Not an Historian.... Moderators, remove this post if it is not up to standards or tell me how to improve it and I will. I tried to includes sources, and I didn't speculate. A lot of my "deductions" aren't mine, but from history classes I took on the Quiet Revolution and my own research on the subject. I took out charts from Statistic Canada to add sources, and I didn't mention anything passed 1995... I can also clarify my sources if needed. This is my first top level post here, and I really hope I passed. (UPDATE: this is actually my second one, the first was this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2gg3y7/why_are_there_still_french_in_quebec/ckivzto)

Oh, I used to be in the Parti Québecois (which I talk about in this bill) and the PQ passed a law on May 11th 1995 reforming alimony and divorce proceedings. I WAS IN THE COMMITTES IN THE PQ INVESTIGATING THESE REFORMS and we studied over the history of Divorce in Québec, so even if I am not an historian, I lived thru that reform and heard the politicians about it). My work was on first version of the "Loi facilitant le paiement des pensions alimentaires", which I worked one in the bureau national du Parti Québécois.)

End intro...

In Canada, marriage is a Federal juridiction and as such, so is divorce, however, until the Federal passed their first law about divorce in 1968, each province had it's own rules.

Québec, my province, being Catholic, there was no divorce law at all. The only way to get a divorce (as was Newfoundland, but I don't know why) was to have a private bill in the federal government granting you a divorce!

Apparently, it was the same in Ontario before 1930 when it passed it's own divorce law. Again, I don't know why...

But the other 7 provinces had adopted rules they inspired from the British, who and as such, had divorce laws before Canada even existed or before they were actual provinces. Perhaps an historian with clearer knowledge of that can elaborate: my own knowledge is limited to Québec history on this.

In 1968, the Federal government finally passed a law legalizing divorce. In 1985, it amended it to make it easier (http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/PDF/D-3.4.pdf).

I know it was controversial in Québec until well into my childhood in the early 1980s, with a major taboo even if divorce was getting common.

At early at 1982, "the number of marriages ended by death and divorce surpassed the number of new marriages" (from the excellent book, The Quiet Revolution, which I had read in French but found extracts in English for this answer).

The Quiet revolution had occurred mainly in the 1960s and was a movement to pretty much secularise Québec society. We replaced the religious schools with school districts, re-used the old seminaries accross Québec to build the CEGEP institutions and it very slowly became more accessible for couples to NOT marry.

Sadly, the chart doesn't appear in the Google preview of the book, and the book I read was a loan from a friend, but I do remember the rise in the number of divorces sharply increasing in the 1970 and 1980s.

I will NOT talk about Divorce around me, because that doesn't belong in this reddit, but I can tell you that the Quiet Revolution was in 3 major steps:

1 ) The Quiet Revolution itself (1961-1970), when Jean Lesage was our prime-minister of Québec and which lead to the modernization and secularisation of Québec. It ended only 2 years after the Canadian Divorce law, so most of the marriages were made prior to the ability to divorce. Our first ministry of education was established in 1964. Almost everyone before that had religious education. I will return to that...

2 ) The PLQ Era of 1970 to 1976 of Robert Bourassa. This was a period of drastic changes in Québec with the cumination of everything Jean Lesage started, and the end of the FLQ terrorist attacks (which had climaxed in the October 1970 crisis).

The violent nationalism of the FLQ gave way to different kind of nationalism, which lead to:

3 ) The PQ government of 1976-1985, which led to even more reforms in Québec on how we functions. Their first mandate was nicknamed the "Republic of Teachers" because of the high number of teachers in cabinet.

But something else started to occur: the kids who were born in 1958 and who had only studied under the ministry of Education were 18 in 1976, and many got married during that PQ government mandate, many of which divorced soon after.

These are kids who didn't receive the strict religious training their parents and elders had received and for most of them and those that followed. Divorce was acceptable.

Sometimes, it was their parents (no longer having kids at home, and whose adult kids accepted divorce) that divorced, when older couples simply stayed together to avoid being judged by their kids.

You can probably correlate a lot of the attitude in Québec with church attendance since the primary objection against marriage was mainly religious in nature.

I know it's fiction, but this article of the Globeandmail cites the movie "Les Invasions Barbares":

"At a precise moment, during the year 1966 in fact, the churches suddenly emptied in a matter of months. A strange phenomenon that no one has ever been able to explain,"

At the article explains, it IS an overstatement, but it's pretty much what happened almost overnight, and with it, resistance to divorce.

If you check the official tables from Statistic Canada: http://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/statistiques/population-demographie/mariages-divorces/6p4.htm

You'll see that the number of divorces averaged in the 15,000 per year from 1975 to 1980, and then, rose abrubtly to 19,000/20,000 from 1981 until 1996 (when the number of marriages remaining was low enough to cause a reduction from then on).

To confirm check the 3rd column, the % of divorce per 100 marriages: In the 30s from 1974 until 1980, it rose from 31.7 in 1980 to 43.5 in 1981... that's almost a 12% rise in a single year!

From 1987 to 2008, the ratio never dipped below 47.3, while before 1987, it never rose above 43.5...

Granted, the number of marriages also dropped around the same time, from around 8 marriage per 1000 people prior to 1976, turn to under 5 from 1986 and on.... In fact, 1972 was the year with the most marriages and from then on, it downhill...

TL:DR: In short, in Québec, marriage was legal in 1968, and became common in the early 1980s, being slowly accepted as it became more common.