With this whole thing, it also includes people who have gone through their whole lives in a common-law situation. As we know, nowadays a lot of people basically stay away from marriage as we know it, and they are more in a common-law situation throughout their lives.
You can have an individual in the Canadian Forces, who is recognized as married by common law, go through his whole career of whatever number of years and come to his retirement. He is released and told that all those years he had doesn't mean an iota of anything post-60. He then has to step up and get married. Most people don't want to get into that whole marriage thing. They feel that common law is more what they want and thus try to stay with that.
We're saying, prior to 60 is okay; post-60 is not okay. That's what we have to look at. In that sense, it's not a gold digger, because that person could have been married or common law for 25 or 30 years, and now, suddenly, he or she is being labelled as a gold digger because of a clause that was written in 1901 based on information that does not really exist anymore.
Thank you.