CANADA AHEAD OF U.S. IN TERMS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Same-Sex Marriage Latest Example

TORONTO -- Canada's decision to allow marriage between same-sex couples is
only one of many signs that this once tradition-bound society is undergoing
social changes at an astonishing rate.

Increasingly, Canada has been on a social policy course pursued by many
Western European and Scandinavian countries, gradually moving more out of
step with the United States over the last few decades.

Even as the government announced this month that it would rewrite the
definition of marriage, it was transforming its drug policies by
decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana and permitting
"safe-injection" clinics in Vancouver for heroin addicts in an effort to
fight disease.

The large population of native peoples remains impoverished, but there are
growing signs that they are taking greater control of their destinies, and
their leaders now govern two territories occupying more than a third of
Canada's land mass.

Canada has never had a revolution or a civil war, and little social
turbulence aside from sporadic rebellions in the 19th century and a splash
of terrorism in Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s.

Regarding ease of social change, Canada is virtually in a category by itself.

The transformation of the country's demographics, for example, has been
breathtaking since the 1970s, when the government of Pierre Trudeau opened
wide the country's doors to Africans, Asians and West Indians as part of an
attempt to fill Canada's huge, underpopulated hinterland. Eighteen percent
of the population is now foreign-born, compared with about 11 percent in
the United States, and there is little or no public debate over whether a
sea change in culture, demographics and even national identity is good or
bad for the country.

In only the last generation, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, where a third
of the population lives, have become multicultural polyglots where the
towers of Sikh temples and mosques have become mainstays of the skyline and
where cuisine and fashion have become concoctions of spices and patterns
that are in the global vanguard.

Toronto, once a homogeneous city of staid British tradition, is now a place
where more than 40 percent of the people are foreign-born, where there are
nearly 2,000 ethnic restaurants and where local radio and television
stations broadcast in more than 30 languages.

"Everything from marriage laws to marijuana laws, we are going through a
period of accelerated social change," said Neil Bissoondath, an immigrant
from Trinidad who is a leading novelist here. "There is a general approach
to life here that is both evolutionary and revolutionary."

He said that the balance goes all the way back to the ideals of the Tory
founders of Canada, who remained loyal to the British crown and who
instilled a laissez-faire conservatism "that says people have a right to
live their lives as they like."

That philosophy was a practical necessity in a colony that was bilingual
after the British conquered French Quebec, creating relative social peace
by allowing greater religious freedoms than even Catholics in England had
at the time.

The live-and-let-live approach was codified by the 1982 Charter of Rights
and Freedoms, Canada's Bill of Rights. Being as young as it is, the charter
occupies a vivid corner of the Canadian psyche. So when three senior
provincial courts ruled recently that federal marriage law discriminated
against same-sex couples under the charter, the Liberal Cabinet decided to
go along and not appeal the decisions.

While the new law will have to be passed by the House of Commons, little
organized resistance has arisen.

Few here have complained that a national policy pertaining to something as
intimate as marriage would be set by courts in Quebec, British Columbia and
Ontario rather than by a federal body. In part that reflects the great
relative political strength that regional governments have developed in
what is known as the Canadian Confederation, where Canada's federal
government is weaker than most central governments in the West.

But it also reflects poll results that show a majority of Canadians support
expanding marriage to gay couples. Last year, the Quebec provincial
assembly unanimously enacted a law giving sweeping parental rights to
same-sex couples, with even the most conservative members voting in favor
despite lobbying by the Roman Catholic Church.

"Canada has always been in the vanguard in relation to many societies in
the world," Prime Minister Jean Chretien said recently, speaking in French
to reporters after he announced the Cabinet's decision. "We have met our
responsibilities."

Nowhere has the social change been more dramatic than in Quebec, which as
recently as the 1960s was a deeply conservative place where the church
dominated education and social life. Since the baby-boomer generation
launched the "Quiet Revolution" in favor of separatism, big government
social programs and secularism, abortion and divorce rates there rose to
among the highest in Canada while church attendance plummeted.

Now the pendulum is moving in the other direction, ever so slightly.

"There is a centrist mentality in Canada that translates into the political
system not tolerating the Pat Buchanans nor the leftist equivalent," noted
Michel C. Auger, a political columnist for Le Journal de Montreal. "There
is a unified fabric here that is a lot stronger on social issues than it
seems to be in the United States."