Harper said this morning that he was “not aware of the details” of the legal decision. “This I gather is a case before the courts where Canadian lawyers have taken a particular position based on the law and I will be asking officials to provide me more details.”

Regardless of its origins, the decision calls the rights and equality of thousands of foreign same-sex couples into question. Non-Canadians who were married under our system don’t enjoy full legal rights in their home countries, but many of them do enjoy hard-won rights that depend on our legislation – and which they could lose if our legislation changes.

It’s true, for example, that same-sex couples can’t get married in the UK. However, the UK does recognize legal same-sex marriages performed in other countries. Two good friends of ours living in London – one a Canadian citizen, the other British – were married in Toronto this past summer, and they now enjoy full rights in UK because of it. In other words, you can’t get married in the UK if you’re a same-sex couple, but you can be married in the UK if you’ve legally gotten married somewhere else.

American sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage, who emerged as a leading voice against the decision following a post on his blog, cites his home state of Washington as another example. “Right now, if I’m not mistaken,” he writes, “Washington state recognizes same-sex marriages performed in states and countries where same-sex marriage is legal – but Washington treats these couples (me and Terry included) as domestic partners under WA state law. Washington’s DP law grants same-sex couples all the rights and responsibilities of marriage that the state controls.” Unfortunately, if marriages like Savage’s are no longer valid in Canada, then their status and rights as domestic partners could be in jeopardy.

It’s an interesting legal issue, to say the least. By recognizing same-sex marriages performed in Canada, and by giving their citizens corresponding rights and benefits, jurisdictions like the UK and Washington state have also given a foreign government the ability to strip those rights away. Savage and his husband can lose status and equal rights granted to them by their own government because of a change in Canada’s laws, and without their own state’s law having to change one iota.

Critics of the policy reversal – and there are many – ask what sort of regressive slippery slope we may have set in motion today. I’ve spoken to people today who wonder why we’re all so worried about the rights of foreigners, but I’ve spoken to many others who are rightly concerned about what the invalidation of one type of Canadian same-sex marriage could mean for the whole enterprise.

“I’d like to know,” Savage writes, “if a Jewish man was to marry a Saudi woman, which is illegal in Saudi Arabia, in Canada would it be a legally recognized marriage? Or is this a special right that we enjoy, this right to be discriminated that way?”

Harper says the decision caught him off guard, but plenty of people aren’t buying it. Former Toronto Mayor David Miller has said he’s certain that “this kind of decision would not happen without the Prime Minister being briefed.” Liberal leader Bob Rae agreed, claiming that it’s tough to believe Harper didn’t know about the case, “because my sense of that government is that he controls everything.”

Closer to home, my brother rightly noted that “if I was PM and changed the name of the government to the Jon Blair Government, I’d try and keep up with what it was up to.”

But Rae put it best when he said he has to “take the Prime Minister at his word when he says what he says.” It’s entirely possible that Harper was taken by surprise by the details of this case, and the question of how much he knew should take a back seat to the question of what he’s going to do next.

It’s too late to promise Canadians that the government won’t reopen the issue of same-sex marriage; this morning’s announcement threw the issue wide open. Maintaining Canada’s position on same-sex marriage now means taking action to clarify and reinforce our legislation, and it’s up to our government to make that commitment. They’ve started to dance around it by addressing the legality of same-sex divorce, but the question of same-sex marriage itself remains up in the air.

What do you think the government should do? How likely do you think they are to do it? Have I missed anything or made any mistakes above? Do feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

“PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.” At the time of this writing, six promises have been kept, fourteen are in the works, and one has been stalled.

There’s a thread about this on MetaFilter, and some of the posters seem upset about all this scrutiny. But there’s nothing wrong with holding a president accountable for the promises he made on the campaign trail – in fact, in a democracy, that’s what you’re supposed to do. On their main page, PolitiFact quotes Obama as saying “I want you to hold our government accountable. I want you to hold me accountable.” They followed it up with their own “Okay, we will.”

And the best part is, it looks like he’s doing a pretty good job so far. Signing an executive order to close Guantanamo was certainly a good choice. It will be interesting to see how things progress throughout the course of his term, and I think that this will be a website worth following. Yes, even more so than a website that currently has a picture of Obama with the word “Rainbows” written under it.

Thanks to Funkaoshi for the link. In the meantime, the White House also relaunched a brand new website on Tuesday, which includes an official blog. That’s got to be worth a look, right?

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess there’s no shortage of inspiring words that you can put on a shirt with his face.”

“You know what?” she said. “Somebody should do a website that’s just pictures of Barack Obama, followed by a bunch of irrelevant nonsense words.”

Long story short, we just launched hundreddays.org. Check it out.

Back in 2000, when I was a student, I was lucky enough to be the co-editor of the alternative humour paper on campus. Blogs hadn’t yet become a popular medium, and a regular public soapbox was still the sort of thing that you wouldn’t want to take lightly. But even back then, it was a safe bet that the average Canadian university student thought that George W. Bush didn’t exactly deserve to be the president of the United States.

As the election dragged on, and the results were continuously contested, we watched with dread at the possibility that some incompetent son of privilege might actually be chosen to run the most powerful country in the world. But after a while, quite frankly, we became bored with the whole thing. And on Sunday, 26 November 2000, we found ourselves sitting around the board room table, trying to figure out what the hell we were going to put on the cover of that week’s issue.

It was only after one of our newer writers entered the board room to tell us that it looked like George W. Bush was officially going to be the next leader of the free world, and everybody in that room swore in unison, that we finally settled on an idea for the cover.

I wish I could provide you with a link to the finished product, because it’s honestly one of the proudest moments of not only my tenure at that newspaper, but of my entire post-secondary career, for what it’s worth. On Wednesday, 29 November 2000, nine thousand copies of Golden Words were distributed all over campus. The cover featured the repugnant smirking face of George W. Bush, flanked by a single four-letter word in red, white and blue block letters.

“…SHIT.”

As it was uttered spontaneously in the board room, so did it go forth across campus – and so has it yet to be disputed by eight of the worst years of American history.

I’m a left-leaning guy, but deep down, I hate confrontation. Sure, I yell and scream a lot, but I ultimately hate the thought of criticizing somebody who might deserve the benefit of the doubt. With that in mind, I can tell you that there has not been a single day since that issue was published that I’ve felt like I was being too hard on Bush. Even this post, which I admittedly wrote while drunk off my ass after Obama’s landslide victory, is something I choose to stand by.

The fact of the matter is that Bush was a really, really terrible president. He claimed his presidency under dubious circumstances, he consistently failed to prove himself worthy of it, and quite frankly, he never seemed to care about the fact that he clearly didn’t deserve his position. No president in American history has achieved such a high disapproval rating, and if democracy still counts for anything, then I guess that’s a pretty significant figure.

But enough about that. Let’s just say that the White House may or may not have a door that could sufficiently hit Bush’s ass on the way out, and leave it at that. Tomorrow, a new guy takes over.

But whoa, hold on! He may be a different dude, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be better. Yes, he couldn’t possibly be worse, and sure, he looks to be a fundamentally decent man. But as such, I’m sure he’d agree that it’s the duty of American citizens to hold him accountable, and to ensure that he lives up to the promise of his campaign.

As for us Canucks, we’ll just have to keep an eye on him and push for the best. That’ll probably be a lot easier once our own federal government starts doing stuff again.