For the first time in 20 years, Canada’s divorce legislation is getting an overhaul.
Good.
Let’s just hope it’s the right kind of overhaul.
C-78, the recently introduced bill that makes the changes, has been described as dealing with a whole suite of issues, everything from relocation of one parent to providing more tools to enforce child support payments to ways of handling divorces where family violence is involved.
Courts are expected to treat parties like adults, even when they are clearly acting like spoiled and bitter children.
But two of them are critical: establishing that the needs of children first, and moving divorce from the courtroom to a less formal settlement forum — because both of those areas are ones that turn separation and divorce into legal combat.
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The absolute worst of the worst examples are the cases that end up in the media: divorcing couples or families that explode with hatred, using every possible dime of savings and equity to get back at each other.
Family law and divorce cases don’t all end up like a 2016 case in Ontario, where a judge ended up writing in a verdict, “No matter what costs order I make, the financial ruin cannot be undone. They’ll never recover. Their eight-year-old daughter’s future has been squandered. How did this happen? How does this keep happening? What will it take to convince angry parents that nasty and aggressive litigation never turns out well?”
The parents, of modest means, ended up owing their lawyers a combined total of more than $500,000.
No, they don’t all end up that way, but many do.
There’s another tier of misery that’s equally tragic. Read through verdicts in the divorce cases that make their way through the court process and there’s always plenty of vindictive and small. Ex-spouses, usually fathers, who stop working — or work for cash — to avoid paying child support. Spouses who use access to children as a weapon to try and hurt their ex-partners, apparently caring little for the effect on their kids. Spouses who use claims for child or spousal support as weapons in litigation that on stretches for years. Spouses who refuse to abide by court orders to provide information about income.
Then there are the divorced couples who march back to court regularly, demanding changes, improvements, accommodations. Courts are expected to treat parties like adults, even when they are clearly acting like spoiled and bitter children.
There has to be a clear way to deal with changes in financial circumstances without endless and expensive trips to court to vary court orders. And there has to be a clear understanding that the interests of children in family law cases have to come first.
Many divorces, many that you don’t hear about, are handled with attempts at fairness and something close to quiet dignity. Too many others bring out the absolute worst in people.
I wrote this a year ago — I could easily have written it many times over: “The amount of time and expense involved in settling family issues is huge. Since one-third of Canada’s first marriages end in divorce, governments should put their minds to finding the best process possible. And yes, everyone deserves their day in court. But what about when that day is a month, or a year, or many years? Courts should never be allowed to become a weapon in someone else’s battle, just because that person has enough money and spite to make the battle last.”
The shame is that it has taken so very long to address issues so obvious that frustrated judges speak out about them from the bench on a regular basis.
C-78 is a long and complicated bill that’s only started to move through Parliament. Let’s hope all sides decide to seriously address the clear issues, and leave politics on the sidelines.
Just get it right.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in 39 SaltWire newspapers and websites in Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
