Governing bodies and organizations in Canada have been compiling national statistics on marriage and divorce for hundreds of years. As a result we can see how the divorce rate in Canada has panned out since changes were made to divorce laws and predict how they might turn out in the future, too.
===History of Canadian Divorce Laws===
Divorce laws in Canada have come a long way since the turn of the century in 1900. At that time, divorce was completely illegal in the majority of regions. In the twelve months between 1900 and 1901 just fifteen couples were granted divorce in the entire country, all on grounds of adultery.
In 1925 the laws on divorce in Canada changed so that every state made divorce legal. Couples could only get one, however, if one spouse could prove that the other had committed adultery. This changed again in 1968 when the Divorce Act deemed ‘marriage breakdown’ to be a viable ground for divorce, but this would only be granted if the couple had been separated for three years, and could also prove that this had happened.
Again, the laws on Canadian divorce changed in 1986, when the time that a couple had to be separated for was finally lowered to just one year or twelve months. The changes since 1968 meant there has been a significant increase in the number of divorces granted in Canada afterwards.
===Divorce Rates Throughout the 20th Century===
As you already know, there were just 15 divorces granted to couples in the year 1900, but how has this changed over the subsequent 100 years?
In the year 1987 (one year after the required length of separation was reduced from three years to just twelve months) alone, a total of 90,000 divorces were granted. This was a huge jump from the numbers of divorces that had been granted prior to 1968, and numbers continued to jump until 1970 until they were 200% higher than they were in 1967. This jump in numbers correlates very strongly with the years in which new laws were passed, so we can certainly deduce that having stricter laws on divorce mean that fewer couples seek them.
Divorce rates actually fell slightly after 2000 (a year in which a high of 71,144 divorces were recorded) down to 70,155 in 2002. However, they did increase again up to 70,828 the very next year, so this drop may not be significant and does not tell us very much about how the economy or state of the Canadian population might have affected divorce rates at the time.
Additional Information
What we can learn from censuses taken in Canada over the past two or three decades is interesting. Details can even be as specific as a couple’s likelihood of divorce at a certain year of their marriage. In Canada, couples are most likely to divorce during the first three years after their initial marriage. As time goes on after this, however, the likelihood of divorce begins to drop.
Statistics Canada also found that in 2003, 16.2% of previously divorced men accounted for the number of divorces in the country. In 1980, 15.2% of all female divorcees had also been divorced before.