While common-law unions, same-sex couples, and lone parenting are on the rise, marriage and the traditional family are far from collapse. Juliet O'Neill reports.

Juliet O'Neill
The Ottawa Citizen

The meaning of marriage and the shape of the family have changed a lot for many Canadians in recent years but both are far from the brink of collapse that some critics have warned about during the soul search in Parliament over equal rights for same-sex couples.

"Marriage is still a strong institution and the desire people have to marry is still very high," says Alan Mirabelli, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family in Ottawa. He says Canadians have always been and remain highly flexible in adjusting the family unit -- "the most dynamic institution in the world" -- to economic and social conditions, through wars, recessions and cultural shifts.

"I think marriage is more exciting than it's ever been," says Ben Schlesinger, a veteran expert on Canadian family patterns and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who celebrated his 41st wedding anniversary this week. "The institution of marriage per se, the ring, etcetera, may be decreasing, but living together, couplehood, is increasing and Canadians are giving themselves many alternative ways of living their lives. That's healthy. That's the 21st century."

For those clinging to a fading, Leave it to Beaver ideal of a stay-at-home mom and a dad earning enough to cover all the family bills, welcome to the real world. Common-law unions, lone parenting and extended families are on the rise, most women have to work for a living, and wedding vows for same-sex couples are not the closeted affairs they used to be.

Still, the bigger picture shows traditional patterns intact for most people. Some 85 per cent of Canadians live in families and more than three-quarters of those are headed by a legally married couple. Marriage and children remain the adult goals of most teenagers. And three-quarters of marriage ceremonies are still conducted the old-fashioned way -- by a member of the clergy.

The divorce rate, which peaked after laws were changed to make divorce easier, has been declining for several years, both as a percentage of the population and as a percentage of marriages. At last count, in 1997, more than 60 per cent of marriages were expected to survive. And marriages that did end in divorce were lasting longer, an average of 13.3 years.

There's one set of figures about common-law marriage breakdown, from a Statistics Canada study of children in 1994-95, that many critics have been using to make their case about the perils of veering any farther away from the legally bound vows of "until death do us part."

That is that while only 13.6 per cent of children of legally married parents experienced family breakdown by age 10, the percentage jumped to a spectacular 63.1 per cent for kids with common-law parents. However, the study also found that at least 40 per cent of the common-law children were in another family by age 10, meaning one or both of their parents had formed another union quite soon.

Mr. Schlesinger says the children of lone parents often have lives complicated by economic difficulty and the children of blended families face the complexities of relating to parents and step-parents and different sets of siblings. However, such children are not generally stigmatized by society anymore and there is no evidence that they are all bound to turn out worse off in adult life than children of traditional family units. "They're not doomed," he said.

What about the sanctity of marriage? Roman Catholic, Muslim and Evangelical Christian church leaders, Reform MPs and such lobby groups as Real Women assert that social and legal acceptance of same-sex couples makes a mockery of the sanctity of marriage. To be consistent, they have also been revisiting the battle they lost some years ago against extension of legal spousal rights and obligations to common-law couples.

But how big a premium do Canadians, few of whom preach anymore that common-law marriage is a sin, put on the notion of marriage as a sanctified institution? As openly gay MP Svend Robinson cuttingly put it at a Commons committee hearing: "We all know that marriage is a sacred institution. We've seen that on television recently with Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?"

The fact is that the tradition of marriage and family, with all the commitment, responsibilities and costs entailed, is generally so appealing and beloved in Canada that the ultimate goal of the same-sex rights movement is not to destroy these institutions but to legally participate in them with society's blessing.

Meantime, the United Church, which does not view marriage as a sacrament, adopted a policy in 1992 of allowing clergy to perform marriage-type services for same-sex couples called covenants. Church leaders told MPs that legislators are heading in the right direction, reinforcing "permanence and fidelity in intimate relationships, regardless of the sexual orientation of the partners."

While one evangelical group claims that clergy will soon face criminal charges if they refuse to marry homosexuals, Brent Hawkes says clergy have been and will continue to be free to reject marriage requests on many grounds.

Mr. Hawkes is a pastor who provides wedding-style services to same-sex couples at an ecumenical church in Toronto. Years ago, he said, such ceremonies attracted only a few close friends of the couple but they now resemble weddings for straight couples in terms of who comes -- parents and grandparents and lots of others. He says some of the ceremonies are so touching, uplifting and original that many straight couples ask for the same ones.

In the Anglican church diocese of New Westminster, B.C., which encompasses Vancouver, representatives of congregations of 80 parishes -- some 30,000 people -- have been quietly agonizing for more than a year over providing a ceremony short of marriage to bless vows by same-sex couples. A proposal for such ceremonies was approved by a narrow margin in a vote at the last synod and Bishop Michael Ingham is in favour, but he wants a stronger consensus before authorizing them.

"It's an emotional struggle," says diocese spokeswoman Lorie Chortyk. While a few parishes are extremely opposed on grounds homosexuality is wrong according to biblical scripture, Ms. Chortyk said the internal church dialogue is not marked by animosity. "It's not so much a battle as a struggle to find the right, compassionate thing to do."

No matter what happens to the formal institution of marriage, says Mr. Mirabelli, society can use all the caring, sharing, committed relationships it can get and all the family-friendly corporate and government policies possible to reinforce them. "We can't afford to exclude anybody," he said. "If it functions like a family and looks like a family, it is a family. They are doing society's work."

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