(from Klein's marriage defiance a form of apartheid by JOHN IBBITSON in the Globe and Mail)

In 2000, the Alberta government passed its own law, declaring that marriages in that province must be exclusively between two people of different sexes. The legislation invoked the Charter of Rights and Freedoms' notwithstanding clause to override any federal or judicial attempt to strike down the bill.

The purported legal grounds: While the feds may have jurisdiction over defining marriage in Section 91 of the constitution, Section 92 gives provincial governments responsibility for "solemnizing" them -- in other words, for issuing the licence and registering the marriage.

At this point, Mr. Klein could simply admit defeat, and withdraw the bill. (It must be reaffirmed, regardless, in 2005.) Unless he does, however, same-sex marriage will be legal everywhere in Canada except Alberta.

In other words, homosexual citizens will enjoy a fundamental right in 90 per cent of the country that they will be denied in one province, just as southern states, using obstructionist senators, the fiction of providing "separate but equal" facilities and inventive voting laws, kept their black citizens in thrall for generations after the 13th Amendment theoretically made those citizens free.