Note to Canada's government - Our Canadian brothers and sisters aren't ATMs

Really.

A ruling is expected in the largest gay and lesbian class action suit in the history of... man this is huge. The Canadian government gave widowed partners in same-sex couples the pensions of their partners when it opted for full and equal marriage - for all those whose partners died after January 1998. Now those surviving partners of people who died before that date are suing for the pensions and accrued interest going all the way back to 1985. The total is over $100 million Canadian, which is about $78 American (man that joke never gets old).

I'd say there's a good chance that Team Q will win. From the Globe and Mail:

In two lower court rulings, Ottawa lost its argument that survivor benefits should only be extended to gays widowed after 1997. The judges agreed with the roughly 400 gays and lesbians in the class-action suit that the cutoff date should coincide with the Charter coming into effect.

In the latest decision in November, a panel of justices at the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the view of the Ontario Superior Court that the government's 1998 cutoff wasn't "rational."

That's three courts so far....

Canada is, of course, way ahead on the gays-are-real-human-beings game than the US is. Can you imagine a suit like this happening here? I mean, we have an international reputation for being letigious, but we not so recently had to win the right to exist. So this amount of money, while it's huge, could have been paid out evenly throughout the last 22 years so that it wouldn't be so much all at once. Instead, the Canadian government treated its own citizens like ATMs all these years, took their tax money and pension contributions, and kept the real and material benefits of paying those taxes away from a segment of their population. They made their bed, and now they have to sleep in it.

Also, one thing I love about Canadian newspapers is that they refer to their supreme court as "the Supreme Court of Canada", as if there's a need to clarify.

Welcome to Bizarro Canada, Population: 300,000,000

Read this from the Sacramento Bee:

Freddie Oakley, Yolo County's clerk-recorder, will distribute "certificates of inequality" to same-sex couples on Valentine's Day to protest the state's ban on gay marriage.

She said she designed the certificates herself as a way to "ease her soul" over having to deny marriage licenses to gays and lesbians.

Oakley's "Certificate of Inequality" claims that California wrongly deprives gays and lesbians of the right to marry.

"I issue this Certificate of Inequality to you because your choice of marriage partner displeases some people whose displeasure is, apparently, more important than principles of equality."

Contrast that with this from the Canadian Press via 365gay.com:

The rights of a same-sex couple to marry faced off Wednesday against the rights of a Saskatchewan marriage commissioner who said he couldn't perform the service because of religious beliefs. But Nichols, a 70-year-old devout Baptist, testified that performing same-sex marriages goes directly against all he knows. "My religious upbringing, my religious beliefs don't allow me to do same-sex marriage," he said.

It's like looking at opposite land. The US has a heterosexual woman who wants to marry gay and lesbian couples but can't, Canada has a heterosexual man who doesn't want to marry gay and lesbian couples but can't not.

The difference is that the American woman still does her job but finds a creative way to protest. The Canadian man just doesn't do his job. This is a hurdle that we will have to overcome: our straight allies are honest people who generally play by the rules, the other side doesn't.

Nichols could just quit, which he should if he doesn't want to do his job. While I would be weirded out to get one of Oakley's Certificates of Inequality, it'd be good to know that at least one person there is on our side.

The Quebecois are really weird

Parti Quebecois leader Andre Boisclair appeared in a political parody of Brokeback Mountain:

In the sketch, the Canadian prime minister and the U.S. president are portrayed naked from the waist up in a tent. Images of their faces are attached to actors' bodies. Bush at one point throws cherries at Harper's nipples which are covered with whipped cream. After the cherries land on the nipples, Boisclair is seen opening the tent flap and saying that Quebec isn't getting involved in that.

This might be some of that really weird allegorical French film, like the whipped cream represents free-trade agreements between the US and Canada, and the cherries have something to do with the war in Afganistan....

Or maybe the joke is that Boisclair's name starts with the French word for "wood".