The Limits of Citizenship: Economic Barriers to Suffrage in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Canada

This chapter explores long-lasting economic and class-based restrictions on suffrage rights in Canada over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on property and taxpayer voting qualifications, and secondly, exclusions of those receiving state or charitable assistance, including the aged, sick, and poor. These prohibitions denoting class and wealth were intertwined with changing gender-based, racial, and colonial voting restrictions and structures of inequality, always in complicated ways. By focusing on legislated economic exclusions at all three levels of government, we can see how struggles over suffrage remained embedded in social and economic relations of power long after it was claimed “universal” suffrage prevailed. The paper also notes the longest barrier to voting, namely incarceration, which might be interpreted as a race and class-based exclusion. Understanding the rationales for, and longevity of exclusions based on class/property and poverty, as well as gender and race, offers a correction to whig narratives of inevitable suffrage progress, highlighting the resilient power relations, both material and ideological, which characterised a profoundly unequal society.