Madam Speaker, because my hon. colleague is a lawyer I have a question along that line. A good article was written by Douglas Farrow, the associate professor at McGill University, in the Wednesday, May 7 National Post entitled “Culture wars are killing marriage”. He stated: “...the courts are actually ordering illicit alterations to the 1867 Constitution Act...”
He goes on to say that “marriage is not merely a union of two persons”. In fact, if we were to use that neutered definition of merely between two persons it would not be an institution at all but a legal fiction and an incoherent one at that. On the matter of marriage, he goes on to talk about judicial activism:
And then the courts will find themselves having to choose between Section 15 equality rights and Section 2 freedoms. This is not supposed to happen and the remedies for it are--as yet--virtually unthinkable. Some of these remedies, while claiming to balance Section 2 and Section 15, will dangerously erode freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion.
Charter jurisprudence, I fear, has allowed itself to become a combatant in this culture war. That is why it has chosen to sacrifice marriage on the altar of a spurious equality right, and to attempt to resurrect it as “the union of two persons”. This is a futility in which Parliament is about to become complicit. If it does, it will only drag Canada deeper into a quagmire of competition between two incompatible visions for society: one which sees marriage as a tried and tested good which must be privileged, and one which out of jealousy refuses to privilege it, consequences be damned. Is it really too late to turn back?
Could the member respond to my question of balancing section 2 freedoms and section 15 rights--freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and this equality issue from section 15?