The Ottawa meeting was called under the shadow of the June 23 deadline for ratification of the agreement by all 10 provinces.
After it was signed, without China and India, the Times said that the President must "spend the next year enlisting the participation of developing countries," before the deadline for ratification expired.
The amendment, first written in 1923 by Alice Paul, was, in fact, approved by Congress and sent to the states in 1972 with a ten-year deadline for ratification, but by 1982, supporters had managed to sign on only 35 of the 38 states needed to add the amendment to the Constitution.
Until then – the deadline for ratification has been extended until December 2015 – the August 2003 waiver remains valid.
The Equal Rights Amendment never became law; in 1982, the deadline for its ratification expired.
Some have argued that the ratification deadline in unconstitutional and have attempted to have the E.R.A. ratified by three more states.
Why or why not? –Should state legislatures be asked to ratify the E.R.A. twenty-one years after its ratification deadline has passed?
The two provinces had threatened to block adoption of the Meech Lake accord before the deadline for its ratification on June 23.
The original deadline for ERA ratification was not in the amendment itself but only in the text of the joint resolution proposing the amendment.
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney met with Canada's 10 provincial premiers in Ottawa today in a last-ditch attempt to overcome opposition to the Meech Lake constitutional agreement before the June 23 deadline for its ratification.
But by the nineteen-eighties the Court's opinion was being criticized on the left, too, as a failure of legal reasoning and even as a betrayal of the idea of equality, especially after the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1923, and passed by Congress in 1972, fell short of passage in the states before its ratification deadline, in 1982.
