Citizenship and Immigration committee  All right. Well, those are very interesting questions. Why has it taken us this long to codify the law of marriage? I really don't know what the answer would be. I could speculate but that's all I could do. I know that there was an agreement by the Government of Canada to cod

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As I was saying before, I think part of the reason for making the amendments now is that although these aspects are in the common law, the common law is not as accessible, particularly for people who are not legally trained, as a statute on the books. The idea is to codify the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the questions. Unlike some countries, Canada does not have a single statute that codifies all of the federal aspects of marriage, marriage of course being divided constitutionally between the federal parliament that has jurisdiction over the legal capacity to marr

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's what I was just going to throw in as my cautionary note. Those studies do not distinguish between marriages that were celebrated in Canada and marriages that were celebrated outside of Canada. Certainly it would appear that a large number of them were celebrated outside of

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Constitutionally the federal Parliament has jurisdiction only over, as I mentioned, that absolute-floor minimum age below which there can be no marriages, so there really is no constitutional way to do that. The government would have to set the age at either 16 or 18. In either i

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much. There is, as you point out, currently no national minimum age for marriage. This is an area that is very confusing to many people because they assume, as you point out, that there is one. The Province of Quebec is the only jurisdiction in Canada that has an

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I should add that this minimum age is a capacity issue that travels with the child. If the child is ordinarily resident in Canada or a Canadian citizen, the minimum age for marriage would apply regardless of where in the world the child is married. There are also some anecdotal