O, Canada!
2003-06-19 | 7:52 a.m.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/19/international/americas/19CANA.html?ex=1056686400&en=06c978fa5ad5bca9&ei=5071&partner=CNN

Gay Marriage Plan: Sign of Sweeping Change in Canada

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

ORONTO, June 18 � Canada's decision to allow marriage between same-sex couples is only one of many signs that this once tradition-bound society is undergoing social change at an astonishing rate.

Increasingly, Canada has been on a social policy course pursued by many Western European and Scandinavian countries, and over the last few decades it has been moving gradually more out of step with the United States.

Even as the government announced on Tuesday that it would rewrite the definition of marriage, it was also in the process of transforming its drug policies by decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana and, to combat disease, permitting "safe-injection" clinics in Vancouver, British Columbia, for heroin addicts.

The large Indian population remains impoverished, but there are signs that native peoples are taking greater control of their destinies; their leaders now govern two territories, occupying more than a third of Canada's land mass.

As far as the ease with which society changes, Canada is virtually in a category by itself.

Canada is a country that has never had a revolution or civil war, and little social turbulence aside from sporadic rebellions in the 19th century and a splash of terrorism in Quebec in the 1960's and 1970's.

The country's demographics have changed dramatically since then, when the government of Pierre Trudeau opened wide the country's doors to Africans, Asians and West Indians as part of an attempt to fill Canada's huge, underpopulated hinterland. Eighteen percent of the population is now foreign-born compared with about 11 percent in the United States, with little or no debate over whether the effects of such change in culture, demographics and national identity is good or bad.

Only in the last generation have Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, with one third of the population, become multicultural polyglots, with the towers of Sikh temples and mosques becoming mainstays of the skylines and cuisines and fashion becoming concoctions of spices and patterns that are in the vanguard of globalization.

Toronto, once a homogeneous city of staid British tradition, now counts more than 40 percent of the people as foreign born. There are nearly 2,000 ethnic restaurants, and local radio and television stations broadcast in more than 30 languages.

"Everything from marriage laws to marijuana laws, we are going through a period of accelerated social change," said Neil Bissoondath, an immigrant from Trinidad who is a leading novelist. "There is a general approach to life here that is both evolutionary and revolutionary."

Mr. Bissoondath said the balance went back to the ideals of the Tory founders of Canada, who remained loyal to the British crown and who instilled a laissez-faire conservatism "that says people have a right to live their lives as they like."

That philosophy was a practical necessity in a colony that was bilingual after the British conquered French Quebec, creating relative social peace by allowing greater religious freedoms than even Catholics in England had at the time.

The live-and-let-live approach was codified by the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada's Bill of Rights. Being as young as it is, the charter occupies a vivid corner of the Canadian psyche. So when three senior provincial courts ruled recently that federal marriage law discriminated against same-sex couples, the Liberal Party cabinet decided to go along and not appeal.

While the new law will have to be passed by the House of Commons, little organized resistance has developed.

Few have complained that a national policy pertaining to something as intimate as marriage would be set by courts in Quebec, British Columbia and Ontario rather than a federal body. In part, that reflects the great relative political strength that regional governments have developed in what is known as the Canadian Confederation, where the federal government is weaker than most central governments in the West.

But it also reflects poll results that show a majority of Canadians support expanding marriage to gay couples. Last year, the Quebec provincial assembly enacted unanimously a law giving sweeping parental rights to same-sex couples, with even the most conservative members voting in favor despite lobbying by the Roman Catholic Church.

"Canada has always been in the vanguard in relation to many societies in the world," Prime Minister Jean Chr�tien said Tuesday, speaking in French to reporters after he announced the cabinet's decision. "We have met our responsibilities."

Nowhere has the social change been more dramatic than in Mr. Chr�tien's home province of Quebec, which as recently as the 1960's was deeply conservative and where the church dominated education and social life. Since the baby-boomer generation started the "quiet revolution" in favor of separatism, big government social programs and secularism, abortion and divorce rates there rose to among the highest in Canada. Meanwhile, church attendance plummeted.

Now the pendulum is moving in the other direction, ever so slightly.

"There is a centrist mentality in Canada that translates into the political system not tolerating the Pat Buchanans nor the leftist equivalent," Michel C. Auger, a political columnist for Le Journal de Montr�al, said. "There is a unified fabric here that is a lot stronger on social issues than it seems to be in the United States."

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