Proposed law change is key for gay parents
Legislation aims to ensure couples will get same rights as heterosexual counterparts
Five years ago, Raquel Grand had to adopt her wife’s newborn daughter — running up $5,000 in lawyer’s fees — to legally become a parent.
That won’t happen anymore under legislation introduced Thursday to give same-sex parents in Ontario who aren’t biologically related to their children the same legal rights as heterosexual moms and dads.
Nor will people who are not legally considered parents have to live in fear they cannot make medical and other decisions about their children if a spouse becomes incapacitated. That almost happened when Grand’s wife Deanna Djos was hemorrhaging dangerously after giving birth to their girl, Thora.
“At that time, I wasn’t legally the mother of my child. Those were added stresses,” Grand said Thursday after Attorney General Yasir Naqvi tabled the bill in the legislature.
Naqvi acknowledged the legislation — which he hopes will pass by Christmas and take effect in January — is “long overdue.”
It has been 10 years since an Ontario Superior Court ruling that couples who use sperm donors and other reproductive technologies should enjoy the same parental rights as people who conceive naturally.
The province’s failure to act sooner prompted a constitutional challenge of parentage laws that was settled in June with a promise to bring this bill forward, allowing same-sex parents to register births in the same way as male-female couples.
Naqvi said the money and energy LGBTQ families were expending on paperwork and worrying should be going toward diapers and play time. He credited New Democrat MPP Cheri DiNovo (Parkdale-High Park) for her private members’ bill to grant equal rights to all parents, which inspired the government legislation.
“The government was under the gun to get something done . . . it’s a victory for queer families,” said DiNovo, lamenting the years of delay.
Kathleen Wynne, the province’s first openly gay premier, signalled last May that the government would introduce legislation this fall.
Toronto family lawyer Joanna Radbord, who represented nine families in the court challenge, said her prior- ity now is to make sure the definition of “parent” in the 66-page bill is clear enough and broad enough.
“The intention is to eliminate all doubts around parentage. I want to make sure that we know with certainty that the co-parent is the parent and shall be declared the parent . . . in the same way as biological fathers.”
Kirsti Mathers McHenry, a lesbian mother who worked with Naqvi’s ministry over the summer as the legislation was drafted, said, “if we get this bill right, there will be no second-class parents anymore.”