In 2005, Canada became the fourth country in the world to open civil marriage to same-sex couples. Several explanations have been put forward to shed light on this decision. A first stream of explanations, supplied by the works of Miriam Smith (2005, 2007, 2008), focused on institutional factors which have rendered possible this decision such as: a federal system where the federal government has the power to decide who can marry, an executive-controlled Westminster parliamentarianism, a hierarchical and centralized courts system, a liberal-oriented Charter of Rights and Freedoms that applies across Canada. A second current in works concerns countermovements to LGBT activism. If, in the US, the Religious Right has shaped the activist agenda of lesbian and gays since the 1970 (Fetner 2008), the conservative Evangelicals have not been so powerful and influential with the Canadian federal political elite (Farney 2012, Haskell 2011, Malloy 2009, 2011). A third niche of research attributes to ideological factors the opening of civil marriage to same-sex couples, and notably to what can be called “homomulticulturalism:” to be open-minded toward lesbians and gays would be a component of the multicultural heritage and contemporary fabric of Canada. This paper suggests reviewing, evaluating and confronting these various explanations of the lesbian and gay marriage in order to get a better understanding of this policy change.
