OOTD June 2017
Orders of the Day The Publication of the Association of Former MLAs of British Columbia Volume 23, Number 5 June 2017 Grace McCarthy, BC's first lady, dies at 89 Grace McCarthy, the irrepressible grande dame of the SocialHappy Credit Party, died May 24 at ageHolidays 89. "Amazing Grace" was a cabinet minister in the governments of all three Social Credit premiers and revitalized the party after it was crushed by the NDP in the 1972 provincial election. It was her tireless promotion of BC, and her high profile at a time when influential females were uncommon in provincial politics, that made her well regarded by friend and foe. "Her political career is almost unparalleled in BC, and her role as a booster of BC, as a promoter extraordinaire of B.C.," says historian David Mitchell. "We have a female premier in BC and we may take that for granted, but Christy Clark's emergence may owe something, at least indirectly, to Grace McCarthy's pioneering and breaking the path for female leaders." McCarthy was born in 1927 in Vancouver's Grace Hospital, less than a month after it opened. After building a successful flower shop business, she made the leap into politics in the 1950s, serving on the Vancouver Park Board for three terms. She ran for the Social Credit Party and won in Vancouver-Little Mountain in 1966 and was quickly Photo credit: John Yanyshyn/Visions West Photography named to cabinet, where she served for the rest of W.A.C. Bennett’s tenure as premier. "It didn't seem right to me and when I got into politics I During that time, she successfully persuaded the saw the broader picture of very capable women, equal in federal government to introduce a law that allowed ability to men, being denied the right to get a mortgage unmarried women to apply for mortgages without a male without having a man to back them," she said in 2011.
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