Canada set to OK gay unions

TORONTO — The House of Commons voted Tuesday night to extend marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples throughout Canada despite strong opposition from the Conservatives and a splintering of the governing Liberal party caucus.

The vote sealed two years of provincial court decisions that gave same-sex couples the right to marry in eight of 10 provinces and one of the three northern territories. When the Senate approves the measure, considered a formality, Canada will become the third national government, after the Netherlands and Belgium, to enact such rights.

Though the vote was largely symbolic, gay rights leaders hailed it as a milestone because it was the first time a Canadian legislative body had voted to change the traditional definition of marriage beyond a union of a man and a woman.

"It's about the right to love," Real Menard, a Bloc Quebecois lawmaker who is gay, said after the vote. "When you are in love, things are different, and everyone is entitled to that."

The Conservatives promised to revoke the legislation if they won power in elections, which are expected early next year, setting up a potentially divisive political campaign in the winter.

The vote in Commons followed weeks of heated debate infused with biblical references and emotional warnings about moral decay on one side, and promises of an expansion of equal rights on the other.

Even before the vote, the Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, questioned the legislation's authority because the Liberals needed the votes of the separatist Bloc Quebecois to win passage. "Because it is being passed with the support of the Bloc, I think it will lack legitimacy for a lot of Canadians," he said in a televised interview.

The Liberals shot back that the Conservatives had made a tacit alliance with the Bloc just last month in an effort to call early elections.

It was the latest effort by the two leading parties to gain advantage from an issue that polls show divides the Canadian public down the middle, with younger and urban voters generally in favor of expanding marriage rights and older and rural voters generally against.