Quebecers have long led Canada in the modern move away from wedding vows toward common-law coupling, but now the province has roared past Sweden and Finland to lead the world. New data from the 2006 census released Wednesday shows no couples on the planet are known to shack up more than those in la belle province.
The dramatic move away from marriage is accelerating wildly in Quebec, with 35 per cent of couples choosing common-law arrangements compared to 30 per cent in 2001, the last time the data was collected by Statistics Canada.
In the other provinces, the proportion of common-law couples was closer to 13 per cent. Canada's national average of 18 per cent is well below Sweden and Finland, where respectively 25 and 24 per cent of couples who live together are unmarried, but no other jurisdiction in the world outpaces Quebec when it comes to unmarried unions.
Sebastien Ross and Nancy Mercier didn't shun marriage when they decided to live together in their Montreal home 12 years ago.
The option just wasn't on their radar.
"The concept of choice is very pertinent because I don't see it as a choice to not marry," said Ross, who teaches computer skills to people trying to rejoin the workforce.
"I just don't have the taste and I don't see what it gives me. I don't see any objective thing that it could change in my life. Not in personal relations with my partner, not with my family, not anyone. There's just no link."
Quebecers have steadily withdrawn from marriage since the Quiet Revolution took off in the 1960s. Quebecers refer to the previous decades as "the Great Darkness" when the Catholic church, an English-speaking business elite and a near-totalitarian provincial government under Maurice Duplessis dominated every aspect of life for francophones.
As new governments of the '60s and '70s kicked the church out of the education and health systems, Quebecers rejected clerics who forbade birth control and pushed them to stay on the farm, produce babies and avoid the evils of liberalism.
Legal reforms that made divorce accessible in the late 1960s liberated a generation of Quebecers who became the first to "live in sin" and gain acceptance. The trend accelerated through the '80s and '90s.
"The 1970s was clearly the first era that allowed it," said Marie-Michele, a retired academic who met her partner, Adrien, in 1972, after they were both divorced. (The couple did not want to use their surnames.)
"Ten years earlier, it wasn't possible to live like that."
Marie-Michele remembers early discussions with family about her then-cutting-edge choice to live with a man without marriage.
"But we've certainly never had any real conflict over it," she said.
Adrien, a 66-year-old retired professor, says he likes to joke that "marriage is the main cause of divorce. So we decided not to marry to avoid divorce."
"For our circle, we are a couple, there is no difference," Adrien added. "It's Adrien and Marie-Michele, and has been for a long time. Being married or not, I don't know what would have been the difference."
Common-law living is increasingly popular across Canada and the industrialized world. But French-speaking Quebec's history of domination by one religion combined with a mass conversion to secularism boosted the phenomenon dramatically in the province, experts say.
Quebec's anglophone and immigrant minorities are more likely to follow the Canadian pattern, they add.
For francophone Quebecers, marriage and Catholicism were inextricably linked. When they rejected religion, marriage went with it, according to sociologist Martin Meunier.
"Quebecers are throwing out the baby with the bath water," Meunier said.
"In other places, religion and marriage are two things. Here, the two were so closely tied we are liquidating marriage as we liquidate the Catholic religion."
Quebec has followed a similar trajectory to Sweden, the former world leader in common-law partnership. Sweden was also dominated for years by one religion, Lutheranism, and ditched religious allegiance for secular values.
Celine Le Bourdais, a demographer and expert on families at McGill University, says the various protestant religions more common in the rest of Canada have been more adaptable than Catholicism, accepting contraception, divorce and less formal weddings.
"The Catholic church, even now, is opposed to many things," Le Bourdais said.
Meunier points to other religious rituals that are disappearing. In the 1990s, the children of baby boomers stopped baptizing their children in great numbers.
"And now we have a complete meltdown where people are dying and aren't even getting a Catholic funeral," he said.
Le Bourdais said many Quebecers are unaware that common-law relationships have hidden pitfalls when it comes to dividing property in the case of a split up, or death.
When a partner dies, property is automatically passed on to children rather than the spouse, for example. Common-law spouses also have fewer obligations to share property when they split, she said.
"Mostly it's women getting the short end of it," Le Bourdais says.
Even though Adrien and Marie-Michele and Ross and Mercier say they don't need marriage, each couple offers a glimmer of hope that the institution might survive.
Ross and Mercier have two small children, aged three and five. Ross sees some advantages for children to have married parents in the event of a sudden death or breakup. They're considering it.
Marie-Michele, 61, admits she has thought a wedding would be nice at different times in her 32-year relationship with Adrien.
Adrien adds that he likes the idea of a wedding, more for the celebration with family and friends than anything else.
"Maybe we'll throw a big wedding for our 40th," Adrien says.
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