A rchive Date
[ 01-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://timecanada.com/story.adp?storyid=5
Michael Stark and Michael Leshner
The first gay couple to legally wed in Canada symbolizes a new social liberalism. Not everyone is thrilled.
CANADIAN NEWSMAKERS OF THE YEAR
 By Steven Frank
December 29 2003
Like a great shakespearean comedy, the gay community’s battle for equality in Canada culminated in a wedding. The ceremony on June 10 included many of the usual trappings: witnesses holding wedding bands, a beaming couple, teary-eyed family members and well-wishers brimming with good will. As the event began, the couple stopped to plant kisses on the rouged cheeks of a beloved family matriarch. When the betrothed—Michael Leshner and Michael Stark—walked down the aisle to recite their vows, the lady, 90, couldn’t hold back a crack. “You almost tripped, Mike,” Ethel Leshner blurted out. “That’s my mother,” quipped her son. “Whom I take after.”
In other respects, the proceedings at Toronto’s superior-court building that summer day were less traditional. The principals were not your typical wedding-cake statuettes. For of course, Leshner, 55, and his longtime partner Stark, 45, are both male. That didn’t prevent these words from being spoken at the end of the ceremony: “I, John Hamilton, justice of the superior court of justice, by virtue of the powers vested in me by the Marriage Act, do hereby pronounce you, Michael and Michael, publicly and affectionately known as the Michaels, to be lawfully married spouses.” The two men then glanced at each other with goofy grins and leaned into a big, affectionate kiss.
Six months later, the Michaels are watching all this on video in the comfort of their downtown Toronto loft. Leshner is beaming at the moment when his mother can be heard bursting into an impromptu rendition of O Canada. In the next scene they’re outside the court building, Veuve Clicquot in hand, hamming up a passionate embrace for the cameras. Watching the tape for the first time in months, Stark, a project manager for a graphic-arts firm, is close to tears. “I’m surprised at how much it moved me,” he says. “The enormity of the event is still sinking in for me.”
Ditto for the rest of the country. The Michaels’ same-sex marriage—the first following an Ontario Court of Appeal decision that ordered the province to immediately begin granting marriage licenses to gays and lesbians—was the start of a cultural revolution. Canada has now joined the Netherlands and Belgium as places where gay marriages are legal. Since summer around 2,000 gay and lesbian couples—an estimated 600 of them from the U.S.—have married in Ontario or British Columbia.
Their marriage has turned the Michaels into hometown celebrities. They were cheered by a million people as they rode behind the grand marshal at Toronto’s annual gay-pride parade in June. Leshner is a self-proclaimed loud, Jewish “media hog,” while Stark is a soft-spoken Catholic who likes to cook. But Leshner jokes that they have become the first family of Canada. “What is it of the values that Michael and I represent that is inimical to a longstanding nuclear family?” says Leshner, a crown attorney. “Both of us work, pay our bills on time, [are] monogamous ... We’re nice to our mothers.”
But it is for neither their marriage nor their monogamy that the Michaels have become world famous. The two men have come to symbolize something much bigger: the unprecedented acceleration of social liberalism in Canada in 2003. From gay marriage to moves to decriminalize marijuana and provide supervised injection booths for drug addicts in Vancouver, 2003 will go down in history as the year that Canada rethought what was taboo. The explanation for that broad social shift lies in deep, structural changes to Canadian society, which has steadily become both more urban and more multicultural. But it would not have happened so fast had individual men and women not pushed for change. And so, for passionately and shamelessly jumping into the front lines—and headlines—of a bitter issue, for delivering a bracing national wake-up call with eloquent and at times outrageous sound bites and public appearances, the Michaels are Time’s Canadian Newsmakers of the Year.
In 2003, as in the preceding few years, the courts were at the center of social liberalization. But mold-breaking court decisions don’t come out of thin air. In Ontario the lead was taken by two Toronto lawyers, Martha McCarthy and Joanna Radbord, who had worked together on a landmark case that led in 1999 to the Supreme Court’s declaring Ontario’s spousal-support law unconstitutional for excluding same-sex couples. In the spring of 2000 the two lawyers were preparing an even more explosive case on same-sex marriage. Leshner heard about it and elbowed himself and Stark into the suit as a representative couple.
On May 12, 2000, McCarthy dispatched Leshner and Stark to Toronto’s city hall with simple instructions: Apply for a wedding license, get rejected and then back off quietly. “Do not make a big fuss,” McCarthy remembers telling Leshner. Leshner, though, likes to improvise. When a Toronto city clerk refused to give him and Stark a marriage license, Leshner recalls saying, “O.K., I’ll be back in an hour with the media. You explain to the media why you can tell me to my face I’m not getting a license because I’m gay.” By the time Leshner returned with reporters in tow, the clerk apparently had decided that discretion was the better part of valor. The next week the City of Toronto—yes, the place that was once the most straitlaced metropolis in North America—formally asked the courts for guidance. Three years later, the city had a reply, and the Michaels had their marriage license.
The year will be remembered for that small piece of paper—not that there was a shortage of other news. Elections shook up politics in 8 of 10 provinces. In Ottawa the governing Liberal Party went though a slow-motion regime change that ended with the appointment of Paul Martin as Canada’s 21st Prime Minister. Then there were the physical disasters: SARS killed 44 and scared the wits out of Toronto, fires ravaged the West, a single mad cow hammered the Western cattle industry, a power failure blackened half the continent’s northeast, a hurricane nearly leveled Halifax. And, oh, yes, Canada decided not to fight in a war in Iraq.
But in the long term, all the politics and natural disasters were less momentous than the social changes in Canada. Nothing like it had been seen since 1967, when a young Pierre Trudeau, then Justice Minister, introduced legislation that made it easier for women to get a divorce, reduced the restrictions on access to abortion and decriminalized homosexuality. “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation,” Trudeau said that year.
Social change has come in fits and starts ever since. By the beginning of 2003 Canada was already the land of socialized medicine and gun control, a place where women have the right to walk down some city streets bare breasted and where abortion is part of the national landscape. Unlike the U.S., Canada has embraced the Kyoto climate-change treaty, the International Criminal Court and the international land-mine treaty and shunned capital punishment.
But in 2003 the pace of liberalization quickened. Following the decision on the Michaels’ case, the federal government decided not to appeal. Instead it wrote a law to legalize same-sex marriage and sent three questions to the Supreme Court of Canada to test the draft law’s constitutionality. In Montreal a judge ruled that swingers’ clubs, which allow strangers to engage in group sex, are not illegal as long as the fun takes place behind closed doors. Ottawa pressed ahead with legislation to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, much to the annoyance of the Bush Administration in Washington. Vancouver opened dedicated rooms where drug addicts could inject themselves under the supervision of nurses. At the prodding of the courts, Ottawa launched a national program to legalize the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. And a national program is in the cards that could see the distribution of heroin to drug users in big cities next year.
At first glance, Canada has taken all this in stride. When a Vancouver gallery held three live performances of a naked couple performing oral sex on each other in June, the audience and the rest of the country just shrugged. When the New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton, told a TV station that marijuana was a “wonderful substance” and that Canadians should be able to “enjoy their marijuana in the peace and quiet of their own home or in a café,” folks just changed the channel. Few cared when Jean Chrétien, then Prime Minister, mused that after he retired “I will have my money for my fine and a joint in the other hand.” O.K., a few feathers were ruffled when near-naked models were used this year to flog construction boots, but no one said Canada is Sweden.
More to the point, nor is it the U.S. By comparison with its neighbor to the south, Canada these days can look positively libertine. As Michael Adams, a social scientist and pollster, noted in his much quoted book Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, the U.S. has been on a conservative bent of late while Canada is looking almost revolutionary in its pursuit of happiness. In general, the new Prime Minister buys Adams’ thesis. Still, Martin told Time, the argument can’t be taken too far, since “there’s a huge body of opinion in the United States which agrees exactly with what we’re doing, and there’s a very, very large body in Canada which shares some of the social conservatism that the United States feels.”
He’s right about that. Not everyone in Canada embraces the wave of social liberalism. Where Canadians stand on social issues often depends on where they live. Toronto’s newly elected mayor, David Miller, sees the new pattern as a function of city life. In large urban areas, Miller told Time, “you have to live side by side with people who have vastly different opinions and lifestyles than your own.” In rural Canada things look different. “Outside major cities you find more traditional conservative perspectives,” says Raymond Corrado, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University.
But worries about the pace of social change are not confined to small towns. Former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard decries the disintegration of the traditional family in his native province. “We have always raised our children in a unit called the family,” Bouchard told a conference earlier this month. “It’s less and less the case, and young people are at risk of not being able to find their point of reference anymore.” For McGill University history professor Gil Troy, an American who has lived in Montreal for 12 years, increasing social liberalization has led to fragmentation. “The social fabric is stretched and fraying,” he says, “and there is much less sense of community.”
Several social-conservative groups are hoping they will be able to beat back the liberal trends. “I’m optimistic that 2003 will be an aberration,” says Derek Rogusky, a spokesman for Focus on the Family in Canada, a Christian group affiliated with the U.S. organization of the same name. The group fears that liberalized marijuana laws will make it harder for parents to keep their kids from using drugs. And Rogusky frets about children growing up in nontraditional families. “We’re rushing into this social experiment without really good, solid research,” he says. Other conservatives warn of an impending backlash. “Enough is enough,” says Gwen Landolt of Ottawa-based REAL Women of Canada about the liberal legislation introduced this year. She singles out same-sex marriage as the thing that has pushed liberalism too far and promises to raise the issue in the next federal election campaign.
How will governments respond? In the past, politicians have dithered on hot- button social issues. Former Reform Party leader Preston Manning maintains that a legislative vacuum is at the root of the dilemma on same-sex marriage. If Parliament had been allowed to do its job, he says, “it would have affirmed a more traditional, culturally and religiously based position of marriage being the union of a man and a woman.” Instead, says Manning, the courts, which “are more socially liberal than the general population,” have rushed into a space that politicians have vacated.
But with conservatives intending to mobilize what they say is a silent majority, politicians may no longer be able to duck controversial social questions—and this worries some gay-rights and pot activists. The new government is thinking of asking the Supreme Court whether the concept of a civil union would be constitutional under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For gay-rights activists, that raises suspicions, although the new Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, says the new question’s only point would be to present the court with “the broadest canvas of views” in a divisive and difficult case.
The courts will continue to be a main forum of debate. The Supreme Court’s decision in a challenge to the constitutionality of the marijuana laws is expected this week. Another same-sex-marriage case will be heard in the Quebec Court of Appeal on Jan. 26; the appeal stems from an earlier ruling that the one-man-and-one-woman definition of marriage is discriminatory.
Leshner fears that a double-cross on same-sex marriage rights is in the works. “Anything less than full equality for gays and lesbians on marriage means that Paul Martin has declared war on gays and lesbians,” he says. The concern among gay activists is that Martin will support civil unions for gays in exchange for support from the West in the coming election. “Martin has decided to make nice-nice with the West, even if it means playing patty-cake with homophobia,” says Leshner, who promises to be the “Dr. Van Helsing of this human-rights battle,” the man who thrusts the cross into the heart of “the Dracula of homophobia.”
Then, with his trademark whimsy, Leshner adds, “A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.” In 2003 what the Michaels did was help lead Canada into unprecedented territory, where long-established social norms were overthrown in favor of things that until recently would have been thought impossibly liberal. In 2004 the nation will have to sort out whether it is truly relaxed about the new dispensation or rather, in its heart, it is more conservative than the Michaels and their friends think it is or wish it were. It will be a tussle for the soul of Canada worth watching.
—With reporting by Linda Gyulai/Montreal and Deborah Jones/Vancouver
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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