However, it hasn’t always been this way. Back in 1866 the House of Lords in England found that marriage was defined as the “voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others” (Hyde v. Hyde and Woodmansee). Since Canada was a British colony up until 1982, Canada had to follow British court decisions. Throughout the 1990s Parliament, taking their lead from the Canadian Courts, decided that discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation went against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Supreme Court of Canada recognized in 1997 that same-sex couples fit the legal definition of “conjugal” and that differential treatment was illegal. Then, in 2003, the Court reformulated the common law definition of marriages as “the voluntary union for life of two persons to the exclusion of all others.”