For Canada, U.S. Debates (about abortion, birth control and same-sex marriage) Are Old News [View all]

[pampango]

“These issues do not seem to be as divisive and inflammatory in Canada as they seem to be in the United States,” Laura A. Liswood, the secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders , a policy program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said in a phone interview.

To many Americans, and particularly American women, who are wondering why some of the issues listed above still stir controversy decades after apparent resolution, Canada appears to have it all over the United States. Over the past three decades, Canada enacted a constitutional provision banning sex discrimination in 1983; lifted a ban on gays in the military in 1992; became one of the few countries with no legal restrictions on abortion in 1988; and legalized same-sex marriage in 2005.

Ms. Liswood, who is based in Washington, attributed the difference of attitude, at least in part, to Canada’s political system. “Ours,” she said, “is a winner-take-all system.” In Canada, which has a parliamentary system, it is more common to have to forge coalitions with other parties and find compromise, and, she said, Canadians seem to have come to terms with a large immigrant population and different cultures.

What’s more, Ms. Liswood pointed at the role that money plays in U.S. campaigns. “These social issues are great wedge issues that a lot of people raise money on,” she said. “Polarization is encouraged in that way,” deepening what is already a socioeconomic gap that is bigger in the United States than in Canada.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/us/30iht-letter30.html?_r=1

It is amazing that a country so close and so similar in many ways has progressed so much further and faster.