One of the major barriers to achieving better treatment of fathers and the children they love in Canadian family courts is the economic system that the professional parasites have propped up for themselves.

In December of 2013 Maurice Vellacott, Member of Parliament for Saskatoon-Wanuskewin, tabled a private member’s bill in the House of Commons to amend the Divorce Act.

One of the most important aspects of this bill is that it sought to create what is typically referred to as the “the presumption of shared parenting” (or shared custody, parental responsibilities, guardianship, etc).

This approach to family law means that it will be assumed that having equal parenting time is in the best interests of a child. This differs from the current approach which relies on the best interests of a child as the measuring stick but does almost nothing to define what that means.

Single fathers and a few good minority of rare, conscious having lawyers have been fighting for this reform for as long as family law has been a thing. But Bill C-560 did not pass into law here in Canada, so why is that? Why is the presumption of equal parenting not considered to be “in the best interests of the child”?

If you get on google what you will find is that the main opposition to this type of legislation comes from two places: feminists and lawyers.

For example, a 2010 report from the FREDA Center for Research on Violence Against Women and Children exposed the following myths about fathers:

Myth: Men and women are equal participants in the care of children. Myth: Men want to participate more in raising their children after separation or divorce. Myth: Men who fight for custody are thinking about the best interest of their children…

On so on and so forth. This type of cherry-pick research is the type of thing that has been landing on the desks of legislators for years since women’s rights groups have received millions of dollars both from the government and powerful interest groups.

In spite of such radical feminists views, when every day Canadians were polled on the issue, it turned out that over 70% of them support the idea. I think that there is a certain amount of natural law at play here, and that humans understand on a visceral level that:

“There is no harsher sanction than to be separated from your child.”

– unknown

So why didn’t the bill pass? Well there was actually heavy advocacy against it from the people who surely must know best, the advocates themselves, whom argued essentially that shifting the focus from the “interests of the child” to the “rights of the parent” is inherently counter to the interests of the child. A persuasive argument, indeed. Another point they made is that the current system puts the power in one parents hands for a reason, so that the parents don’t have to keep coming back to court every time they have a disagreement, which the lawyers assured us would happen well nigh constantly and overwhelm the already burdened family court system. While these arguments seem a lot more sound on the surface than the preposterous feminist fear mongering that all males are violent and uninterested in nurturing, the reality is that they are founded in the same selfish reasoning. The argument that shared parenting increases the amount of legislation is pretty preposterous so let’s start with that one because it’s easy to disprove since Australia has been operating under the presumption of shared parenting since 2006.

The truth is that shared parenting ends up resulting in less court battles between couples, which should really be obvious. In Canadian Courts spend untold amounts of time dealing with access and custody issues, versus a much smaller portion of divorce disputes dealing with custody and access issues in Australia and as everyone knows custody/access cases tend to remain active in the court system longer and involve more court activity than other family law cases.

The other argument is that you are focusing on parents rights instead of children’s rights. What this argument is really saying is that you are focusing on father’s rights instead of assuming the mother’s rights trump the fathers. So when people tell you that shared parenting puts the child at risk of violence what they are saying is that violence towards children comes from men, which is a highly suspect statement, but that’s another article…

Australia has faced a powerful backlash from feminist and lawyer lobbies trying to reinstate the old guard. As always they can make some compelling arguments but they tend to rely on anecdotal fear mongering and appealing to the traditional gender paradigm rather than hard science. Real science, on the other hand, has improved to the point where even the Canadian Bar Association has had to shift its position and is now asking for the same reforms that it shot down just a couple years ago. Meanwhile science continues to favor what people know is common sense, that fathers have a positive influence on their children. This 2015 Swedish study concluded that:

“Children with non-cohabitant parents experience more psychosomatic problems than those in nuclear families. Those in joint physical custody do however report better psychosomatic health than children living mostly or only with one parent. Longitudinal studies with information on family factors before and after the separation are needed to inform policy of children’s post separation living arrangements.”

We haven’t even talked about the number one reason for instituting a presumption of shared parenting, which is that in cases where custody or access does come before a judge, everything is at that judge’s discretion and now we have judicial gender bias entering the equation. Don’t even get me started on Judges, they are literally the worst. I mean even worse than lawyers at the end of the day.



In a future post I will go into the problems with Judges in more detail and go deep in their ass and leave some snicker bar wrappers before spray painting Lyndon was here and then walking out. Trust me the #1 reason for a presumption of shared parenting is because judges are not equipped to meet 2 people, listen to them for a couple hours, and then decide which should have custody of the child for the next 18 years. In a future post I will go into the problems with Judges in more detail and go deep in their ass and leave some snicker bar wrappers before spray painting Lyndon was here and then walking out. Trust me the #1 reason for a presumption of shared parenting is because judges are not equipped to meet 2 people, listen to them for a couple hours, and then decide which should have custody of the child for the next 18 years.

As long as we allow Canadian family law to be determined by powerful feminist and legal lobbies rather than listening to the social science, statistics and the objective will of the people , we are failing our children and turning our backs on loving fathers in the process.

READ MORE:

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/barbara-kay-how-the-tories-abandoned-desperate-fathers

In a child’s best interest: the battle over equal custody parenting

An Analysis of Options for Changes in the Legal Regulation of Child Custody and Access

Shared Parenting works well for Children

Edward Kruk: Equal shared parenting — best for parents, best for children