If the Conservatives are in the mood for apologies and redress, they should put women at the top of their list.

No group has suffered such sustained, systemic and continuing discrimination and many within it are doubly damned because of ethnicity as well as gender. None have been so badly treated as first nations and Metis women.

For the first 54 years after Confederation -- 1,921 years into modern times -- Canadian women could not vote in national elections. Chinese- and Indo-Canadians women had to wait until 1947. First nations' women couldn't vote until 1960.

Women account for 51 per cent of the population, yet Canadian law and lawmakers didn't recognize them as persons until 1929.

The idiotic government and judiciary of the day said women couldn't be senators, judges and magistrates. Their reasoning was that because the British North America Act was written in 1867 when women couldn't vote, women (along with children, criminals and the insane) did not fit the legal definition of a "qualified person."

Bright-light politicians couldn't conceive that their mothers, wives and daughters weren't subhuman.

So five women went not only to the Supreme Court of Canada, but to Britain's Privy Council to overturn the unanimous Supreme Court ruling that women weren't persons.

In overturning Canada's highest court, the Privy Council noted that "the exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours."

Of course, that didn't end the discrimination.

During the Depression of the 1930s, women who lost their jobs were not entitled to "relief" or welfare. (Chinese men were entitled to relief, but only to a third of what white men got.)

Without access to welfare, women had to fend for themselves with prostitution, the only way to earn money to feed themselves and their children.

During the Second World War, women flooded into the workforce, filling vacancies left by men who went to fight. When the war ended, they were sent home. Married women, in particular, were either forced to quit or expected to resign.

The 1947 Citizenship Act, which remained in force until 1974, determined women's citizenship to be that of their husbands. If a husband renounced Canadian citizenship, his wife was stripped of hers.

Children of Canadian-born mothers and foreign fathers were not eligible for Canadian citizenship. Yet children of Canadian-born fathers and foreign mothers were.

(The same discriminatory policy was used to strip first nations' women and their children of Indian status until 1983.)

Until 1975, women's contributions to families' financial well-being were deemed inconsequential. Women were not entitled to an equal share of matrimonial property if the marriage ended.

Politicians didn't recognize the error of their ways. They relented only after Alberta rancher Irene Murdoch got a favourable judgment from the Supreme Court of Canada. Until Murdoch, then, women were entitled only to property that they had paid for or had placed in their names.

First nations women still have no right to an equal share of matrimonial property if they divorce. A bill to correct this wrong is expected to be tabled in Parliament this fall.

Women had to march on Parliament Hill to get the equality section included in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In theory, Canadian women have equality under the law and full and equal access to education, jobs and opportunities. The reality is different.

There are still five times more men in Parliament than women.

Women working full-time make 71 cents for every $1 men earn. Two-thirds still work in pink ghettos of traditional "women's work" such as health care, clerical and administrative jobs. Little more than a third of all managers are women.

Women are poor in disproportionate numbers with 38 per cent of single mothers living below the poverty line compared to only 17 per cent of single fathers.

Women are more likely to be victims of violence than men. One in every 10 Canadian women reports having been stalked in the past 10 years.

Women are many more times more likely to be forced, enticed or trafficked into prostitution and, once there, many times more likely to be charged, even though the Criminal Code offense of communicating for the purposes of prostitution was aimed at punishing the buyers and not just the sellers.

If any racial or ethnic minority had been subjected to anything near the discrimination women have suffered and continue to be subjected to, Canada would be an international pariah.

Yet no women's groups can afford the amount of time and energy that government-funded ethnic groups can to campaign for apologies, redress and compensation.

The federal Conservative government eliminated grants to any women's groups that lobby, advocate or do research. It stripped equality from Status of Women Canada's objectives and quashed plans for a universal daycare system.

Provincial governments reduced funds for human rights tribunals, legal aid and transition houses -- cuts that disproportionately affected women.

Fighting for redress of past wrongs is a luxury that women and their advocates can't afford. They're too busy fighting to hang on to the few gains they've made.