“Saskatchewan is more advanced than us. I cannot accept this! ” launches Mona Greenbaum. The director of the Coalition of LGBT + Families is among those who would have liked Quebec to recognize multi-parenthood in its reform of family law.
According to her, the phenomenon of multi-parenthood – or the fact that a child has three or four parents – will increase in the coming years, so that three other Canadian provinces (Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan) have already recognized this in their laws.
Lesbian couple with sperm donor friend, gay couple with gestational mother, infertile heterosexual couple who decide to start a family with three, the examples are numerous. “They exist,” says Mona Greenbaum, hence the importance of recognizing them in the law to protect their children.
In the event of a conflict, “for custody, both legal parents can block access to the child completely, but also the (third) parent has no legal obligations, so it makes the child very vulnerable not to. not have his family legally recognized and supervised ”, she illustrated.
Introducing Bill 2 reforming family law on Thursday, the Minister of Justice, Simon Jolin-Barrette, declared that “the Quebec family and its needs have changed a lot in recent decades; society is changing and this must be reflected in the law ”.
But he added in the same breath that “for us, it is very clear that the family unit has only two parents”. Mona Greenbaum sees this as a kind of double talk.
“Simon Jolin-Barrette is congratulating himself on having done something so progressive, (…) but we are behind three other Canadian provinces which have found solutions for that, which have protected children with laws, ”she said in an interview.
For her, the government of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) “caught up” with its reform, but lacked “courage” when the time came to do more for families in Quebec. The need to please a more traditional electoral base is probably not unrelated to it, she reflects.
Same disappointment on the side of Isabel Côté, professor at the University of Quebec in Outaouais, and holder of the Canada Research Chair on the procreation by others and family ties. “I wish we had gone further,” she said. We could have taken the extra step and gone towards a multi-parent family as in Ontario. ”
The expert cannot help observing that “we think in a heteronormative way. (…) It is really the strength of the Euro-American model of kinship which assumes that children have two parents. Obviously, the two-parent pattern is really very strong in our social representations ”.
Yet, she says, today’s multi-parent family is, in the vast majority of cases, born out of extremely careful thought, with parents even going so far as to discuss the school they want for the little one even before. its design. In the other provinces, “so far, we have not detected any difficulties related to this mode”.
“A decisive turn”
The one who acts as special advisor to the Minister in this matter, the author of the report “For a family law adapted to new conjugal and family realities”, Professor Alain Roy, pleads that the government has undertaken with its reform a “Decisive turn towards the future”.
“I salute the courage and determination of the Minister of Justice who has not hesitated to tackle the imposing project that the reform of family law represents despite the delicate and sensitive social issues that it raises” , he said in a written statement sent to The Canadian Press.
The voluminous Bill 2 also recognizes and regulates the use of surrogate mothers, which was eagerly awaited – eight provinces have already done so – in addition to enshrining in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms a new right to knowledge. origins.
Here again, Professor Côté sees something to correct. In his opinion, Quebec should not allow the surrogate mother to think after childbirth about the possibility of keeping her parentage with the child. She believes this will create tension with the intended parents, instead of uniting the family.
But this is another element of the bill that made the lawyer Florence Ashley Paré, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, jump: a person will only be able to change their sex marker on their birth certificate if they have had surgery. to modify his genitals.
For others, the bill provides for the possibility of having a gender identity different from the sex marker. In other words, we “expose” anyone who has not had surgery, worries Ms. Paré, herself a trans person. On social networks, the LGBT + community is in “panic mode”, she says.
“That would create in Quebec the most regressive situation in all of Canada. (…) We are really in a situation where a person could have a surgery that they would not otherwise want to meet the prerequisite that the government has just created. ”
On the issue of multi-parenthood, “Quebec stands out for its lack of openness,” said Ms. Paré.
“I’m pretty disappointed,” she drops. It really makes me less inclined to return to Quebec. ”
Bill 2 will be the subject of public consultations and will be considered clause by clause before its adoption. The Legault government has already announced its intention to possibly file a second part of its reform of family law, on the theme of conjugality.
Quebec family law has not been revised since the 1980s.