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Canada census to
count same-sex couples
for the first time
By AP from iht.com on
the Web, September 9, 2007
TORONTO, Sept 6 – Canada will
release its first census count of same-sex married couples next week, but some
activists in the gay and lesbian community are not happy with the way the census
treated the question.
Some object that gay couples were relegated to the census questionnaire's
"other" box, and some asked whether same-sex marriage should be counted at all.
"I don't think we should be a segregated group just because we're same-sex
married. Marriage is marriage," Helen Kennedy, executive director of Egale
Canada, an advocate group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered rights,
said in an interview last month.
The group urged people to list their relationship as husband or wife rather than
filling in the "other" box, and in the end it said many members simply chose not
to complete the census in protest.
When Canada became the third country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage
in 2005, its census officials hurried to include that group in the next count.
The term "spouse" was suggested during focus group testing but proved too
confusing for participants, said Anne Milan, a senior analyst at Statistics
Canada. Terms like "husband" and "wife" were also ruled out, as they are
not commonly used in the gay community, she said.
The end result was an "other" box "where people were encouraged to include
same-sex married couple as a write-in response.
Statistics Canada and Egale are talking about how to change the counting process
next time.
Last November, the now-defunct advocacy group Canadians For Equal Marriage,
based on its research of municipal records, reported that 12,438 marriage
licenses had been granted to same-sex couples since 2003.
Same-sex common-law couples were recorded in the 2001 census. There were
34,200 such unions, representing 0.5 percent of all couples in Canada.
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