The latest data released by Statistics Canada on Wednesday backed up a trend that has emerged over the last few years.

In 2003, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the average age of people getting married for the first time was 30.6 years for men and 28.5 years for women. (Those numbers exclude Ontario and do not count same-sex marriages.) Both numbers are up slightly from the previous year when the average ages were 30.4 and 28.3.

Compare that to 1973, when Canadian men were tying the knot at the age of 25.2 and women at the ripe young age of 22.8 years.

“This gradual rise in the average age at first marriage is largely due to couples cohabiting and delaying marriage,” Statistics Canada explains.

The agency’s report also provided data on the total number of Canadians who got married in 2003, and for the first time the data included information on same-sex marriages.

A total of 147, 391 couples exchanged vows in 2003, only 653 more than the previous year. The rate of marriages has slowed since a peak in 2000 when 157,395 got hitched, presumably choosing to marry at the start of the new millennium, the report said.

Yukon, Ontario and British Columbia saw gains in the number of marriages in 2003 and in all other provinces and territories there was a decline.

The crude marriage rate was highest in Prince Edward Island where it was six marriages for every 1,000 population and was lowest in Quebec with 2.8 marriages for every 1,000. In Nunavut, the rate was 2.3 per 1,000.

Statistics Canada said Quebec’s low marriage rate is due partly to the high number of common-law couples in that province.

In 2003, Ontario and British Columbia became the first two provinces to legalize same-sex marriage. But data is only available for B.C. because Ontario’s marriage registration forms do not allow for the type of marriage to be identified.

Of the 21, 981 marriages that took place in B.C. in 2003, 3.5 per cent of them were between people of the same sex, the study determined.

During that year, Canada was the only country in the world that allowed same-sex marriages between people who were not Canadian residents. It’s not surprising then, that more than half of the people who entered a same-sex marriage in B.C. were not residents of Canada.

It was female couples that made up the majority of same-sex marriages in B.C. in 2003, Statistics Canada said. Of the 774 marriages, 54.5 per cent were between women and a little more than one-quarter of the women had been previously married.

Are Canadians tying the knot more or less than other countries? Our crude marriage rate is 4.7 marriages per 1,000, lower than the United States where it’s 7.5, but it’s virtually the same as several European countries such as France, Austria and Germany.

Crude marriage rate per 1,000 population in 2003
Canada 4.7
Newfoundland and Labrador 5.5
Prince Edward Island 6.0
Nova Scotia 5.1
New Brunswick 5.0
Quebec 2.8
Ontario 5.2
Manitoba 4.9
Saskatchewan 5.0
Alberta 5.6
British Columbia 5.3
Yukon 5.2
Northwest Territories 3.3
Nunavut 2.3