Canadians still have one last chance to stop gay ‘marriage’ from becoming the law of the land. While it is true that the courts have already imposed the perversion of marriage upon the people of British Columbia and Ontario, such a move will not really be finalized until the Parliament passes the legislation presently proposed by the Government. We still have one last chance to stop this abomination, though it will not be easy.

The final vote on the bill changing the definition of marriage will be a ‘free’ one. What that means is that it will not be subject to the usual party discipline, nor will it be considered a vote of non confidence if the measure does not carry. Each and every single Member of Parliament will be allowed to vote based upon both their personal views and the views of their constituents. This means one thing: if we can find the votes, we can still defeat this bill.

There are three hundred and one Member of Parliament. So, in other words, we need to find one hundred and fifty-one votes in order to defeat the bill. Are the votes there?

At present the House of Commons is divided as follows: 171 Liberals, 63 Canadian Alliance members, 34 Bloc Québécois, 15 Progressive Conservatives, 14 New Democrats, and 4 Independents.

Now the Canadian Alliance is Canada’s most conservative party, so it can be counted upon that virtually all of its members will vote against the bill, though a few of the more libertarian members might vote for it. So let’s say that we can expect to get sixty votes against from the Alliance.

Similarly, we can expect that most of the Progressive Conservatives will vote against the bill (though certainly not all of them). A few members are old-fashioned ‘Red’ Tories and will probably vote for the bill as, I suspect, will openly gay MP Scott Brison. I would expect that about ten Tories will vote against the bill and five for it. So we are now left with a total of seventy of one hundred and fifty-one needed votes.

The Bloc Québécois is a tough beast to deal with. People in Quebec, for the most part, support gay marriage more strongly than people in other Provinces, and the Bloc has generally been quite far to the left on social issues. However, I would expect that we will still have a handful of Bloc votes come down on the ‘no’ side of this issue, if only because for some it will be a political or personal imperative. The recent efforts of the Catholic Church to fight the gay marriage bill will probably resonate in some areas of heavily-Catholic Quebec. Arbitrarily, I will guess that ¼ of the Bloc Caucus will, for one reason or another, vote against the bill. That leaves us with seventy-nine votes.

The NDP are Canada’s most left-wing party, and they can be counted upon to mostly support the bill. At best, there will be maybe one or two defections from MP’s who represent rural areas without a terribly secure base, and for whom voting against the bill might be a political imperative. Eighty-two votes.

One of the four Independents is former Alliance MP Jim Pankiw. His vote against the bill can, I think, be reliably counted upon. Eight-three.

What this means is that we will need the votes of sixty-eight members of the Liberal Caucus against the bill in order to defeat it. The heart of the battle, therefore, is within the Liberal Party and, more than that, it is in Ontario, where polls reveal that roughly half of the people are opposed to gay marriage. According to a June 2003 Ipsos-Reid poll, only 49% of Ontarians support same-sex marriage. Those numbers are undoubtedly inflated by the probable majorities which stand in support in Toronto and Ottawa. According to some news reports there are already fifty Liberal MP’s committed to a public battle against gay marriage: we need just eighteen more.

There are about one hundred Liberal MP’s from Ontario, many of whom represent socially conservative areas. We can write off most of the urban MP’s, it’s the rest that we have to work on. They must understand that supporting this execrable measure will be notably unpopular among their constituents and that they will have to go before the voters not long after voting upon this bill. They will probably vote in the fall of this year, and there will probably be an election next spring. Our people forget things: but they don’t forget quite that quickly.

Now, as many have pointed out, even if Parliament doesn’t pass the bill- the Supreme Court will still legalize gay marriage. However, a victory against the national gay marriage bill could swing momentum- perhaps enough to convince a worried Liberal Government to take some further action in the face of an oncoming election. Moreover, the issue could be used at the Provincial level, with citizens demanding that Provincial Governments (many of which will be up for re-election in the next two years) invo9ke the Notwithstanding Clause to shield themselves from gay marriage.

Imagine this scenario for a moment: this fall the Parliament defeats the idea of gay marriage by a narrow margin. Not long after that the Supreme Court goes ahead and legalizes gay marriage anyways, over the votes of Parliament. The new Prime Minister, Paul Martin, will then be forced either to go to the polls at that point or attempt to govern without a mandate from the people. He will not be able to move in support of same-sex marriage because of the opposition both of the people and from within his own party. However, he will not be able to move against it either, because doing so would almost certainly cause a split in his own party. None of this is a certainty. However, it is the last, best, hope of those of us who believe in a moral Canada.