By Hilary White
OTTAWA, September 12, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Newly released numbers from Statistics Canada have shown that in the year since “gay marriage” has been a legal reality in Canada, there has been a less than overwhelming level of interest in mimicking natural marriage by actual homosexuals.
Statistics Canada’s “family portrait” of Canadians examines developments in families, marital status, households and living arrangements in Canada between 2001 and 2006, what StatsCan calls “evolving” family structures. For the first time, the federal census agency lists those in officially recognised “gay marriages”.
45,300 homosexual pairings, either formally “married” or common-law, were registered. Of the total, 7,465, or 16.5 per cent, were “married”. Despite claims by the homosexual activist movement that homosexuals account for 10 per cent of the general population, by 2006, a year after same-sex “marriage” was legalized, same-sex couples, either “married” or cohabiting, represented only 0.6 per cent of all couples in Canada.
In the 1999 ruling in M. v. H., the Supreme Court of Canada decided that same-sex partners would also be included in common-law relationships. After the imposition of legal same-sex “marriage” in 2005, the StatsCan survey shows the number of same-sex couples officially registering as “married” grew 32.6 per cent since 2000.
The figures for same-sex relationships are also more a time snap-shot statistic compared with the figures for opposite-sex married couples, given the relatively much more unstable and different nature of usually open and childless same-sex relationships.
A study of homosexual men under age 30 in Amsterdam, sponsored by the Dutch AIDS project and published in AIDS 2003, found that single men acquire 22 casual partners a year, men with a steady partner acquire eight casual partners a year, and “steady partnerships” last an average of 18 months. In a book published in 1996 and entitled Virtually Normal, Andrew Sullivan argues that stable homosexual couples have a “need for extramarital outlets”.
Legal marriage in general is losing popularity in Canada. Married-couple families accounted for 68.6 per cent of all census families in 2006, down from 70.5 per cent five years earlier. The proportion of common-law-couple families rose from 13.8 per cent to 15.5 per cent. Twenty years ago, common-law-couple families accounted for only 7.2 per cent of all census families.
In Quebec, where marriage is a stablizing force has been declining since the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960’s, common-law-couple families increased 20.3 per cent. Close to one-quarter (23.4 per cent) of all common-law-couples in Canada lived in Montréal and Québec City.
In Canada, the legal definition and regulation of common-law marriage fall under provincial jurisdiction. In 1999, after the court case M. v. H., the Supreme Court of Canada decided that same-sex partners would also be included in common-law relationships. In Ontario, a couple must live together for three years to be considered to be in a common-law marriage. In British Columbia and Nova Scotia a couple must cohabit for two years in a “marriage-like” relationship.
Reflecting a growing trend around the world, one of the largest changes was not in any form of marriage, but in the number of one-person households. The number of single-person residences increased 11.8 per cent, more than twice as fast as the 5.3 per cent increase for the total population in private households.
Perhaps most ominously for the future of Canada, the households with the slowest growth between 2001 and 2006 were those comprised of couples and children aged 24 years and under; these households edged up only 0.4%.