When the parents of a child separate, they must make decisions about where the child should live on a day-to-day basis. Many parents prefer some form of “shared parenting” which usually means that each parent has day-to-day care of the child at least 40% of the time. However, shared parenting is not right for all families. In some […]
FAMILY | What COVID-19 Caselaw Tells Us about Parenting
This column is coming out during the COVID-19 pandemic. Health authorities across Canada, and the world, have issued protocols for limiting the spread of the virus. Many family courts are only hearing “urgent” matters. The court has heard cases during this time that speak to a specific set of circumstances in our history. However, the […]
FAMILY | The Legal Status of the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines
The Divorce Act sets out the factors that a judge considers when ordering one ex-partner to pay spousal support (also knows as “partner support” or “spousal maintenance”) to the other ex-partner. The factors in provincial family law legislation that applies to unmarried couples, such as Alberta’s Family Law Act, often mirror the Divorce Act. Before […]
FAMILY | DBS v SRG: Retroactive child support claims
20/20: Looking back over the last 20 years I was not short of choices when LawNow asked me to write about one of the most important family law cases in the last twenty years. After consulting with Sarah Dargatz, my fellow columnist on family law issues, I decided to talk about DBS v SRG, a […]
Alternatives to Court: Parenting Coordination
This is the last column in LawNow’s series on resolving family law disputes out of court. The other columns in this series include Sarah Dargatz’s articles on collaborative negotiation and mediation, and my article on arbitration. In this column, I’m going to talk about parenting coordination. This is a child-centred process that combines elements of […]
Alternatives to Court: Mediation
In the first column in this series, John-Paul Boyd introduced basic alternatives to resolving family law disputes in court. In the second column, I wrote about the Collaborative process. In the last issue, John-Paul Boyd explained arbitration. In this column, I’m going to talk about mediation. Mediation is a process where you and the other […]
Alternatives to Court: Arbitration
In our first column in this series, I introduced the basic alternatives to resolving family law disputes in court – negotiation, mediation and arbitration – and talked about some of the surprising research on lawyers’ views about litigation. In the second column, Sarah Dargatz wrote about collaborative negotiation, a cooperative kind of negotiation in which […]
Alternatives to Court: The Collaborative Process
John-Paul Boyd explained why people might want to find an alternative to court to reach a resolution about their family law disputes in the November/December 2018 issue of LawNow. One alternative to court is the Collaborative process. Many processes, such a negotiation or mediation, can be “collaborative”, meaning cooperative or amicable. However, here I am […]
Resolving Family Law Disputes: Alternatives to Court
When adults leave a serious relationship, they have a lot of decisions to make. Sometimes these are small decisions, about who can keep the dishes or the books, but more often they are big decisions. Things like where the children should mostly live, how their time will be divided, who should pay how much in […]
Domestic Violence and Family Law Disputes
Domestic violence – or family violence or intimate partner violence, call it what you will – is a serious problem in both intact and separated families. According to a 2013 report from Statistics Canada, there are 252.9 victims of domestic violence per 100,000 population, and domestic violence makes up more 26 per cent of all […]
