ABSTRACT
After a generation of living openly and relatively undisturbed in the polygamous community of Bountiful in British Columbia, Canada, two leaders of a Fundamentalist sect of the Mormon Church of Latterday Saints (FLDS) – Winston Blackmore and James Oler – were charged with violating the archaic Canadian Criminal Code provisions on polygamy.1 These highly publicized arrests occurred within a year of a similar spectacle in the US, when state authorities raided a Texas FLDS compound, ‘Yearning for Zion’, and apprehended over 400 children. Spectacular as these arrests appear, they come as no real surprise: in Canada, polygamy has been readied for public scrutiny and state intervention for some time now after police investigations in the early 1990s were followed by a number of government commissioned reports.2
