We Versus Me: Normative Legislation, Individual Exceptionalism and Access to Family Justice

• Author: John-Paul Boyd
• Date: January 09, 2015

In many of Canada’s family law courts, especially our provincial courts, the majority of litigants now appear without counsel. This state of affairs should have been a foreseeable consequence of the diminution of legal aid representation in family law cases coupled with the relative absence of market forces impelling private family law lawyers to reduce their rates or embrace new service models, but it is nonetheless where we find ourselves today.

It is easy enough to point to the observable consequences of this superabundance of litigants without counsel – chief among them the increased number of ill-conceived chambers applications, the ever-expanding length of trials and the congestion presently plaguing court registries – and shudder in horror. However, it must be borne in mind that the justice system is not our system, a system for judges and lawyers, but their system, a system that belongs to the users of the system, the litigants themselves. As a result, despite the inconveniences enuring to the mutual discomfort of bench and bar, I am hard pressed to conclude that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the growing presence of unrepresented litigants; the situation is infelicitous, to be sure, but not iniquitous.

The engagement of so many litigants without counsel in court processes could be viewed as prima facie evidence that family justice is accessible, however as the recent work of Professor Julie Macfarlane and the Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family demonstrates, this sort of “access” is superficial and doesn’t go much further than being able to find the front door of the courthouse; there would still be lineups to get into the only hospital in town even were it staffed by a third of the necessary doctors and equipped with a third of the necessary beds, but we wouldn’t call that accessible health care. The research produced by Macfarlane and the Research Institute shows that litigants have enormous difficulty understanding and navigating the rules of court, the rules of evidence, court processes and the legislation applicable to their cases, and that, unsurprisingly, they find the justice system to be impossibly intimidating, incomprehensible and inaccessible.

This raises a special set of problems for litigants involved in family law disputes. Family law is a unique species of civil law for many reasons, but primarily because of: the frequency with which disputes brought to court concern social, psychological and emotional issues rather than legal; the almost complete absence of circumstances in which a specific legal conclusion invariably and inevitably results from a particular set of facts; and, the range of other areas of the law that may be concurrently applicable, such as contracts, tax, conflicts, real property, negligence, torts and trusts. Family law, in other words, is complex, and the questions this note seeks to explore are the extent to which complexity is necessary or desirable, and the extent to which complexity is compatible with fairness and an accessible system of family justice.

To begin with, it must be noted that the federal and provincial legislation on domestic relations is an expression of social values and government social policy. Divorce is bad, and accordingly the 1857 UK Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act made it very difficult to get a divorce a vinculo, especially if you were a woman; adultery and abuse are bad, and accordingly the 1968 Canadian Divorce Act required the court to take matrimonial misconduct into account when determining issues of custody and support. Today, some of the clearest examples of social policy questions resolvable by legislation concern:

• Children – Should both parents always be presumed to be the children’s custodians? Should a default parenting schedule be prescribed by legislation?

• Child Support – If and when should stepparents assume a liability to pay child support? Should children be allowed as adults to sue to collect arrears accumulating during their minority?

• Spousal Support – Should the income of dependent spouses’ new partners be considered in determining eligibility for support? Should spousal support be paid from income derived from assets that have already been divided as matrimonial property?

• Property – Should unmarried couples have interests equivalent to those of married couples? Should property acquired before the commencement of a relationship take priority over property acquired during the relationship, or should primacy be given to the latter rather than the former?

Given that the moderation of conflict is a critical psychological, social, legal and economic value, it also stands to reason that certainty would inform the manner in which social policy is expressed through legislation, particularly in family law matters. Certainty is, by and large, a...