Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, this is one of those occasions when I wish an S. O. 31 was more than 60 seconds as I try to sum up of the life an extraordinary woman who had an extraordinary life. I was proud to know her as a friend and a colleague.
Margaret Fulton passed away at the age of 91 on January 22, earlier this month, peacefully at home on Salt Spring Island.
However, the impact of her life started when she was a young woman on a farm in Manitoba, where she was born in 1922. She went on to be, at first, a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse.
Through her life and career, she became a champion for women’s studies, for feminism, for confronting sexism and patriarchy and male power wherever she found it, for centralization of systems. She was an iconoclast. She was a pioneer. She achieved 15 honorary doctorates, was an Officer of the Order of Canada, and achieved numerous goals in education, including being president of Mount Saint Vincent for two terms, that being the first university to bring in a program for women’s studies.
We will all miss her, especially her 17 nephews, her seven nieces, and her sister, Eva Robinson. I will miss you, Margaret.