British Columbia Family Law Blog

People often ask me how many substantial divorce cases I handle, I tell them "every divorce case I handle is substantial, because all the person has is at stake".

Once a divorce is commenced, the goal of the Court is to end the marriage and decide such issues as child custody, access, support, property and debt division and deal with responsibility for legal costs.

Roughly 90% of divorces end up proceeding on an uncontested basis. This means that all, but 10% of family cases are settled between the parties, whether by separation agreement or by embodying the agreement in a divorce order with consented to corollary relief.

One of the most contentious issues in divorce proceedings is the division of business assets. The first question is whether the business interest is a family asset. The second is, if it is a family asset, how it should be valued for the division of assets. The spouse seeking to keep the business in his or her allocation of assets wants the value to be low and the spouse not wishing to retain the business wants its value to be high so as to entitle him or her to a larger share of the other family assets. So the question is - how do the courts assign a value to a business? This can be especially difficult if it is a small, closely held business where the shares can not be freely transferred.

Meet British Columbia's Family Law and Divorce Law Firm with offices in downtown Vancouver and Northern BC.  We travel the province handling all kinds of family law cases including child custody, child support, spousal support and property division cases.  From left to right, Alison Ouellet associate, Lorne MacLean founding partner, Shelagh Kinney associate and Shawna Specht, associate.  We can't protect your heart but we can protect your rights.

In a child support judgment rendered on November 10, 2005 in Contino v. Leonelli-Contino, the Supreme Court of Canada has addressed the calculation of child support under the Child Support Guidelines in shared parenting situations. This decision is now the leading child support case in Canada and for BC child support in shared custody cases and will affect British Columbia child support cases for years to come.  Earlier British Columbia Court of appeal child support and shared custody cases notably Green applied a similar approach.

The recent decision of Tedham of our BC Court of Appeal has dealt a blow to the clean break principal in cases of long marriages and has also referred to the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines and approved of their usefulness.

The Court also dealt with the thorny issue of decided what does self sufficiency mean and how does support compensate a working spouse for the economic disadvantages they may have suffered during a marriage.

Two recent decisions family law decisions of our British Columbia Court of Appeal have been handed down in the cases of Yemchuk and Tedham and both cases used the new spousal support guidelines to support  generous awards of spousal support and to one case remove time limited support on the grounds too much emphasis had been placed on the clean break principal.  The authors of the guidelines Professors Rogerson and Thompson have lauded these decisons as very important cases in the Canadian spousal support jurisprudence.  As these decisions come from British Columbia's highest court the judgments will be used to support similar arguments in lower courts of British Columbia and considerably increase the credibility of these new guidelines.

Shared custody is increasingly becoming a hot topic, especially in light of the contemplated changes to the Federal Child Support Guidelines being considered by the Federal Government. Currently, there are several methods by which the quantum of child support is determined for shared custody situations. These were recently and succinctly identified by Dinyar Marzban at a CBA family update session.