This one’s really for Stan, our in-house marriage guy.

In Ontario, gay marriage is legal. Toronto is Canada’s largest city and home to the country’s largest gay population. Number of Canadian gay couples applying for marriage licenses this year?

One.

On the other hand, there’s good news for the polygamous community of Bountiful, British Columbia:

Oppal asked for a special prosecutor to look into the case in May after a months-long review by his ministry’s criminal justice branch concluded there was no likelihood of any conviction on the charges.
Peck agreed that convicting members of Bountiful on sex charges was unlikely and that it’s time to find out once and for all if Canada’s laws against polygamy will stand… Governments may refer legal questions to a court without anyone actually being charged – it happened with the same-sex marriage issue in 2004 and previously on the right of Quebec secession in 1998.
“If the law is struck down, the onus will be on the federal government to develop a new, Charter-compliant legislative solution to the problem,” Peck wrote.

In his very effective campaign for gay marriage, Andrew Sullivan argued that there was no serious constituency for polygamy and spoke breezily of “the decline of polygamy in the west“. He needs to get out of the house more: Polygamy is on the rise in the west – in the French suburbs, and in the British tax system, and, indeed, in the Muslim quartiers of Toronto.

The number of takers for gay marriage is tiny. The demand for polygamous marriage is far larger. It’s not hard to predict which will be a more common feature of life in the west a decade or two hence.