When breaking up is hard to do

04-What’s new:NATIONAL
5/20/10
12:57 PM
Page 33
When breaking up is
hard to do
What’s New In...
Family Law
Same-sex couples who split find provincial family laws
have not kept pace with their hard-won rights.
By Virginia Galt
ROBERT JOHANNSEN
V
ancouver lawyer barbara findlay’s
recent family law seminar —
“When Your Clients are Queer
and You Aren’t” — might have
been considered provocative by
some or — conversely — not even necessary in 2010.
And that was findlay’s point in her presentation to British Columbia’s Collaborative Family Law Association: As much as it
might appear that lesbian, bisexual, gay
and transgender families have achieved
equality in marriage and divorce matters,
“it plays out differently.”
In the wake of a precedent-setting court
challenge in 2003, the legal right for samesex couples to marry in Canada was officially proclaimed by Parliament in 2005.
The honeymoon was barely over when
same-sex couples also won the right to
divorce (although this right does not apply
to non-residents who travelled to Canada
from other countries to marry.)
“The trends, I’m sure, among same-sex partners
are exactly the same as they are among heterosexual
partners: some marriages last and some don’t,” findlay said in an interview from her Vancouver office.
But, in some respects, breaking up is harder to do
for same-sex couples because provincial family laws
— which determine issues such as spousal support,
child support and the division of property — are
evolving at an uneven pace across the country.
There are variations now as to which parents (two
lesbian mothers, for example, or two gay dads) can be
named on a child’s birth documents, depending on the
province where the baby is born.
But despite the changes to birth registration forms,
same-sex couples do not automatically have the same
parental rights as opposite-sex couples, findlay and other
Juin 2010
“Despite the changes to birth
family law specialists said.
The division of property, registration forms, same-sex
in the event of marriage couples do not automatically
breakdown, is another area have the same parental rights
of concern because most as opposite-sex couples.”
provinces do not take into
account the amount of time that same-sex couples
cohabited before they could legally marry.
w w w. c b a . o r g
33
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