By Robin Perelle

I remember it was May 1996. I was trying to watch the news. Images kept flashing by: people celebrating, people protesting, people shouting furiously, calling Prime Minister Chrétien the anti-christ. Clever pun, I remember thinking before pushing myself to pay attention.
This was important stuff, I told myself. "Ground-breaking amendments," I repeated after the reporter, stumbling only slightly.
"Human rights codes across the country are being brought into line with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms," I nodded, as if I understood.
But I didn't.
I tried and I cared, but I just couldn't follow what the announcers were saying. I knew that as a queer Canadian these events affected me and my life and my rights. I just wished I understood how.

Now four years have passed, and I am sitting at my kitchen table surrounded by crumpled pieces of paper, trying to sort through all the information. As far as I can tell, this story starts in 1982.
That's when the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms swung into action. Actually, I doubt its introduction was quite so dramatic, but it did begin to slowly change the legal landscape.
The Charter basically says that all Canadians should be treated equally. According to section 15.1 of the Charter of Rights,

Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

Now, no one expected a bunch of idealistic words on official-looking paper to instantly eradicate all our social problems and inequalities, but it was an important start. The problem was, it didn't explicitly say anything about lesbians, bisexuals and gay men being equal individuals too.
That was in 1982.

Eleven years and many court challenges later, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed that leaving L/B/Gs off the Charter's list of people who need extra protection against discrimination was indeed a problem.
Like visible minorities and other targeted groups, lesbians, bisexuals and gays are a historically discriminated-against group and they deserve recognition and protection too, said the Supreme Court.
So the Court pointed to section 15.1 of the Charter and announced that, from then on, anyone reading this section should read it as if it included the words "sexual orientation" somewhere between the words "race" and "physical disability."
And so, for the first time ever in Canadian history, the legal equality of lesbian, bisexual and gay individuals was guaranteed by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Granted, this supposedly ground-breaking change was only on paper, but the Charter is not just any piece of paper. It sets the standards for all the federal, provincial and territorial governments in the country, and any legislation they pass. So any change to the Charter of Rights is bound to have a significant ripple effect.

You see, Canada is like a big tree, where the Charter is perched on top, overseeing the governments on the branches below. Each government, in turn, oversees activities on its own branch and makes its own mini charter to regulate these activities. To avoid confusion, these mini charters are called human rights codes, but they're all modelled after the big Charter on top.
That's why the Supreme Court's decision to include sexual orientation in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was so important: it meant that all the little charters (the human rights codes) had to follow suit.
That's what the federal government was doing in May 1996: changing its human rights code to keep it consistent with the Charter.

Which brings us back to May 1996 and the passage of the infamous Bill C-33. With it, the federal government amended its Canadian Human Rights Act to include sexual orientation in its list of prohibited grounds of discrimination.
That means that individuals working on the federal government's branch (which includes any business or agency run or regulated by the federal government, such as airlines, post offices, banks and DFO offices) are not allowed to discriminate against other individuals working on or using that branch on the basis of their sexual orientation.
Which doesn't mean, of course, that people have completely stopped discriminating against lesbians, bisexuals and gays in these areas, but it does mean that such discrimination is now illegal. It means that anyone caught discriminating against others in these areas on the basis of sexual orientation (or skin colour, religion, ethnic origin, etc.) can be punished.

But the Supreme Court and the federal government were only willing to go so far.

While they were willing to extend protection to lesbians, bisexuals and gay men as individuals, they refused to recognise us as people in loving and committed relationships.

Only people in opposite-sex couples qualified for the term "spouse" and all its accompanying benefits. People in same-sex couples didn't get a little box to check off on their forms. They just didn't count.

Fast-forward three years.
On May 20, 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada took another giant step towards protecting the rights of lesbians, bisexuals and gay men in this country, with its "M vs H" decision.
This time, the Supreme Court ruled that the opposite-sex-only definition of "spouse" violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Individuals in same-sex couples are entitled to the same protection, the same treatment, the same rights and obligations as unmarried heterosexual couples, the Supreme Court said.
"This is the first day of the rest of our lives," said John Fisher, executive director of Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere (EGALE).
"Welcome to a more equal Canada, in which the constitutional rights of lesbians, gays and bisexuals and our relationships have been unequivocally upheld by the highest court in the land." he said.

The Supreme Court's "M vs H" decision had an instant ripple effect.
In June, the government of Quebec changed the definition of "spouse" in all its laws, extending spousal benefits and responsibilities to same-sex couples throughout the province. The government of British Columbia soon followed suit.
In February 2000, the federal government introduced Bill C-23 to put same-sex couples on equal legal footing with heterosexual common-law couples. That means all unmarried couples -- gay and straight -- living together in a conjugal relationship for more than one year, now have the same rights and responsibilities.
That means Canadians in same-sex couples will finally get a little box to check off on all those government forms.

They'll be able to claim their partner on their income taxes, collect employment insurance if one partner relocates to be with the other, qualify for the same survivor benefits their opposite-sex counterparts have been receiving for decades under the Canada Pension Plan, and even be eligible for conjugal prison visits.

Bill C-23 even extends equal benefits to the same-sex partners of federal judges and the Governor General.
"These amendments send a clear message that lesbians, gays and bisexuals can aspire to the highest positions in the land and expect equal recognition of their relationships," said EGALE's John Fisher.
"This legislation is about ensuring that Canadians in committed common law relationships are treated equally and fairly," federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan told Parliament. "Canadians do not want laws that discriminate unfairly or that violate charter principles. We should be proud to support this bill."
In all, Bill C-23 extends common-law status to same-sex couples in 68 federal laws, though the term "spouse" will be reserved for married, opposite-sex couples only.
Fisher says that's a battle for another day. "For too long, same-sex relationships have been stigmatized as inferior to opposite-sex relationships," he said. "This bill provides a symbolic affirmation of the equal validity and worth of same-sex relationships."

And yet, even as we take enormous strides forward at a rate earlier generations dared not dream of, we still have a few miles to go. Marriage, for one, remains out of reach.
The dust had not yet settled on the Supreme Court's "M vs H" decision last spring, when the then-Reform Party brought a motion opposing same-sex marriage to Parliament on June 8, 1999.
Now, any queer can tell you that same-sex marriage is already illegal in this country, so the motion had no legal effect. But it forced the federal government to declare its position on the subject.

"It is necessary, in light of public debate around recent Court decisions, to state that marriage is and should remain the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others," said then-Reform MP Eric Lowther.

The government promptly agreed.
"I would like to thank the honourable member for giving the government the opportunity to clarify our position on this important issue," federal Justice Minister McLellan replied. "Let me state again for the record that the government has no intention of changing the definition of marriage or of legislating same-sex marriages."
That was last June. While Bill C-23 grants same-sex couples equal footing with unmarried heterosexual couples, it makes no concessions on the issue of marriage. In fact, the government tacked another Lowther-like clause onto the bill's preamble, just to be sure. We may be equalizing common-law couples, but marriage shall remain the union of one man and one woman, the clause essentially says.
For now, then, the latest round of legal change has extended considerable recognition and protection to same-sex couples, but has stopped far short of marriage. Next time, we probably will manage to pull a few more teeth and gain access to yet another piece of the socially acceptable pie.
But I wouldn't line up at the altar just yet.

-- Robin Perelle, August 2000

Crawling to Equality:
A concise timeline of change in Canada

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