According to Spartacus Gay Travel Guide, Canada is the number one safest country in the world for 2SLGBTQ+ community, behind Iceland, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, and ahead of Spain, Denmark and the United Kingdom.
As we know things are far from perfect and there is still lots of work to be done. Looking at you Alberta Premier Danielle Smith
But getting to this point took a lot of work by many courageous people who stood up and fought against an oppressive system that denied their rights to exist.
Some saw them as mentally ill in the best case, and dangerous offenders who deserved jail time in the worst case. Many still carry criminal charges in their records.
There are so many members of the LGBTQ2S+ community and their allies that worked to improve Canada, and I would like to take a moment now to thank them for their efforts and today.
I am going to share a few of their stories.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx… join me as we journey through the 1950s to the 2000s to learn about the story of Canada’s LGBTQ2S+ history!
In Canada, it is illegal to be fired from a job because of your sexual orientation.
Quebec was the first province, and major jurisdiction in the world, to ban discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
It enshrined that right in 1978 in its Quebec Charter for Human Rights and Freedoms.
Canada doesn’t explicitly grant or deny any such right in its constitution, but the Supreme Court has ruled that Section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does protect against discrimination, including sexual orientation.
It is as enshrined as possible without being in the constitution.
But back in the 1950s, a person could not only lose their job, but the federal government and RCMP were actively trying to out them.
If you were a gay man in that era, working for the federal government in any capacity, there was a chance you could find yourself sitting in a chair, looking at a television screen displaying pornographic images, while your pupil responses were measured.
Called The Fruit Machine by those who administered the test, it was invented by Dr. Frank Robert Wake, a psychology professor out of Carleton University.
He based his machine on a study done in the United States that measured the pupil sizes of subjects as they walked through the aisles of a grocery store to gauge their emotional reactions to products.
Dr. Wake was sent to the United States by the Canadian government to study similar devices used there and, in his travels, he also met with Allan Seltzer of the University of Chicago who claimed he could distinguish gay men from straight men through a series of pictures in a box.
After a year in the United States, Dr. Wake returned to Canada where he built his machine.
But why was the federal government interested in outing people in the civil service, Armed Forces and RCMP?
At the time, it was a commonly held belief that gay men suffered from a mental illness and had weak character.
During the Cold War, the government saw gay men as a security risk. In their paranoia they believed that they could be turned into Soviet spies by agents who preyed upon their quote unquote “weaknesses”.
In one 1959 American study, it was stated,
“Homosexuals often appear to believe that the accepted ethical code which governs normal human relationships does not apply to them.”
To determine this so-called security risk, the government began to compile a list of men in its employ that were suspected to be gay, but the process was taking too long.
So, the government turned to Dr. Wake to build his device.
If a federal employee was suspected of being gay, they were called to a room for the purposes of undergoing a stress test.
The subject sat down in what looked like a dentist’s chair and, as their heart rate was analyzed, and images of naked men and women were displayed.
A person next to the subject would be charged to analyse the size of the subject’s pupils and measure any changes through a camera.
Another test had a subject hold a bag of anhydrous cobalt chloride and silica gel in their hand as they read quote unquote “homosexual words” like circus, bagpipe, blind, camp, fish and sew.
This test was supposed to measure changes in moisture, as it was believed that sweat would change the colour of the crystals,
It goes without saying that the accuracy of these tests was highly questionable.
The pupil measurement was based on a flawed assumption that an involuntary reaction could be measured scientifically, or that gay and straight people would respond differently.
Another issue was the ability to measure any changes to pupil size accurately would be near impossible using equipment of the time as pupils contract or expand in less than one millimetres.
Despite all of this, the device was used until 1967 when the Defence Research Board finally pulled funding.
But the damage it did to the lives of those who lost their jobs because it is immeasurable.
While no exact numbers are known, it is believed many civil service employees, soldiers and RCMP officers were either demoted without cause or lost their jobs.
What is known is that the device allowed the RCMP to collect files and data on over 9,000 people.
In the 1990s, Dr. Wake addressed his role in the creation of the machine and its impact, by stating,
“I think it was worth doing because it might have brought us a lot of knowledge of homosexuals.”
In 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized in the House of Commons for the government’s actions on the matter and for using Dr. Wake’s machine.
One of those impacted by the government’s use of pseudoscience, would become a Canadian human rights activist who launched a landmark legal challenge in the Federal Court of Canada against the military’s discriminatory policies against LGBTQ+ service members.
Her name? Michelle Douglas
Born in 1963 in Ottawa, ON, Michelle Douglas earned a Bachelor of Arts in Law in 1985 and later joined the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) in 1986 and became the first woman to be promoted to the Special Investigation Unit.
For years she had known she was attracted to women, but it was something she kept hidden because it could risk her military career.
She had been promoted to the unit that was responsible for finding homosexuals in the Armed Forces.
It didn’t take long before rumours began to swirl about Douglas’ sexuality. Those rumours led to an investigation in 1988 to determine if Douglas was a lesbian.
While under investigation, she was taken to a hotel room where two male officers questioned her about her sexual activities with women and told her she should like men.
Soon after, she was transferred to another unit and lost her security clearance.
There was nothing to warrant this demotion as she had an exemplary service record.
In 1989, she was released from the Armed Forces because she was a lesbian.
On her release form, it stated,
“Not advantageously employable due to homosexuality.”
This was part of the “LGBTQ Purge” that began in the 1950s and was helped along by Dr. Wake.
But Michelle Douglas had a legal background, and she launched a $550,000 lawsuit against the Department of National Defence in January 1990.
Likely because they knew they would lose the trial; the Department of National Defence abandoned its policy of banning gays and lesbians from serving in the military and settled the case with Douglas in 1992.
This made Canada one of the first countries to openly allow LGBTQ individuals to serve in the military.
The end of Douglas’ military career Douglas devoted herself to many worthy causes.
She served as the chair of the Foundation for Equal Families, and the chair of the board of The 519 Church Street Community Centre in Toronto. She was a founding member of the Rainbow Railroad LGBT refugee organization and currently serves as a member of the board of directors of the Michaelle Jean Foundation.
In 2000, she was named a Pride Parade Marshal in Toronto and on Dec. 13, 2023, Minister of National Defence, Bill Blair, appointed her as the first Honorary Colonel for Professional Conduct and Culture.
Michelle Douglas has devoted herself to furthering LGBTQ2S+ rights in Canada, and at the heart of it, is the right to love who you love.
One man put his heart on his sleeve and changed the perception of gay men by doing just that.
His name was Jim Egan.
In the spring of 1948, Jim Egan met Jack Nesbit the first time at the Savarin Hotel in Toronto, a popular place for the LGBTQ2S+ community to meet during a time when being gay was illegal.
In his book, Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence, Jim Egan wrote,
“I was smitten with Jack.”
Both Jim and Jack went on with their lives after that first meeting but two weeks later, they met again at the King Cole Room at the Park Plaza Hotel.
Jack was sitting with some friends and Jim sat a little distance away from them.
At one point, Jack walked over and said,
“I’ve been asking all these guys if they wanted to go steady with me, and none of them will. How about you? Would you like to go steady with me?”
Initially shocked by how upfront Jack was, Jim stated they should at least go on a date first.
The next night, they had their first date.
It was simple. A long walk together.
By Aug. 23, 1948, they made a commitment to date each other.
With the support of Jack, Jim felt more at ease being a gay man. He decided to tell his mother who told him that if he was happy, that all that mattered to her. Jim wrote in his book,
“When I brought Jack home for the first time, she took to him like another son, and they had a wonderful relationship for as long as she lived. ”
Jack’s parents also welcomed Jim into the family and treated him like a second son.
Jack’s mother told Jim,
“You know, now I can die happy because Jack’s found someone who can look after him.”
Jim and Jack’s parents’ welcome was the exception, not the norm at the time.
In Toronto, gay people had to keep their love secret. If discovered, not only did they face jail time, but they would lose their job.
Following the Second World War, there was also an increasing amount of press maligning gay people with articles meant to inflame the public, and limit understanding for the gay community.
Papers such as Justice Weekly freely spoke of quote “disgusting sex orgies” and the quote “limp wrist club.”
Jack worked for the Provincial Audit Office at Queen’s Park and could in no way come out at the risk of losing his job.
In contrast, Jim was self-employed and that gave him the security to take a stand.
Beginning in 1949, Jim wrote letters and articles advocating for gay rights in Canada.
For the next 15 years, he wrote letters to the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and any other publication that presented the LGBTQ2S+ community in a prejudiced light.
In one piece he wrote,
“The acceptance and integration that every thinking responsible homosexual desires will come someday.”
It was not without cost.
In 1963, Jack told his partner he couldn’t handle the growing attention that Jim was receiving for his activism.
Jim said,
“Activism was very important to me. I couldn’t just walk away from it.”
Because of this, the pair broke up.
Jim Egan’s persistence along with other members of the community and their allies began to affect changes.
Slowly, publications moved away from publishing damning articles that condemned the LGBTQ2S+ community.
In 1964, The Homosexual Next Door was published in Macleans, representing one of the first positive portrayals of gay people in a major Canadian publication.
The two-part series was described as fair and objective and Jim said,
“Considering that they were written by someone like Katz, who was not gay, the articles were refreshingly non-judgmental for the time and very informative.”
Meanwhile fate couldn’t keep the lovers apart.
One night in May 1964, by complete coincidence, Jim and Jack ran into each other at the Parkside Tavern at 530 Yonge Street.
Jack invited Jim back to the apartment and the two had a long talk.
Jim told Jack that he would abandon the activism work he had been doing if it meant being together and that he wanted to leave Toronto.
The two got back together and a month later they left Toronto for good with three chihuahuas, ready to begin a new life in British Columbia.
For the next twenty years, Jim kept his word and settled into a quiet life with Jack in their new, more welcoming home.
Jim and Jack began to live as openly gay men in Merville, on Vancouver Island.
In 1981, Jim ran for regional director of Electoral Area B of the Regional District of Comox-Strathcona.
He won his election and served from 1981 to 1993.
He also became the first openly gay man in a relationship to be elected to public office in Canada. In 1987, Jim applied on Jack’s behalf for spousal allowance benefits provided under the Old Age Security Act.
Jim Egan and Jack Nesbit had been a couple for almost 40 years and met all criteria. Health and Welfare Canada denied the claim because they were a same-sex couple.
With that Jim Egan was called back into being an activist and he would challenge the decision under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In 1988, their case entered the Trial Division of the Federal Court of Claim, claiming discrimination under the Old Age Security Act’s definition of spouse which didn’t include same sex relationships and went against section 15(1) of the Charter.
In 1991, the Federal Court dismissed the case because the court claimed their relationship was not a quote, “spousal one”.
They appealed only for the Federal Court of Appeal to rule against them in 1993.
The next step was to take their case to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court of Canada
In May 1995, the Supreme Court dismissed Jack and Jim’s appeal.
But…
They also ruled unanimously to include sexual orientation as a prohibited grounds for discrimination in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
While Jack and Jim lost the battle, they won the war.
This Supreme Court decision set a precedent for several other landmark LGBTQ2S+ cases including Halpern v Canada in 2003.
That case ruled that the common law definition of marriage, defined as between a man and a woman, violated section 15 of the Charter.
That decision allowed for the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada in 2005.
Meanwhile in 1995, following their landmark case, Jack and Jim were made the grand marshals of the Toronto Pride Parade.
Sadly, Jim Egan didn’t get to experience the progress he helped create because he died in March 2000.
Three months later, his lifelong partner, Jack Nesbitt, passed away as well.
In 2018, Jim Egan and Jack Nesbitt were the subjects of the first LGBTQ Heritage Minute.
While Jack and Jim were able to change the laws for a more inclusive society, one man had a long legal battle to be pardoned for a crime he never should’ve been accused of committing.
George Klippert was painted as a dangerous offender and punished for no other reason than being gay.
George Klippert was born on Sept. 6, 1926, in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, and at the time being gay was a federal crime.
From an early age, Klippert knew that he was gay and that he wouldn’t be accepted in society.
Men having sex with men was called buggery, which was a major felony. Other sexual acts fell under gross indecency.
In 1960, Klippert was working as a transit bus driver when he was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, 18 counts of gross indecency and admitted to acts of masturbation with men and in exchange, he would sometimes allow them a free bus ride.
He was found guilty and spent four years in prison.
Upon his release, Klippert moved to Pine Point, Northwest Territories and started working as a mechanic.
In 1965, a series of arsons in the community had police questioning suspects including Klippert even though he was not involved in any way.
But during questioning he admitted to police that he had engaged in sexual acts with men.
Although he was cleared of suspicion in the arson, he was charged, once again, with gross indecency for having relations with men.
He was given little legal representation and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Because this was his second conviction for gross indecency, the Crown applied to label Klippert a dangerous sexual offender.
To make his decision, Judge John Sissons heard from two psychiatrists who stated Klippert had no pedophilic or aggressive tendencies.
They described him as a quote incurable homosexual and recommended psychiatric care instead of prison.
Judge Sissons instead declared Klippert a dangerous offender and sent him to prison.
It seemed hopeless but Klippert had someone in his corner who had his back and wasn’t about to sit back and watch him rot in prison for being gay.
Everett Klippert’ sister, Leah, appealed the conviction and the dangerous offender ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Unfortunately, the appeal was unsuccessful.
On Nov. 7, 1967, the court ruled, three to two, to uphold the conviction and dangerous offender designation.
The appeal may have failed, but the public was outraged.
Now, it must be noted that many of those speaking on behalf of Klippert still believed that he had a psychiatric problem because he was attracted to men.
They just didn’t want him labelled a dangerous offender.
Bud Orange, Klippert’s Member of Parliament, told CBC it was ridiculous to put a man in jail because he was afflicted by a social disease.
Tommy Douglas, who at the time was the leader of the federal NDP, also spoke out against the ruling. Quote
“Homosexuality is a social and psychiatric problem, rather than a criminal one.”
Due to public pressure, then Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau added the legalization of consensual sex between two men over the age of 20 to his landmark omnibus justice bill.
That bill passed in 1969, but Klippert was not released from prison.
He remained behind bars until 1971.
Upon his release, he had the sad distinction of being the last person in Canadian history to be imprisoned for being gay, and the last to be labelled a dangerous offender because of it.
After his release he went back to a quiet life.
He moved to Edmonton and became a truck driver until he retired in the 1980s.
Klippert never set out to change Canadian law and he refused to be a public figure and never marched in a Pride parade.
On Aug. 7, 1996, he died of kidney disease.
And he would’ve disappeared into obscurity were it not for an article in the Globe and Mail in 2016.
In it, John Ibbitson told Everett Klippert’s story and how his life was interrupted by official injustice and how he was persecuted and punished for being gay.
. Soon after, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed to pursue a posthumous pardon for Klippert.
On Nov. 18, 2020, he was successful, and an expungement order was issued by the Parole Board of Canada.
While Everett Klippert’s long road to justice changed Canadian law, a pioneering trans soul singer contributed to Toronto’s R&B music scene and made her an enduring queer icon in Canada.
The story of Jackie Shane begins in Nashville, Tennessee where she was born on May 15, 1940.
At a young age, Jackie felt different from those around her.
Blessed with a great deal of confidence, at five years old she began to dress as a girl and took inspiration from Mae West’s iconic style.
Shane was very lucky her mother and grandmother both accepted her for who she was and supported her as she began her journey of self-discovery when she came out as transgender at the age of 13.
She said in 2017,
“Even in school, the other kids accepted me. So did their parents. There was something about me that drew them in.”
That kind of support in Tennessee, was and continues to be rare. In 2023 Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a total ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender children, and limited drag performances to the point of almost banning them outright.
So, imagine how fortunate Shane was to be accepted in the 50s, although it wasn’t without incident.
She recalled when a young boy threw rocks at her and verbally accosted her.
In response Shane took a jump rope and whipped him with it.
Shane was not only capable, but more than willing to defend herself in the face of verbal and physical attacks.
She also had a gift for performing, and a love of music.
As a young adult, she became close friends with Little Richard, one of the most important figures in rock and roll and he encouraged her to explore the R & B and soul scene in Nashville.
She frequented clubs and performed at many of them.
As her singing career developed, Shane found that the early acceptance she experienced in life was going to be harder to get as Nashville audiences were openly hostile to her because she was Black and transgender.
Feeling that she would fare better away from the American Deep South, her friend, soul singer Joe Tex, encouraged her to move.
After stops in Boston and Montreal, she arrived in Toronto in 1959 where she felt she had found a home. Quote,
“One cannot choose where one is born, but you can choose your home. I chose Toronto. I love Toronto. I love Canadian people. I consider myself a part of them.”
Shane arrived in Toronto just as the city was becoming a music beacon in Canada.
As she rose in the R&B scene, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot were cutting their teeth at the city’s clubs, coffee shops and bars.
It didn’t take long for Shane to be performing sold-out shows at nightclubs throughout the city, and even appearing on local music television shows.
She released several singles, including a cover of You Are My Sunshine in the early-1960s.
In 1963, her cover of William Bell’s Any Other Way, hit #2 on the CHUM singles chart.
Before she knew it, she had become a central figure in shaping what became known as the Toronto sound, a style of R&B unique to the city.
Sadly, throughout her entire career, she was misidentified by the press as a man who performed in ambiguous clothing that suggested femininity.
Some simply called her a drag queen.
Whenever she was asked about her gender, she typically dodged the question.
Behind closed doors and with her mother, she identified as a woman, but in the public eye she preferred to ignore labels related to her sexuality and gender.
In 1967, Shane released a live album, the only album she ever did.
She shied away from releasing studio albums because she didn’t trust music labels.
And it wasn’t like they didn’t try to sign her.
Both Motown and Atlantic Records approached her, and legendary funk musician George Clinton attempted to convince her to join his iconic band Parliament-Funkadelic.
For Shane, it was never about making records.
What she loved more than anything was performing in front of a crowd. Quote,
“I’ve never really wanted to record. I get my charge from performing in front of people. That is my energy.”
Then, almost as soon as she burst onto the music scene of Toronto, she left it all behind.
In 1971, Shane retired from music and moved to Los Angeles to care for her aging mother.
The two later moved back to Nashville and lived together until her mother’s death in 1997.
From then on, Shane settled for a quiet life in Nashville.
As the years went on, the media incorrectly reported that she had died by suicide or been stabbed to death in a home robbery.
Neither were true. Shane was simply avoiding the public eye.
But a talent like hers couldn’t stay hidden forever.
In the 2010s a new generation discovered her, and the CBC released a radio documentary titled I Got Mine: The Jackie Shane Story.
Five years later, her 1967 live album Jackie Shane Live, was reissued and was shortlisted for a Polaris Music Prize.
This was followed in 2017 by an anthology album from her career that included monologues from her live shows.
Called Any Other Way, the album earned a Grammy nomination in 2019 for Best Historic Album.
With her music being rediscovered, she said,
“I had been discovered. It wasn’t what I wanted but I feel good about it. After such a long time, people still cared, and now those people whoa re just discovering me, it is just overwhelming.”
In 2019, Shane gave a rare interview with CBC Radio One’s Q. The interview was conducted by Elaine Banks, who was the producer of I Got Mine.
It was Shane’s first major interview since she left the spotlight behind almost fifty years earlier. Then, on Feb. 21, 2019, Shane died in her sleep.
In 2022, a Heritage Minute was released about her life, and she has been honoured with a massive mural on the side of a building on Yonge Street, in Toronto
On June 23, 2023, Jackie Shane Day was declared in the city.
That day, a Heritage Toronto plaque was unveiled honouring Shane’s life at the site of the former Saphire Tavern where she often performed the ceremony marked the start of Pride weekend.
Three years after Jackie Shane left the music scene to care for her mother, four women walked into a Toronto bar to sing karaoke.
They would become known as the Brunswick Four.
On a cool evening Adrienne Rosen (formerly Adrienne Potts), Pat Murphy, Sue Wells and Lamar Van Dyke (formerly Heather Elizabeth Nelson) walked into the Brunswick Tavern in Toronto.
The four friends were out on Jan. 5, 1974, and having fun performing during amateur night.
They took the Rodgers and Hammerstein song I Enjoy Being A Girl and changed the lyrics to I Enjoy Being A Dyke.
Although their performance was met with applause their own version of the song drew the ire of the bar’s owner, and several men in the crowd became angry \. The four were refused service and told to leave.
When they refused, the police were called.
A few minutes later, eight police officers dragged the women from the venue to arrest them, injuring two of them in the process.
Adding insult to injury the Brunswick Four have stated that police made inappropriate and harassing comments while escorting them to the station.
While they were not charged with a crime, the women were refused their right to a lawyer during their detention.
They protested their arrest by refusing to leave the police station.
Police forcibly ejected them, and Adrienne Rosen was punched in the back of the head by an officer.
Hoping to find witnesses, they returned to the Brunswick House and were met by two uniformed officers, two bouncers and two plainclothes detectives.
For the second time, the four women were put into a police car and taken to a station.
This time, they were not asked to leave.
Instead, they sat in the station for the next five hours as police officers made sexist and homophobic remarks.
Police pressed charges; Rosen, Murphy and Van Dyke were charged with creating a disturbance. Van Dyke was also charged with obstructing the police.
Their lawyer was Judy LaMarsh, a former Member of Parliament and the second woman to hold a federal cabinet post in Canadian history.
She was outraged over their treatment by police and insisted on representing the women pro bono.
The Toronto gay community also rallied around the women and formed the Brunswick Four Minus One Defense Fund to help them with any legal fees.
In May 1974, all charges were dismissed, except for Adrienne Rosen, who was convicted in the charge of creating a disturbance against. She was given a suspended sentence and placed on three months’ probation. Over the course of the trial, the full extent of the abuse the four experienced at the hands of police also came to light; Pat Murphy testified that she overheard one of the police officers say that the women should be shot.
Afterwards, Rosen, Murphy and Van Dyke charged the officers that arrested them with assault.
They produced evidence that included doctor’s notes and photographs of the bruises on their bodies.
What the women didn’t know was that while they were being arrested on that January night, the officers swapped their hats and badge numbers among themselves to prevent identification.
Upon learning this, Rosen, Murphy and Van Dyke all refused to participate in the trial, calling it a miscarriage of justice.
When the trial began, and the clerk asked everyone to rise, the women stayed seated in protest. When they were ordered to rise again, they didn’t budge.
All three were charged with criminal contempt of court and taken to jail cells. Rosen, and Van Dyke both apologized a few hours later but Murphy did not.
For that, she spent the next 30 days in jail.
She was the only person to be imprisoned over the entire incident because every officer involved in their violent arrest was acquitted.
While the Brunswick Four were in court, two men got married even as their union was not recognized by law.
That would come decades later.
In 1974, Chris Vogel and Richard North walked into the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Winnipeg, said their vows and became the first Canadian same-sex couple to be married in a church.
The church may have recognized their union, but the Manitoba government refused to register the marriage, or even grant the couple a licence.
The couple filed a lawsuit against the provincial government, but the case was dismissed on the basis that the dictionary definition of marriage did not include same sex unions.
Told their legal case was hopeless, Vogel and North went about their lives together as a married couple in every sense except the law.
By the dawn of the 21st century, there was a growing acceptance of same-sex marriage in Canada.
Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and the Yukon had all recognized same-sex marriage by the summer of 2004.
Seeing the changing tide, North and Vogel, along with two other same-sex couples, Stefphany Cholakis and Michelle Ritchot, and Laura Fouhse and Jordan Cantwell, launched a lawsuit, titled Vogel v. Canada on Aug. 26, 2004, which argued that the ban on marriage licences to same-sex couples violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Manitoba Justice Minister Gordon Mackintosh said quote,
“We will not oppose what they are seeking. We don’t have an interest in opposing legally recognized rights of Canadians. I think the weight of the decisions across the country have pointed to the conclusion that the current federal law is not in accordance with the Charter, so I am pleased that we’re going to have some definitive ruling here in Manitoba.”
On Sept. 16, 2004, Justice Douglas Yard of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba ordered the province to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
The day of the ruling, Stefphany Cholakis and Michelle Ritchot became the first same-sex couple to legally be married in Manitoba.
Laura Fouhse and Jordan Cantwell followed two days later.
But Vogel and North did not remarry.
They argued they were married in 1974 and didn’t need to do it over again.
All they wanted was a marriage licence that recognized their original union.
In 2018, a human rights adjudicator ruled that he was legally bound by the 1974 ruling against Vogel and North, stating there was nothing to register because there had been no marriage.
Since the ruling, nearly 1,000 same-sex couples have married in Manitoba, but not the two who started it all.
As of this recording in June 2024, the original marriage of Vogel and North has not been recognized by the Manitoba government.
The battleground for LGBTQ2S+ rights seem to always be in the courts.
And a teacher was at the center of a landmark provincial and federal legal case concerning the inclusion of sexual orientation as a protected human right in Canada.
His name? Delwin Vriend
Delwin Vriend’s story begins in 1966 in Iowa where he was born.
When he was two, his family moved to an organic vegetable farm near Edmonton.
As a child, he attended a private Christian elementary school and eventually enrolled in King’s College in Edmonton.
He later transferred to Calvin College in Michigan where he earned a degree in physics and mathematics.
After some time working as an electrician, he was offered a position as a laboratory coordinator and chemistry instructor at King’s College.
The contract was for three years at the Canadian Christian university.
Vriend was involved in a same-sex relationship, which was something he was open about with his church congregation.
But word soon reached his bosses at King’s College, and they promptly fired him, stating that his sexual orientation was not compatible with the Statement of Religious Belief adopted by the college.
Vriend immediately filed a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission, but this went nowhere as they refused his complaint because sexual orientation was not protected in the human rights code of Alberta.
Vriend then sued both the Government of Alberta and the Alberta Human Rights Commission.
Following his termination from the college, Vriend was unemployed for nine months before he found work with the AIDS Network of Edmonton Society.
Three years after he was dismissed, an Alberta court ruled that sexual orientation had to be protected under human rights legislation.
The Alberta government then appealed this decision.
Two years later, the Alberta Court of Appeal overruled the lower court’s decision. Sexual orientation was not a protected right.
Vriend wasn’t about to give up without a fight even if it had been five years since he had lost his job.
He took his case to the Supreme Court of Canada as Vriend v. Alberta.
On April 2, 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that provincial governments could not exclude protection of individuals from human rights legislation based on their sexual orientation.
It was a landmark decision that not only protected LGBTQ2S+ rights in Alberta, but across the country.
Many groups in Alberta lobbied the provincial government to use the notwithstanding clause, which gives a province the ability to overrule a federal decision, but the province didn’t pursue the case any further.
The decision was a victory for Vriend, who was now working for the University of Alberta library.
In 2000 publicity surrounding the case forced the reluctant gay rights hero to seek refuge in Paris and left Canada behind.
But Canadians didn’t forget him he was ranked 44th on Alberta Venture’s list of the 50 greatest Albertans of Alberta’s first century in 2005 and six years later he was inducted into the Q Hall of Fame Canada.
The Vriend v Alberta case became a basis for provincial cases against the ban on same-sex marriage in Canada, leading to its legalization nationwide.
And I think that will make one more interesting story to tell this episode.
The official road to legalizing same-sex marriage began with its legalization in Ontario on June 10, 2003, followed by B.C. on July 8, 2003, and the Yukon on March 19, 2004.
Over the course of the next year and a half, every province and territory except Alberta, Prince Edward Island, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories legalized same-sex marriage.
By then, numerous court cases were entitling same-sex couples to an increasing number of rights.
These were cases like M v H in 1999, which ruled same-sex couples in Canada were entitled to the same financial and legal benefits of traditional marriages, or Halpern v Canada in 2002 in Ontario and Hendricks and Leboeuf v Quebec in 2003 in Quebec, which ruled that the same-sex marriage ban was discriminatory.
Public opinion was also changing.
In 1996, 49 per cent of Canadian supported same-sex marriage. That number increased to 53 per cent within three years.
By Feb. 1, 2005, when Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Colter introduced the Civil Marriage Act to Parliament, 3,000 same-sex couples had already married in Canada. About 90 per cent of the Canadian population lived in a province that had legalized same-sex marriage.
Over the next few months, the Act went through its first and second readings, and survived a Conservative Party motion against the bill on April 12, 2005.
On May 4, 2005, the bill passed its second reading in Parliament.
Through all of this, the minority government of Paul Martin survived multiple confidence votes that could have brought down the government, forced an election and killed the bill.
On June 23, 2005, the Liberal Party, Bloc Quebecois and NDP voted to extend the sitting time of Parliament so that Bill C-38 could pass its third reading.
Five days later a vote was held on the final reading.
Nearly every NDP, Bloc & Liberal MP voted in favour of it.
The Conservative Party nearly unanimously voted against it.
The Civil Marriage Act passed with a vote of 158 to 133, and then moved on to the Senate where it passed and on July 20, 2005, at 4:45 p.m., Bill C-38 received Royal Assent from Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
She was serving as acting Governor General while Adrienne Clarkson was recovering from surgery.
With that Royal Assent, Canada became the fourth country in the world, and the first outside of Europe, to legalize same-sex marriage throughout its borders.
Today, same-sex marriage is legal in 37 countries around the world.
. In 2011, adoption by same-sex couples was legalized nationwide, and conversion therapy was banned in 2022.
Canada isn’t perfect by any means, and in some provinces, it feels like we are stepping backwards, but we have come a long way to becoming more tolerant.
I leave you today with a quote from Marsha P. Johnson “History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.”
and remember you never completely have rights, until we all have rights.
