Mr. Speaker, certainly, in the last few years there has been an incredible amount of thought given to the whole issue of civil marriage versus same sex marriages versus what in France is called a “pacte civil”. This has been in discussion for quite some time. However, there has been a great deal of work on this issue from leading experts on human rights that this is something that is quite fundamental and is in fact a human rights issue.
If we look at country after country, whether it is Belgium, Spain, The Netherlands or South Africa, these are the arguments that have been espoused. In Canada, too, there has been a great evolution around this issue in the last number of years. We are now in a situation where those who argue against it are arguing also against human rights.