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To borrow shamelessly from Jules Dassin’s 1948 film, the police procedural The Naked City, “There are eight million stories in the family courts. This is one of them.”

One by one: It’s the only way I can muster the will to lift my head from the avalanche of emails, with their attendant mountain of pain, that resulted from a couple of stories I wrote this week about the Ontario family courts.

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I should point out this one story is also one-sided, but backed up at significant points by court orders and other documents in my possession.

As it turns out, the family courts problem isn’t confined to Ontario but rather runs, as Peter Mansbridge says ad nauseam, from coast to coast to coast.

T.D. is a 45-year-old father of two who has spent fully a third of his life in the Manitoba courts, trying both to see his kids, now young adults, and to get out from under the punitive support orders made during his highest-earning year as a power engineer in the oil fields.