Chris Selley: Why did it take so long to address Bountiful’s horror stories?

National Post
Chris Selley
August 15, 2014

Reasonable people disagree on whether polygamy should be illegal in Canada. With Wednesday’s announcement that Winston Blackmore and Jim Oler, the former and current bishops of Bountiful, B.C., again face charges under Section 293 of the Criminal Code — which prohibits all forms of multiple marriage — that debate will likely reignite. But everyone agrees, I imagine, that the mere existence of polygamous households and communities is far less an affront to Canadian society than the harmful practices generally associated with them: Most serious is the ghastly trifecta of child trafficking, sexual abuse and forced marriage, although abandoning surplus young males along the sides of highways isn’t great either.

Can polygamy exist without those harms? We spent years debating that. Could Section 293 withstand a Charter challenge? B.C. authorities spent years averting their eyes from Bountiful, for fear it wouldn’t (at which point human civilization would draw quickly to a close, they seemed to believe). At long last, the government asked the B.C. Supreme Court for its opinion on the matter, and in 2011 it ruled Section 293 was indeed constitutional. And so here we are: Messrs. Blackmore and Oler face up to five years in the hoosegow for their multi-wife lifestyles. Hurray for us. It only took decades.