The Return of LawLINE?

LawLINE was one of the programs offered by the Legal Services Society, the organization that provides legal aid in British Columbia, that were terminated in 1 April 2010 as a result of cuts to the society's budget. LawLINE gave people telephone access to a lawyer for legal information and advice without having to pay for an initial consultation. From my point of view, programs like this are invaluable for people who might only have a small question that can be answered quickly and for people living in the more remote parts of the province; it was a real loss when the program was cut.

To get to the good news, I have heard from a reliable source that LSS may be reviving LawLINE in the next couple of months, or at least some other program that will look a lot like LawLINE. This is very welcome news indeed.

The Ins and Outs of Separation... Part II:Sex and New Relationships

Questions about sex and new relationships following separation are very, very common... Is it adultery to have sex with someone else after separation? If you're living with someone new, can you be in a common-law relationship before you've divorced? Is it okay to have sex with the spouse you've separated from? Thankfully the answers are pretty simple.

Sex with spouses

Yes, it's okay to have sex with your spouse after you've separated. It happens all the time. There are three things to be aware of.

First, from a legal point of view, s. 8(3)(b)(ii) of the Divorce Act says that married spouses can live together "with reconciliation as its primary purpose" for up to a total of ninety days following separation without stopping the clock on the one-year period of separation that has to pass to get a divorce. (Once more than ninety days have passed, the one-year period starts to run from the last separation.) Honestly, though, I don't see this as much of a problem. Spending the night with your spouse isn't going to count toward the ninety days unless you spent the night for the "primary purpose" of reconciliation rather than sex, which I rather doubt.

Second, if the legal ground for your divorce is based on your spouse's adultery or your spouse's cruelty toward you, you need to know that you may have been considered to have forgiven or "condoned" your spouse's misconduct if you have sex with your spouse after separation. Under s. 11(2) of the Divorce Act, an act of adultery or cruelty that has been condoned cannot be used as a ground for divorce.

(There aren't any legal problems with unmarried spouses or partners having sex after separation since a divorce isn't necessary to end unmarried relationships.)

Third, from an emotional point of view, you might want to think about what having sex with your spouse will do to the progress you've been making in getting over that relationship and building a life for yourself that doesn't include him or her. Lots of people are able to handle the messiness of sex with a separated spouse; other people find it to be emotionally difficult.

Sex with other people

As long as you're married, having sex with someone who isn't your spouse counts as adultery. If you're separated at the time however, no one except your in-laws or the Pope is going to care.

I suppose it's true that your spouse could claim adultery as the ground for your divorce, but if you've already separated from your spouse, your marriage would seem to have already come to an end for an entirely different reason than your adultery. Apart from this one issue about the legal ground for your divorce, having sex with someone else isn't going to have an impact on how your divorce is handled. It isn't relevant to whether spousal support is payable or not, how much child support will be paid, how property will be divided or what the parenting arrangements are going to look like.

(There's no such thing as adultery for unmarried couples, since you have to be married in order for sex with someone other than your partner to count as adultery.)

New relationships

As I often tell my clients, there's nothing a separated married person can't do that a single person can, except to get married. Apart from that, a separated married person can see other people, date other people, have children with other people and live with other people.

What's interesting about all of this is that there's nothing stopping a person who's married to someone qualifying as someone else's common-law spouse. Under the Family Relations Act, "spouse" includes, in addition to people who have been married, people who have lived together in a "marriage-like relationship" for at least two years. In other words, if it's taking awhile to get your divorce and you've moved in with someone else, you could have two legal spouses: the person you're still married to and the person you've been living with. Surprise!

I talk about the legal consequences of having two spouses in the Marriage & Divorce > Separation chapter of my website.

Future posts

Separation is a broad subject. If there's something you'd like me to discuss, please say so in a comment to this post. Click on the "separation" label below to read other posts about separation.

Okay, so there's (probably) a new law coming. Now what?

Important Update: The Family Law Act was introduced on 14 November 2011. See my posts "The Early and Unlamented Deaths of ss. 90 and 120.1: Government takes quick action on parental support and unmarried persons' property agreements" and "Family Law Act Introduced!" for more information.

Readers of this blog, or any local newspaper really, will know that the provincial government is planning on introducing a brand new Family Law Act sometime in 2011 that will revolutionize family law in British Columbia. I've summarized the proposed new Family Law Act in a previous post.

In September, I published another post which talked about how bill becomes a law and how a law comes into force. One of the points I was trying to make was that the Family Law Act described in the government's White Paper (PDF) doesn't have any legal effect at present and may not look anything like the Family Law Act that comes into force, and a result you shouldn't make any decisions on assumptions drawn from the White Paper.

That being said, I was recently consulted by a fellow who wanted a cohabitation agreement. (I have written at length about why cohabitation agreements are a really bad idea under the current law if the point of the agreement is supposed to be about protecting property; read my post on the subject, "Why you DON'T want a cohabitation agreement," before continuing.) This is an important problem because if the new law looks anything like the White Paper's proposal, the property interests of common-law couples and married couples are going to look very different than they do right now and, either way, the dilemma posed by s. 120.1 of the Family Relations Act will no longer exist.

So what do you do now? Frankly, I'm not sure, and any answer is going to involve an awful lot of assumptions.

If the Family Relations Act is replaced and if the new act looks like the White Paper's proposal, lots of things are going to be different:

• common-law couples will have the same property entitlements as married couples
• the value of property brought into the relationship will be excluded from sharing, as well as certain other kinds of property like court awards and inheritances
• property bought with excluded property will also be excluded from sharing
• agreements about property will only be set aside where there is a defect in the agreement or how the agreement was entered into, such as a misunderstanding about the nature of the agreement or a failure to disclose the existence of an asset

In circumstances like this, it's not clear what a marriage or cohabitation agreement about property might accomplish. Perhaps such agreements would more clearly define which assets are excluded from sharing, or address how excluded property will used during the relationship. Perhaps they would attempt to regulate how property acquired during the relationship will be paid for, or how such property would be divided at the end of the relationship.

Whatever winds up happening, the only thing we know for certain is that the Family Relations Act is the law of the land, and this is the law you need to be thinking of when planning a new relationship. We can't say for certain that the Family Relations Act will be replaced; if it's replaced, we don't know what the replacement is going to look like or when it will come into effect. We also don't know how the replacement will deal with relationships that are ongoing when it comes into effect. Will there be an exemption for existing relationships? If the new law applies to existing relationships, will it apply right away or will there be a grace period?

I think that if you are planning on a new cohabiting relationship and need to be absolutely sure about the law that will apply to your relationship, you're best off waiting until the bill passes final reading. Your second best choice would be to have an agreement not about property but an agreement to negotiate an agreement about property when the content of the new law is known.

Vanier Institute Issues Report on Canadian Families

The Ottawa-based Vanier Institute has published a study on Canadian families based on the 2006 census. According to the CBC article on the study:

• 40% of marriages now end in divorce
• one in ten people live in an unmarried, common-law relationship
• 16.5% of same-sex couples marry

I'm sure there's more to the Institute's 211-page study than the CBA has reported; read the summary to learn more. You can also visit the website of Statistics Canada and get your data right from the horse's mouth.

The Ins and Outs of Separation... Mostly the Outs

Separation, in the sense of ending a relationship, is actually rather straightforward. What's required is a decision by one person to end the relationship and the announcement of that decision to the other person, although sometimes the announcement is made nonverbally... by moving out.

This post talks about some common misunderstandings about separation and then about how to do it.

The Legal Separation

There's no such thing as a "legal separation" in British Columbia. You don't need a document to say you're separated; you don't need to see a lawyer and you don't need to see a judge to separate.

In fairness, there used to be something called a judicial separation or a divorce a mensa et thoro (a divorce from bed and board). Judicial separations were once required to relieve a married couple of their common law duty to live together and support each other, but this sort of half-divorce hasn't been available for many, many years.

Separation Agreements

Sometimes people mean a separation agreement when they talk about a "legal separation." A separation agreement is a contract which records a couple's settlement of the legal issues resulting from the end of their relationship. Although you don't need a separation agreement in order to separate, separation agreements are an excellent way to avoid court.

How to Separate

A couple is separated once either or both people decides that the relationship is over, announces that decision and terminates the marriage-like aspects of the relationship, such as sleeping together, eating together, doing household chores for the benefit of the whole family and so forth.

The decision to separation only needs to be made by one person; the consent or permission of the other person is not required. The reason why a decision is required at all is to distinguish couples who live separate and apart for reasons like employment from couples who live separate and apart because they've split up.

Staying Under the Same Roof

Most couples move out and find new places to live after they separate. Some couples continue living together after they've separated, usually because living together is so much cheaper than living apart. The court will consider couples who have split up but continue to live under the same roof to be separated looking at things like:

1. whether the couple have stopped sharing the same bed or bedroom;
2. whether the couple have stopped having sex together;
3. the extent to which each person does their own chores;
4. whether the couple have opened separate bank accounts and begun to separate their finances; and,
5. whether the couple have stopped going to social functions as a couple.

Separation and the Legal End of a Relationship

For all unmarried couples, including common-law spouses, separation is all that's required to legally end a relationship.

Married spouses, on the other hand, must get a divorce to legally end their relationship... no matter how long they've been separated. There is no such thing as an "automatic divorce." A married couple will be married until they divorce, whether they've been separated for one year or thirty.

This difference is important for unmarried couples because certain limitation dates begin to run from the date of separation, the most important of which involve the right to apply for spousal support and, although this isn't quite accurate, the right to apply for child support for children brought into the relationship.

Future Posts

A future post will discuss a perennially popular topic, sex and new relationships after separation. Separation is a surprisingly broad subject. If there's a topic you'd like me to discuss please say so in a comment to this post.