, now we are fighting for basic economic rights—against poverty and for human dignity—rights such as housing, childcare, equal pay for equal work, clean water on reserves, equal access to the justice system, and a decent minimum wage.

Recently, I met former Supreme Court of Canada justice Claire L’Heureux-Dube, one of the heroes of the Canadian feminist movement along with the Famous Five, who told me that one needs to have a sense of outrage to change to the law. Sometimes it’s easy to let that sense of outrage dull, as funding cuts pile up, many struggle just to survive, and the mundane tasks of life overshadow the bigger picture. So this was an important reminder—outrage at injustice is vital to progress.

Outrage, for example, that the justice system is much too expensive for even the middle class to access and that recent service and program cuts have decimated family law legal aid; outrage that the government’s failure to implement a national housing strategy contributes to women being trapped in abusive relationships because they can’t afford to leave; outrage that B.C. has the worst child poverty levels in the country and Canada has the worst child-care system of all the OECD countries.

I’m not talking here about the blunt hammer of anger; I’m talking about the articulated spark of outrage that ignites social change, the outrage that means we still believe that we can do better. And as one of the most prosperous countries in the world, we can do better than just recognize our citizens as persons—we have the resources to ensure satisfaction of economic rights and respect for human dignity.

Persons Day provides us with the opportunity to think about personhood, about human dignity, about what makes us truly human. It’s an opportunity to think about equality—what it means, what it feels like when we have it, and what it feels like when we don’t. It’s an opportunity to feel outraged about injustice and to renew our determination to ensure equality for all. It’s a reminder that we are on a journey toward being a rights-respecting society—not at the end and not at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle.

Kasari Govender is the legal director for the West Coast Legal Education and Action Fund.