Polyamory does not equal polygamy

In this morning's Globe and Mail there's an article about a polyamory advocate who's looking for clarification as to whether the Canadian criminal code (section 293) that bans polygamy also extends to polyamorous relationships, read it here. Now without exploding over the fact that this is completely ridiculous (consent vs. non-consent) I'd rather examine how this could possibly be enforceable.

With polygamy it seems clear cut, there's an issue of consent that's breached. A man has multiple wives that act in a similar fashion to a harem and is based on a patriarchal system, whereby the woman's rights aren't always respected. While this sort of relationship can be completely consensual, the ones we always hear about are the ones that aren't; where a man controls his wives (a la the recent polygamy case in Bountiful, BC).

Polyamory on the other hand is usually consensual and may not even involve marriage. To the untrained observer polyamory could be nothing more than an individual dating more than one person, in most cases nothing's down on paper; so I can't see how (or why) this would be illegal. In the case of a marriage that is polyamorous and the couple are off with different partners, there may be something to enforce, however if neither of them is wishing to press charges and both of them are consenting to the situation, why would it be illegal? An added difficulty with polyamory is the definition of it, there is a general openness to the relationship, however in my experience almost every polyamorous relationship has it's own structure and it's rare to find one relationship that is the same as another one, given differing rules or lack there of. Due to the small amount of relationships that are polyamorous (and happily so, for the most part, they are relationships after all) I would fail to see the purpose of making it illegal, but then again I'm not a conservative political figure.

It poses a very interesting question and one that cannot be easily answered. I'm curious, however, as to why this polyamory advocate would bring the question into the legal realm unless there was a hint that it may fall under the same umbrella. This article also brought to my attention that there is a Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association, which I was not formerly aware of; also apparently there are 0.5% of people across Canada that participate in polyamory, that's a lot more than I would've expected. If you're interested I'm sure you can follow the discussion their website, I know I'll be looking for updates there; as polyamory is not typically mainstream news.