Pubdate: Sat, 28 Jun 2003
Source: Daily News of Los Angeles (CA)
Copyright: 2003 Daily News of Los Angeles
Contact: http://www.dailynews.com/info/contact/index.asp
Website: http://www.DailyNews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/246
Author: Clifford Krauss, The New York Times

CANADA AHEAD OF U.S. IN TERMS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Same-Sex Marriage Latest Example

TORONTO -- 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 changes at an astonishing rate.

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

Even as the government announced this month that it would rewrite the 
definition of marriage, it was transforming its drug policies by 
decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana and permitting 
"safe-injection" clinics in Vancouver for heroin addicts in an effort to 
fight disease.

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

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

Regarding ease of social change, Canada is virtually in a category by itself.

The transformation of the country's demographics, for example, has been 
breathtaking since the 1970s, 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, and there is little or no public debate over whether a 
sea change in culture, demographics and even national identity is good or 
bad for the country.

In only the last generation, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, where a third 
of the population lives, have become multicultural polyglots where the 
towers of Sikh temples and mosques have become mainstays of the skyline and 
where cuisine and fashion have become concoctions of spices and patterns 
that are in the global vanguard.

Toronto, once a homogeneous city of staid British tradition, is now a place 
where more than 40 percent of the people are foreign-born, where there are 
nearly 2,000 ethnic restaurants and where 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 here. "There is a general approach 
to life here that is both evolutionary and revolutionary."

He said that the balance goes all the way 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 under the charter, the Liberal Cabinet decided to 
go along and not appeal the decisions.

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

Few here 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 by 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 Canada's 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 unanimously enacted 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 Chretien said recently, 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 Quebec, which as 
recently as the 1960s was a deeply conservative place where the church 
dominated education and social life. Since the baby-boomer generation 
launched 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 while 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," noted 
Michel C. Auger, a political columnist for Le Journal de Montreal. "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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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart