What's Right.(same-sex marriages legal in Canada)

The North Goes South

Here's what didn't happen when the Canadian government announced that it would comply with the orders of a high (but not supreme) court and write gay marriage into the law of the land. There were no protests from the country's religious leaders: only mild expressions of concern. There were no angry editorials in any of the country's major newspapers. The leader of the conservative Canadian Alliance party had no comment, and most of the country's other conservative leaders likewise kept silent.

After less than a decade of judicial and political pressure, resistance to same-sex marriage in Canada had crumpled up.

In retrospect, it is amazing how fast this change came upon the country. As recently as 1994, a left-wing government in the province of Ontario introduced legislation that would have granted spousal rights to same-sex couples-and had to drop the idea when its own backbenchers mutinied. In 1995, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Egan v. Canada that a homosexual man who had cohabited with another could not claim his partner's old-age pension because they were not "spouses."

Yet even then, it was difficult to be optimistic about the future of the Canadian traditional family.

In 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau forced through a radical rewrite of the Canadian constitution that put vast new powers into the hands of the courts. The powers were all the greater because the new constitution was for all practical purposes unamendable-meaning that if the courts did something, it would be virtually impossible for anybody to undo it.

Canadians accepted this transfer of power from elected politicians to unelected judges with astonishing equanimity. Maybe it was the famous Canadian placidity. Maybe Canadians were so fed up with a political system that seemed to deliver nothing but stalemate that they lost faith in self-rule. Or maybe they were simply deceived by all the promises made at the time that Canada's traditionally restrained and deferential judiciary would never, ever take advantage of its new powers.