Evidence filed with BC Supreme Court
The CPAA has filed its evidence with the court.
The main thrust of our evidence was to describe examples of Canadian polyamourous families. We filed affidavits with detailed descriptions of five different healthy, functioning poly groups in five provinces. Each group was described by one of its members.
We also filed an affidavit describing the results of the CPAA’s survey of Canadian poly households, and some social science material. That affidavit is here.
Names and other identifying information have been redacted from some of these.
Update June 10: Some of these weren’t properly set up and weren’t readable to a lot of people. That’s been fixed. Also, Google Docs has problems with PDFs and will sometimes say they’re unavailable. You’ll almost always get the document if you hit reload once or twice. We’re looking into better ways to host these. We’ll probably also either stop redacting names, or stop posting filings.
Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association -
Could you post these PDFs on your site instead of Google Docs? When I try to access them, I get the following error: “Sorry, the page (or document) you have requested is not available.” A friend of mine was also unable to access these files. Thanks!
I tried again, and got a different error: “Sorry, we are unable to retrieve the document for viewing.”
The reason we use Google Docs is that we don’t have the bandwidth or the storage to post these locally. It may take us a while to get our account upgraded to the point where we can do that, if we ever do. If we make a habit of posting stuff in the future, we’ll improve matters.
The error messages appear to be Google bugs or overload problems at Google. Usually you’ll get the document if you reload the page.
jbash: They’re all good, but yours is particularly beautiful. I particularly like your “impact on the family” section.
Basically, the law is both mis-aimed and overbroad. They object to men keeping harems of cowed women, and so decide to carpet bomb the “harem” area, while ignoring the “cowed” aspect of spousal abuse that is the morally repugnant part.
I agree that sometimes a law has to be written to prohibit what is objectively measurable and enforceable rather than what is truly the target, but surely it can be done better than this.
I think that poly conjugal ‘family’ constellations are contrary to common sense. Most of the women who are involved are probably at a fertile stage of their life. When they are ovulating (and therefore can more easily become pregnant) they chance getting pregnant from more than one gendered sexual partner that produces semen. They will not know who the baby was fathered by until a DNA sample can be given. Meanwhile, months of the time for pre-natal semen producing gender parent bonding has gone by. One of the semen producers may want the child aborted if the child is a result of their semen. Meanwhile, the other semen producing potential parent wants the child. What a predicament to be in!
Barbara Gobbi says:
September 26, 2010 at 10:15 pm
I think that poly conjugal ‘family’ constellations are contrary to common sense. Most of the women who are involved are probably at a fertile stage of their life. When they are ovulating (and therefore can more easily become pregnant) they chance getting pregnant from more than one gendered sexual partner that produces semen. They will not know who the baby was fathered by until a DNA sample can be given. Meanwhile, months of the time for pre-natal semen producing gender parent bonding has gone by. One of the semen producers may want the child aborted if the child is a result of their semen. Meanwhile, the other semen producing potential parent wants the child. What a predicament to be in!