TIMES ARE CHANGING - JUST CHECK THE HEADLINES

Governments are often chastised for how slowly they move. Change is forever
bogged down. That being said, one would hardly have imagined 20 years ago the
stories that would dominate the news last week.

Newspapers were abuzz with stories on the protection of gays from
discrimination, their right to marry, the legalization of marijuana, and safe
drug injection sites.

It has already been well documented by a number of U.S. writers that Canada has
quietly become America's "cool neighbour." Samantha Bennett, writing for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in comparing America to its northern neighbour writes:
"The Canadians seem more adult - more secure." She laments, "I wonder if
America will ever be that cool."

While some still worry that Canada may become either the official or unofficial
51st U.S. state, a number of positions on domestic and foreign issues have
separated us in recent years.

From our stance on the Iraq war, to the treatment of marijuana, to gay rights,
to the Kyoto Accord, Canada has shown it can stand apart from its Superpower
neighbour.

News of the past week shows how different the nation's priorities are in Canada
to those in the U.S. and how far public opinion has come on a number of very
sensitive issues within the last 20 years.

Last Monday, the Canadian Alliance put forward a motion in the House of Commons
to have marriage defined as a union between a man and a woman. While the vote
was close, the motion was defeated. Two decades ago, this motion would have
passed almost unanimously.

The day after this Alliance motion was defeated, gay rights once again
dominated the news as gays and lesbians were extended the protection to be free
of hate in a similar way that religions and cultures have their protection
enshrined.

And what was the other story that dominated the news last week? Canada's new
approach to drugs. No longer is Ronald Reagan's "War on Drugs" strategy, in
which users are jailed for their horrible addictions, in vogue.

Last week two stories that shared the headlines with gay rights focused on the
changing view of drugs in Canada. The first ever safe injection site in North
America opened in Vancouver, and a B.C. court ruling continued a trend of other
recent rulings by declaring "there is no offence known to law at this time for
simple possession of marijuana."

Court rulings, public sentiment, and strategies for dealing with substance
abuse have come a long way in Canada, while so many other places have insisted
on continuing to view drug use as a crime like rape or robbery.

It is clear that support for all these changes is far from unanimous in Canada.
This split has also evidence itself in a number of surveys that show there is a
generational divide on a number of social issues with younger people tending to
look through a more liberal lens.

What is very true is that Canada is leaning more towards tolerance in ways that
make our southern neighbours shudder, and could barely have been imagined in
the 1980s.