Toronto Sun leads with “Same-sex couples choosing marriage”:

More Canadian same-sex couples than ever are tying the knot.

Figures from the 2011 census released Wednesday show the prevalence of same-sex couples in this country jumped 42.4% between 2006 and 2011.

There are now 64,575 same-sex families living in Canada – 43,560 of those common-law couples and 21,015 married couples.

Same-sex couples are walking down the aisle at a much higher rate than their opposite-sex counterparts, with the number of couples made up of a man and a woman increasing a modest 2.9% since 2006.

But there’s a caveat.

Census manager Marc Hamel noted the agency may have overestimated same-sex married couples in Canada by up to 4,500, possibly due to confusion over the census questions.

The issue came to light when Statistics Canada data crunchers began noticing higher rates than average of reported same-sex marriage, especially in smaller communities. …

But same-sex couples are much less likely than opposite-sex couples to have children: less than 10%, compared to almost 50%, respectively. Lesbian couples make up the large majority (80%) of same-sex couples with children.

Still, same-sex couples are a tiny portion of couples tallied by StatsCan in 2011, accounting for just 0.8% of all partnerships in Canada.

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and Ottawa Citizen goes with “Canada’s families shifting from marriage to common-law”:

The sanctity of marriage as the bedrock of the Canadian family is steadily eroding as the country’s social fabric evolves, new census data released Wednesday reveals.

Instead, although married couples are still the norm — about two thirds of families — their numbers are lagging and only increased by 3.1 per cent between 2006 and 2011.

In contrast, the number of common-law couples rose by 13.9 per cent and lone-parent families rose by eight per cent over the same period.

The shift means that common-law couples now account for 16.7 per cent of all families, and lone-parent families now represent 16.3 per cent of the total.

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