On July 12, 2002, the Ontario Superior Court ruled in the case of Halpern et al. v. Canada that the common law restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. During the next ten months, similar rulings were brought down in Hendricks v. Quebec and Barbeau v. British Columbia.
In early 2003, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights decided that the issue was sufficiently serious to warrant travelling hearings all across Canada. It was my privilege to testify before one such hearing on April 29, 2003.
On June 10, 2003, the Ontario Court of Appeal issued a decision on an appeal made by the families in Halpern. They ruled that same-sex marriage ought to commence immediately. The Standing Committee advised Prime Minister Chrétien’s government not to appeal that appeal. Same-sex marriage became legal in Ontario.
Over the next two years, eight more courts ruled likewise. After a while they gave up going through all the Charter reasons and simply finding that the law as it existed ought to apply equally in that province.
At the same time, the government sent a reference to the Supreme Court. This took more than a year to decide, including the time to consider an additional question put by Prime Minister Martin. The answer, brought down on December 9, was that the government had the authority to pass a law amending the legal definition of marriage; it declined to rule on whether such a change was required, saying that had already been decided by the provincial courts.
Then ensued several months of debate in the House. The Civil Marriage Act was brought on February 1. It passed the House of Commons on June 28, the Senate on July 19, and Royal Assent on July 20.
To recap, there have been twelve different court rulings requiring same-sex marriage. There has been three years of parliamentary deliberations, cross-country hearings, a Supreme Court reference, and enough reports, minutes, opinions, letters, Hansards, and coverage to wallpaper New Brunswick.
And apparently, it just hasn’t been enough.
Now folks, you know I’m involved in politics. Hell, I’m with the NDP, the party where you innocently go into a meeting and stagger out three hours later, on six different committees with no idea how you got there. You know I regularly devote huge swaths of my time to arguing about policy in finicky detail, putting out press releases, organizing campaigns, getting signatures, building coalition. I do this for fun. In my spare time. So as you can imagine, I have quite a bit of patience for debating issues of all kinds.
My patience just ran out. I cannot possibly express just how unfathomably bored I am with my equality and rights still pretended to be an open question. It is so incredibly wearying to be a political football; every day literally defending yourself, every day being called into question, every day hearing someone on the news blithely talking about curtailing, excluding, repealing, reviling, with not a single inkling of doubt that that’s somehow a reasonable point of view in this country in the twenty-first goddamn century.
I knew this was coming (and a big nyah! to all the apologists who were convinced he wouldn’t try it.) I’m not that worried, to be honest. I know it’s just a sop to his base and that he probably doesn’t expect even the motion to pass. Counting them out on my silly little fingers, I am fairly sure we have enough MPs to keep us safe for another year.
But for Dorothy Parker’s sake you are working my very, very last nerve. You lost. It really, really passed. It really, really is required by the Charter. The sky really, really didn’t fall in. Will you please get some new goddamn material!