First of all, on the question of the federal and provincial split on control over marriage, at least so far it's been fairly settled law—and there have been actual cases about this—that it is within the provinces' competence as a solemnization question to set the age limits for marriage. Certainly that is uniformly accepted across the country at this point in time. Again, I repeat that this is partly because we really do believe that marriage is a local or a community-based matter.
The question with respect to sharia law is a very interesting and telling point: that there are enormous cultural variations with respect to attitudes towards marriage and there are community norms with respect to attitudes towards marriage. That's exactly why it's a provincial competence and exactly why we have very many modes for getting permission. If you are a young person and you want to get married, in some jurisdictions it's parental consent, in other jurisdictions you can go to court to get a court order, and in some places a minister can decide to give permission. So the provinces have taken different approaches, depending on their feelings about the community they're representing.
There is no question that this bill will require all provinces and all territories to reconsider their minimum age of marriage with respect to marriages that are occurring in violation of the Criminal Code. The problem is you're creating two regimes, in a way: you're going to have legal marriages between 15-year-olds, and if the person is less than the five years different it's going to be fine, but a constitutional problem will arise if a 15-year-old wants to marry a 21-year- old. Comments aside around 40- and 50-year-old men, I think this is really a problem arising mostly with that just-outside-the-age-gap question, and that's where small communities, northern communities, and religious communities have particular constraints around how they're approaching the marriage question.
I think the one thing you would hate to see is some sort of exception for sexual activity within marriage for all of the reasons around privileging the marriage relationship. It's a question that the provinces are going to have to be involved in answering. You may have unanimity, they may all agree that they're going to raise their absolute age to 16, but you're still going to have the question of what to do with those processes for people who want to go to court and get a special court order giving them permission to marry. What does a judge do with competing laws on what is lawful sexual activity? Do we want courts and parents consenting to what would otherwise be unlawful sexual activity? Those are all important questions.