By Amber-Dawn Davison
Every summer, rainbow flags fly in cities across the country marking the nationwide Canada Pride celebration. People from every culture, gender, and sexual orientation gather to celebrate the LGBT community as an integral part of Canadian society. But beneath the swirls of colour and vibrant pageantry lies a deeper reason for festivity: just 50 years ago, homosexuality was illegal in Canada.
Until 1967, no government had yet questioned that homosexuality was a sin. A young Pierre Trudeau, Justice Minister at the time, took the oft-quoted stance that “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” He proposed amending the Criminal Code of Canada to decriminalise homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, “separating the idea of sin and the idea of crime.”
Peter Maloney, a Lawyer and former politician with Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal party, was one of the first Canadian political figures to publicly come out as gay. He remembered that before 1967, to be labelled as gay was akin to being called a dangerous sex offender, and often destroyed professional reputations and personal lives.
“Before that point, if I had even asked a same-sex person to engage in sexual behaviour, that was a criminal offence,” he recalls. “You had to be pretty bold if you wanted to engage in sexual behaviour, and you had to be pretty sure of who you were talking to or you could wind up in jail.”
The decriminalisation of homosexuality was critical to LGBT Canadians becoming socially accepted and treated as equal under the law. Judy Girard, who teaches human rights practice in civil society at Carleton University says that other pieces of legislation like the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms were more powerful, but the 1969 amendment was symbolically fundamental and led to other discriminatory legislation across the country being struck down.
“Once we were ‘legal’, so to speak, it became clear that we deserved rights and freedoms which were available to all other Canadians,” says Girard. “With one stroke of a pen, Pierre Trudeau caused every jurisdiction in Canada to comply. Those of us who were pressing for changes one piece of legislation at a time saw a watershed of progress.”
LGBT rights grew over the next twenty years, ending one by one many discriminatory practices in both Canadian law and society. By the late 90s, heterosexual biases were erased from most legislative documents, replaced by legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Then, in 2005 same sex marriage was legalized.
Fifty years after Pierre Trudeau’s 1967 proposal, both Girard and Maloney agree that some inequities still persist. For instance, the difference in the age of consent for anal sex for heterosexual couples versus homosexual couples, and the “blood ban” that prevents gay men from donating blood unless they have abstained from sexual intercourse for a year prior. However, Trudeau Jr. seems intent on fixing those problems.
In contrast to the civil rights issues unfolding across Canada’s southern border, Trudeau’s open and equitable treatment of LGBT rights is comforting to LGBT people all over the world. In his own words, “Canadians know our country is made stronger because of our diversity, not in spite of it.”