(Quebec) Quebec is tackling a delicate subject: the legal framework for de facto spouses. The Minister of Justice, Simon Jolin-Barrette, will table this Wednesday the highly anticipated second part of the family law reform, in which he will create a new “parental union” regime in Quebec, the only province where couples common-law couples with children are more numerous than married couples.
This new pivotal stage in the reform of family law, which has not been revised in depth since 1980, was initiated after the famous judgment Eric c. Lola of the Supreme Court more than 10 years ago. It aims to modernize the Civil Code on conjugality issues, in the context where de facto spouses currently have no rights or obligations in Quebec.
At the time, Lola challenged the Quebec regime for common-law spouses. She alleged that it was discriminatory, compared to the provisions provided for married people. In an extremely close judgment of five judges against four, the highest court in the country finally ruled that the provisions of the Civil Code were not unconstitutional, but still invited the Quebec legislator to correct the situation.
After the judgment, the PQ government of Pauline Marois created an advisory committee chaired by Alain Roy, full professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Montreal and expert in family law, who submitted a colossal report of more than 400 pages in 2015. The various political parties which have succeeded one another in power have not, to date, brought into play the reform of family law on the issues of conjugality, although demanded by all legal stakeholders.
“Anachronistic” provisions
In 2018, Mr. Roy – who acts as special advisor to Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette – told Radio-Canada that the Liberal government of Philippe Couillard had lacked “courage” by not reforming family law, “incoherent and anachronistic”. News also reported that Prime Minister Couillard’s office explained at the time that it had not moved forward because it did not know “how to approach this.”
In their report in 2015, Mr. Roy and the members of his committee proposed, among other things, that the government establish a new “imperative parental regime”, in which the Civil Code would recognize a “horizontal legal link linking the two parents to one another. the other from the birth of the child or the judgment of adoption, regardless of their marital status.”
Concretely, this new proposed regime was to be accompanied by “reciprocal rights and obligations” and “compulsory enforcement mechanisms aimed at ensuring parents fair protection against the effects of marital and family interdependence that could result from taking into account responsibility for their child, whether during their life together, after their breakup, or even if they have never lived together.
New rights and obligations
Concerning the rights and obligations that two parents owe within this new regime, Mr. Roy’s committee proposed subjecting “the child’s parents to the obligation to provide, during their life together, a contribution to the expenses of the family proportional to their respective abilities”, to protect “the family residence they live in” and to establish “a completely new mechanism for compensating the economic disadvantages suffered by one of the parents due to taking care of the child common “.
PHOTO EDOUARD PLANTE-FRÉCHETTE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
The Minister of Justice, Simon Jolin-Barrette
The reform that Simon Jolin-Barrette will table this Wednesday could be inspired by the proposals formulated in the report of the committee chaired by Alain Roy, but it could also hold surprises. At the time of publication, no information had filtered out on the content of the bill. At the minister’s office on Tuesday, we responded that we would not give any details before tabling the bill.
In recent weeks, Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette met with several stakeholders and observers from the legal and family law community to solicit their observations, on the eve of the tabling of his reform. Several have affirmed The Press that they were impatiently waiting to read it, considering its unprecedented nature.
The story so far
2013
In January 2013, in the case Éric v. Lola, the Supreme Court of Canada highlights the evolution of different marital models in Quebec since the last reform of family law in the early 1980s, particularly on the fact that de facto spouses do not benefit from legal protections adapted to their reality in the event of separation.
2015
In June 2015, the advisory committee on family law, chaired by Professor Alain Roy, submitted its report in Quebec. The document includes 82 recommendations on various subjects: marriage, civil union, filiation, assisted procreation, etc. The Minister of Justice, Stéphanie Vallée, will not carry out the reform before the end of the Couillard government’s mandate.
2023
Parliament adopts Bill 12 on the reform of family law in matters of filiation and aimed at the protection of children born following sexual assault, as well as the rights of surrogate mothers and children born from a pregnancy project for others. This is the conclusion of the first part of the reform, which was initiated during the first mandate of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) in power.