Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Jun 30 2005 (IPS) — As Canada joins the three other countries in the world to legalise same-sex marriage, religious conservatives who actively opposed the move are licking their wounds and vowing that their fight is not over.

This week, after much tumultuous debate and divisions within all political parties, the Canadian House of Commons passed by a vote of 158 to 133 a bill that broadens the traditional male-female definition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples.

The other three countries are Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

But a multi-denominational coalition of evangelical Christians, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs, which organised rallies in various Canadian cities against the measure, will continue to lobby against any further "incursion" into their faiths, says Charles McVety, the president of Canada Christian College.

Traditionally apolitical, Canadian religious conservatives are looking at getting more involved in political parties. "We can have great impact at the local level just by being involved in party politics," McVety said.

One manifestation of this has been the nomination of federal Conservative party candidates for Parliament with a strong Christian background. "You can have a member of parliament nominated by a few hundred votes [at the local constituency level]," he added.

Another is the increased lobbying presence in Canada of the U.S. Christian right organisation Focus on the Family, whose Vancouver-based Canadian branch has set up an office in Ottawa. The group did not return several calls for comment.

But the association of the main opposition Conservative party, which led the fight against gay marriage in the House of Commons, along with the Christian right, is jeopardising its chances of beating the Liberal-led minority government in the forthcoming federal election, says Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson.

"Healthy conservatism promotes the continuity of civilisation, the importance of community, the dangers of thoughtless change. It does not, or should not, assert the right of white Christian heterosexual males of a certain age to limit the rights of everyone else," he wrote on Wednesday.

Unlike their U.S. neighbours, Canadians "at a gut level" are very uncomfortable with the aggressive Christian right political agenda seen south of the border, Murray Dobbin, a Vancouver-based author and commentator, told IPS.

"Canadian political culture is becoming increasingly secular over the years if you look at the trend line, especially compared to the U.S. where you see the trend line is for more and more people to be born-again Christian," he said.

And this multi-cultural alliance of social conservatives may not hold after the parliamentary same-sex vote, says Carleton University political scientist Jonathan Malloy, who is currently writing a book on evangelical political activity in Canada.

"Non-Christian groups have been reluctant to get on board with evangelicals and trust them. There is the larger issue of diversity and tolerance," he said.

Many Muslims are uncomfortable with the concept of gay marriage, but in the post-9/11 world, this single issue will not drive them to abandon either the ruling Liberals or the social democratic New Democrats for the Conservatives, which have long been perceived as "anti-immigrant," says Halima Mautbur, a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada (CAIR-CAN).

In the case of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was held by U.S. authorities at an airport in New York City and then sent back to Syria, his country of birth, where he was allegedly tortured, the leadership of the Conservative party or its predecessor, the Canadian Alliance, has not been sympathetic, she told IPS.

"In the time that he was detained in Syria from 2002 to 2003, the Conservatives were very quick to denounce him as a terrorist," Mautbur said.

Also, it is not clear that Canada’s three million evangelical Christians can be mobilised like their U.S. counterparts behind a single right-wing social conservative movement, according to Jonathan Malloy.

"There is some convincing evidence that Canadian evangelicals are not as economically conservative as American evangelicals," he said. "Canadians are more supportive of state intervention and government spending."

The important element of the same-sex marriage debate was the "sophisticated" effort by groups like the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada to maintain and build their base of support for future political battles. "They are the ones pushing for amendments to ensure that churches will not lose their tax status if they refuse to marry gays," he said.

Taking the long view to building support for what he calls the small "c" conservative values of smaller government, personal responsibility, private accountability and stronger support for the United States is Joseph Ben Ami, an Orthodox Jew and the executive director of a new social conservative public policy think tank, the Ottawa-based Institute for Canadian Values.

"The conservative movement [in Canada] is probably where it was in the United States, 30 years ago. The conservative wing of the Republican party was fairly weak and the Republican party policy was to adopt what I would call a ‘me-too’ liberalism. The Democrats would propose something and conservatives, just to prove that they were mainstream, would adopt essentially the same policies with minor variances," he told IPS.

Not only does the ICV, which calls itself Judeo-Christian in its orientation, aim to produce papers and studies to broaden the public policy debate in Canada, it also seeks to to encourage "marginalised" Canadians of faith to become more engaged in politics at the municipal, provincial and federal levels.

"We want to encourage them, we want to provide some training, to give them the tools and skills to be successful, to be able to represent their views in a cogent and articulate manner," Ben Ami explained.

Meanwhile, feminist author Judy Rebick, who has carried the battle for abortion rights in Canada for more than two decades against the pro-life lobby, dismisses the notion that Canada will always be immune to the appeal of the social conservatives.

Quebec, which was ruled by the Catholic Church until the 1950s, has remained the major bulwark in Canada in terms of opposition of religion on politics, she told IPS.

But with support for sovereignty at an all-time high, the dynamics of Canadian politics could change in a few years, she adds.

"As long as Quebec is part of Canada, the religious right can never have that kind of influence they have in the United States," she said. "But of course, it is possible that Quebec could leave Canada, and that is where I would start to worry."