The Court of Appeal for Ontario reformulated the common law definition of marriage to be: "the voluntary union for life of two persons to the exclusion of all others."

Several Canadian provinces have recognized the right to same-sex marriage under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

We face a problem similar to one that recently confronted the Court of Appeal for Ontario, the highest court of that Canadian province, when it considered the constitutionality of the same-sex marriage ban under Canada's Federal Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter).

In the end, `an argument that marriage is heterosexual because it `just is' amounts to circular reasoning

Of these six jurisdictions, three (Massachusetts, Canada, and South Africa) arrived at that position through judicial decision

In mid-2003, an Ontario appeal court declared that the longstanding common law exclusion of same-sex couples from civil marriage was unconstitutional

—the Court of Appeal for Ontario had already found in 2003 that marriage equality must be achieved as 'Exclusion of same-sex couples from the institution of marriage perpetuates the view that same-sex relationships are less worthy of recognition than opposite-sex relationships, and offends the dignity of persons in same-sex relationships.'

As a result, same-sex marriages have generally come to be viewed as legal and have been regularly taking place in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec the Yukon, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan.

—the Government of Canada proposed legislation that would change the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples and asked the Supreme Court to determine its constitutionality.

—recognized that seven lesbian and gay couples' reasons for wanting to engage in civil marriage- "to celebrate their love and commitment to each other" 89-were the same as those of heterosexual couples.

[HTML] Manitoba Law Journal: A Review of the Current Legal Landscape 2013 Volume 37 (1)

[BOOK] Responsive judicial review: democracy and dysfunction in the modern age