I don’t often read a family court decision that makes me jump for joy, but a recent decision by Justice Renu Mandhane of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice did just that.
In this case, Justice Mandhane recognizes a new tort of family violence and awards the wife $150,000 in damages for the pattern of physical and coercive controlling abuse she was subjected to by her husband over their 16-year marriage.
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In the early weeks of the pandemic, some abusers took advantage of the public health crisis to manipulate parenting orders, stop paying child support and, generally, make life for their former partner as difficult as possible. A few months later, the focus shifted to fathers refusing to agree to appropriate schooling arrangements for the children,
The applicant requests that the family court issue an order removing all barriers to an Islamic religious divorce.
Lenihan v Shankar 2021 ONSC 330: The legal issue at the heart of this case was on parenting arrangements for the parties’ child, but the decision also addressed the issue of fake evidence, and it is on that topic that this summary is focused.
Justice McGee began her decision with these comments:
Text messages,
Hamour v. Hamour, 2021 ONSC 3965: This case concerned child support and division of property for a Sudanese family that immigrated to Canada in 2008. The case involved family violence, lack of transparent disclosure by the father of income and court documents from abroad, and testimonies from witnesses abroad that the judge found not to be reliable sources.
Chrisjohn v Hillier 2021 ONSC 1666: In this case, the father brought an urgent motion to have the child returned to him. The mother had withheld the three-year-old child, alleging that the father’s substance use posed a risk.
Much of the evidence presented by the mother was hearsay, and Justice Mitrow took the opportunity to address the issue of what he called “the unfortunate trend of inadmissible hearsay evidence seeping into evidentiary records on motions.”
In his decision,
Bourke v Davis 2021 ONCA 97: This is a decision by the Court of the Appeal, in response to an appeal brought by the applicant, the father, from a trial decision that allowed the respondent mother to move to Washington State with the couple’s two children. The mother had married a man who lived in Washington and had recently had a baby in that relationship.
Ball v McKenzie 2021 ONSC 1150: The parents in this case lived together for about 16 months and are the parents of one child, a son, who was three years old at the time of the mother’s motion. The mother also had a daughter, from a prior relationship, who lived with the family.
L.B. v P.E. 2021 ONCJ 114: This is a trial decision in a parenting and child support case. It is of interest primarily because, although the case was heard before the March 1st implementation of the revised Divorce Act and Children’s Law Reform Act,
Pereira v Ramos 2021 ONSC 1737: We are now beginning to see a steady stream of cases in which either the revised CLRA or Divorce Act is being applied. In this case, the father (applicant) brought a motion in the fall of 2020 to increase his time with the children to a shared parenting arrangement who were,
