Posted on 11/27/2004 6:07:26 PM PST by Ellesu
Toronto activist led 1,300 others in 18-year battle
Like everyone else, Ron Shearer spent his working life paying into the Canada Pension Plan. But when the Toronto artist died in 1986, his partner of 27 years, George Hislop, was denied a survivor's pension. The reason? He was gay.
Eighteen years and two monumental court battles later, Hislop and some 1,300 other widowed gays and lesbians scored a major victory yesterday when the Ontario Court of Appeal awarded them pensions retroactively, ruling that denying the benefit was an unjustifiable infringement of their equality rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Preventing access to such a "fundamental pillar" of Canada's retirement income system amounted to "a complete non-recognition of these same-sex survivors as full members of Canadian society," justices Louise Charron, Kathryn Feldman and Susan Lang said in their decision.
"I always knew Canadians are interested in fair play and the courts have borne this out," said Hislop, 77, a long-time Toronto gay activist, who hopes the monthly stipend will end his life of "genteel poverty" and allow him to take "a little vacation to a warm climate."
(Excerpt) Read more at thestar.com ...
Money! Some of these guys have figured out how to get modestly wealthy by being "gay".
77 eh...won't be long and he will get a good long vacation in a 'warm climate'.
I can hear him/she/it singing "San Fransisco hear I come."
Canada is liberal heaven. I'm still waiting for all of the defeated democrats to move there.
Marriage is man+woman --> possibility of progeny to support parents and the civilized state . . .So, when my uncle married his second wife at the age of 80, it was an invalid marriage? I still don't understand why this is an issue: first of all, it happened in a foreign country, secondly no one forces any religion to accept the marriages of any other religion or purely state marriages, and third, I always thought personal autonomy was a tenent of conservatism, and the individual should be free to manage his money (and his estate) as he wished.
Wait a sec now...in a sodomite "marraige", would the survivor be a widow or widower?????? Widowette, possibly?
This is why I object so strongly(aside from the obvious moral reasons) to gay marriage. They will get insurance benefits, they will be able to adopt children, they will get survivor pensions, etc. That is wrong. the liberal argument that we should be more like Canada is a horrifying suggestion. I wish they would all just move there.
I beg to differ, probably the Boca Raton or Fort Lauderdale area. Have we lost this one already in the U.S.? Is the jack-booted IRS gonna confiscate my earnings so some sodomite can enjoy a lifestyle I can't afford? Is the whole world just gone topsy-turvy?
The way to show the ridiculousness of it all it to let it go through somewhere (thank God it's in Canada! HA HA!). The way we'll fix the system is to break it first. Then they'll see what we've all been trying to tell them for some time. Maybe we can learn and preempt it here.
tenet
I have a suggestion, if all the straight people started pretending to be gay, all the money would be sucked ( no pun intended) down the drain, then the government would stop being so lenient, and we could all go back to acting straight, with a little money to show for it! < sarcasm>
I agree...the hole world has turned upside down...
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2004/11/27ky/A1-boyd1127-9280.html
http://galvnews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=d0b925bfc93cca46
http://www.indystar.com/articles/2/197917-1332-009.html
Oh, cheeze, cry me a river.
Did or didn't Ron Shearer, who "spent his working life paying into the Canada Pension Plan", know what same sex cohabitants [a.k.a. homosexual partners] were ineligible for survivor's pension?
-- If he knew they ,as homosexuals, were ineligible why didn't he direct money into an annuity or some such for Hislop? Or insure himself enough to assure Hislop a comfortable life after his [Shearer's] death? The fact that Shearer might have been required to contribute to the Canadian pension plan -- as with out Social Security -- is no excuse. An impediment, yes. And excuse, no.
-- What steps had/has Hislop taken to cushion is own old age? Even if he did not have the mind, inclination or ability to feather his own nest as Shearer's partner for more than a quarter of a century, surely they would've/should've gone over questions and plans re: "the future", just like any other married couple.
-- And, finally, if Shearer continued paying in to the pension plan and even after decades still did not know that Hislop would not be eligible... why, oh, why should the Canadian tax payers be forced to pony up for his ignorance?
Look for the 9th Circuit down here to use this as a precedent.
No no that's the wrong way to look at it. "It" will be bring the Canadian tax money down here to the lower 48. At which time he will pay his fair share in the fight against AIDS and poverty, and for abortions and sex education. :)
That's too late try 1st grade.
"What defines a marriage besides the sharing of assets?"
Why should there be any other definition for the state?
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