Cuts to Legal Aid

On 1 April 2010 (sorry about the delay), a number of important changes were made to the services offered by the Legal Services Society, the provincial agency which delivers legal aid in British Columbia. LSS' budget for legal services is largely funded by the provincial government.

Terminated Services

LSS no longer offers LawLINE, a service which gave free summary legal advice and legal information to persons with low incomes by telephone. The LawLINE Journal blog stopped being updated on 22 March 2010.

The LawLINK website (formerly the Electronic Law Library) has been taken off-line and now redirects to the ClickLaw website, an excellent legal information resource operated by Courthouse Libraries BC with core funding from the Law Foundation.

Updated Income Criteria

LSS provides legal representation to persons of limited means. The household income caps, above which LSS will not provide representation, has been modestly increased by $10 to $85. The current income caps are :

1. For a family of one person, you cannot earn more that $1,420 per month net.
2. For a family of two persons, $1,980 net or less.
3. For a family of three persons, $2,540 net or less.
4. For a family of four persons, $3,100 net or less.
5. For a family of five persons, $3,660 net or less.
6. For a family of six persons, $4,230 net or less.
7. For a family of seven or more persons, $4,800 net or less.

To read other posts about LSS and past funding cuts, click on the "legal aid" label below.

New Amendments for the New Rules

An Order in Council came into effect on 5 May 2010 amending the published version of the new Supreme Court Family Rules. The new rules, as amended, will be in force on 1 July 2010. Many of the amendments corrected minor errors and inconsistencies in the new rules. The significant changes are these:

1. Lists of Documents are now amended to add new documents. The old way of doing things had new documents being listed in a Supplemental List of Documents, a Second Supplemental List of Documents and so forth. With this amendment there will be only one document, an Amended List of Documents, which will be updated when new documents come to light.
   
2. The Applicant's reply materials in chambers proceedings, including the application record and application record index, must now be served and filed by 4:00pm on the day which is one full day before the day set for the hearing of the application. Previously, these materials need to be served and filed by noon on the day before the hearing. Applicants now have much less time to prepare these materials.
3. The Notice of Application form now requires the Applicant to specify the date and time of the hearing of the application.
   

The Order in Council is not yet posted to the website of the Queen's Printer. I will add that link when it becomes publicly available. I have previously discussed the new rules here, here and here, and in much more detail on my website in the New Rules 101 chapter.

Update

The Order in Council amending the published form of the new rules is now available from the Attorney General's website (PDF). The changes to the family law rules are in Schedule B, in the second half of the document.

Family Relations Act Review Update

Readers will recall the review of the Family Relations Act begun by the Attorney General's office in 2007. As mentioned in a post last year, work on the project has continued behind the scenes following the end of the AG's public consultations.

I have learned that the AG is due to release a white paper in June summarizing amendments that will be made to the Family Relations Act as well as options for amendments which may be made to the act. Will there be another opportunity for public comment before the bill is tabled in the legislature?

To read other posts about the FRA review , click on the "Family Relations Act" label below.

Spousal Support Calculators

Readers of my website will recall my frustrated attempts to create on-line calculators to handle the math required by the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines. Despite hours and hours of effort, I simply couldn't coax JavaScript to generate exactly correct results; the math required by the "with child support" formulas is just too complex and defeated me. As a result, I decided to take my "with child support" calculator off-line rather than have people going to court with inaccurate information.

This has not proven a problem for Bryan Delaney, an Ottawa family law lawyer, whose firm's website features calculators for both the "without child support" formula and the basic "with child support" formulas at http://www.delaneys.ca/calculators_main.html. Congratulations are due to Mr. Delaney, although, with respect, I am not sure how accurate the results of his "with child support" calculator will be with the limited information it seems to require.

The surviving calculators available on my website are:

1. child support, under the old and new child support tables for British Columbia;
   
2. children's special expenses; and,
   
3. the "without child support" spousal support formula.

My technical overview of calculations under the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines is available at the website of the Department of Justice at http://canada.justice.gc.ca/eng/pi/fcy-fea/spo-epo/calc/index.html.

Update: 25 May 2011

DivorceMate, the company that sells spousal support software to lawyers, has published a free, public spousal support calculator. Read my post on the calculator for more information, or click on the "advisory guidelines" label below.

Remarrying After a Void Marriage

Not every marriage needs to end in death or divorce. Some marriages are voidable and others are void from the get go. How do you remarry if you're in a marriage which is void or might be voidable?

A marriage may be voidable if:

1. the marriage was a sham;
2. a male spouse was under the age of fourteen or a female spouse was under the age of twelve at the time of the marriage;
3. one or both spouses didn't consent to the marriage, or agreed to the marriage as a result of fraud or misrepresentation;
   
4. a male spouse was impotent or a female spouse was sterile at the time of the marriage; or,
   
5. the marriage cannot be consummated as a result of a spouse's medical or mental condition.
   

If a party to a voidable marriage wants to remarry, a judge must either declare the marriage to be void, annulling the marriage, or make a divorce order. With the court order in hand, go to your local branch of the Vital Statistics Agency and get your marriage licence!

A marriage may be void if:

1. one or both spouses were under the age of seven at the time of the marriage;
2. the spouses are within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity set out in the federal Marriage (Prohibited Degrees) Act;
3. one or both spouses didn't have the mental capacity to marry at the time of the marriage; or,
4. one or both spouses were married at the time of the marriage.
   

Marriages which are void are void ab initio, from the very beginning, as if they were never celebrated. As a result, you don't need either an annulment or a divorce; your marriage never existed in the first place! You can proudly declare yourself to be unmarried when applying for your marriage licence.

If you run into a situation where you need proof that your marriage was void, the only solution I can think of would be to commence a Supreme Court petition proceeding asking for a judicial declaration that your marriage is void.

New Resources for the New Rules: Update

Additional links and documents for download have been posted in New Rules 101 page of my website. The new papers are:

• Commencing Proceedings: Discovery and Disclosure and
• Desk Orders: Process and Procedure
  

Proving Agreements Made at JCCs

Judicial Case Conferences in the Supreme Court are held on a confidential, in camera and off-the-record basis so that the parties can more effectively explore settlement options, without worrying that they'll be held to a settlement proposal later on. This system usually works quite well, but what happens if people disagree on the terms of an agreement reached at a JCC? How do you prove the terms of an agreement reached at an off-the-record conference?

Normally, the court clerk records the terms of any agreements reached or orders made at a JCC. These are printed out and signed by the parties (or their lawyers) and the judge or master who heard the JCC. The first step to avoiding confusion later on is to make sure that the clerk's record is clear and accurate. If you see an error or an ambiguity, ask to have the record clarified before you leave the JCC. No one will complain, as long as you're being reasonable and not trying to re-argue a point.

If you discover an error or an ambiguity later, and the other side doesn't agree with your recollection of the JCC, you'll have to listen to the tape of the proceedings at the JCC. However, because JCCs are confidential, you don't have the automatic right to listen to the tape of the JCC the way you'd be able to listen to the tape of other court hearings, like proceedings in chambers, and you'll have to make an application for permission to listen to the tape and have a transcript made.

If the transcript backs up your recollection, the other side really ought to agree and that should be the end of it. If not, you'll have to make a second application for an order on the terms of the agreement reached at the JCC, using the transcript of the JCC to support your application.