An Economic Assessment of Civil Marriage Act, 2005

“Because we were defiant and did not apologise for our existence. We said that we were already married, because we were; the state just did not recognise it. In the same way that women were always persons, even before the law said we were. And now we are legally married.”1 Language is imbued with power. It is indicative of the barriers that exist within a society and has the capacity to reduce a person to a mere label to fit them in a box, for instance a homosexual person is reduced to his or her sexual identity. Gays and lesbians have been deviant outsiders, excluded from terms like “family” and “spouse” because words are ingrained with statements of value. The Civil Marriage Act which had been passed by the House of Commons and the Senate, received the Royal Assent in July 2005, making Canada the third country in the world to legalise same-sex marriages. Earlier marriage had been defined as the lawful union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, but under Section 2 of the Civil Marriage Act, marriage is defined as the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others.