Canada

February 27, 2007

Canada's Supreme Court will deliver a ruling Thursday on what is considered the biggest gay class action suit every filed, worth possibly as much as $100 million with accrued interest.

The case involves more than 1,000 gay men and lesbians whose same-sex partners died in the period between April 17, 1985 and January 1, 1998.

Those partners paid into the government run Canada Pension Plan most of their working lives, but unlike heterosexual pensioners, when they died their survivor benefits were not paid to their surviving partners.

In 2000 the federal government passed legislation allowing same-sex surviving partners to collect the pensions but restricted payments to those whose partners had died after January 1998. 

Longtime Toronto gay activist George Hislop went to court accusing the government of discrimination by not setting the cut-off point at 1985, the year in which the Charter of Rights took effect and opened the door for gays and lesbians to eventually win equal treatment under the law.

Hislop had been denied survivor benefits after his partner of 28 years, Ron Shearer, died in 1986. Shearer had paid into the plan for decades.

That lawsuit evolved into the class action case, but Hislop would not live to see the outcome. He died in October 2005 at the age of 78.

He did live however to see Ontario's highest court rule that denying retroactive same-sex benefits to widowed gays and lesbians violates their rights and is unconstitutional. 

The federal government appealed to the Supreme Court but because of Hislop's age and the ages of about 30 other litigants agreed to pay the back pensions on the provision they money would be returned to the government if they lost their case.

The class action suit involved gays and lesbians from Ontario and British Columbia but its outcome will affect elderly gay men and women across the country except in Quebec. Quebec has its own pension system and already included surviving partners.

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