Madam Speaker, I want to reinforce the answer that the hon. member gave me. When we took in testimony we heard that if we took a five year segment for relationships and over that five years someone married, there was an 8% chance that the marriage would end in a divorce in that five year period. If, however, they first lived together and then married over that five year period, they actually doubled their chances of separation, which is a bit counter intuitive. In a similar situation, if two people lived together over that five year period, the breakup rate was 40%. That is five times greater than marriage, which is really an interesting statistic.
If we were to do what has been put to us, which is simply to say that marriage is an institution about love, that gender has nothing to do with it, then why cannot anybody be in this institution? It really should make no difference at all.