In the much-watched case we discussed last week (Jun. 21), the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that compensation could indeed be awarded a wife for her inability to work due to ongoing trauma from her ex-husband’s infidelity years earlier. Per the Globe and Mail:
Some legal experts said yesterday that the vague and self-contradictory nature of the ruling may encourage litigation from other estranged spouses who want to mount similar arguments based on their emotionally fragile state.
“What has opened up is a new route for people to argue that they cannot become self-sufficient,” said University of Toronto law professor Brenda Cossman.
(Kirk Makin, “Divorce ruling threatens to open floodgates”, Globe & Mail, Jun. 22).
3 Comments
We have said this before. The treatment for traumatic stress disorder is exposure not avoidance. Go to the bottom of this page:
http://www.med.umich.edu/psych/amb/anxiety/treatment/index.htm
If the judge wanted this poor victim to feel better, he would have forced her to face the horrors of work. Now, she will never get better.
Furthermore, no one is coming knocking at her door. In order to meet new people, to get over her husband’s caddish behavior, she should go back to work, meet people with similar backgrounds and interest, date them, and move on. Now, this therapeutic experience is not possible.
No-fault divorce laws are themselves internally contradictory.
Supposedly, fault is not supposed to be considered.
Yet distribution of property in a divorce is based on the vague notion of what is “just” or “fair” or “equitable,” which seems to invite considerations of fault.
In practice, the Canadian courts seem to consider fault only when it is on the part of the divorcing husband, making him pay more alimony for cheating.
But if the wife cheats, and the husband is emotionally devastated, resulting in reduced earnings or the loss of a job, they force him to pay alimony regardless, and impute income to him based on what he would have earned had his earnings not fallen. If he doesn’t pay what he can no longer afford, they hold him in contempt of court.
The sharply different way the Canadian courts treat husbands and wives is sexism, pure and simple.
I read that a Brampton, Ontario was forced to pay alimony despite being stabbed in the chest by his wife and very nearly killed by her. The court said fault could not be considered.
Yet in the British Columbia case described above, the wife will receive more alimony based on garden-variety marital wrongdoing, of a kind that both wives and husbands unfortunately engage in with frequency.
Fault-based jurisdictions seem to be only a little fairer.
In Virginia, the courts supposedly are allowed to consider fault, and infidelity by a spouse seeking alimony is typically supposed to bar alimony.
But as Virginia divorce lawyer Richard Crouch observes on his web site, in practice, the Virginia courts give little weight to cheating by wives in distribution of marital property, unless it resulted in dissipation of assets.
Meanwhile, they consider fault by husbands even where it is statutorily irrelevant, such as in setting child support, and the court of appeals did in one divorce case in Tidewater.
Even under Virginia law, when infidelity happens, courts are allowed to award spousal support to the cheating spouse by making findings that it would be “manifestly unjust” for alimony to be denied. This standard has been considerably watered by by court decisions finding “manifest injustice” based primarily on the wife’s financial need.
In Calvin v. Calvin, for example, the Virginia Court of Appeals ordered a husband to pay alimony to his unfaithful wife, whom the court described as “vindictive and cruel” to her husband, despite the statutory presumption against alimony for unfaithful spouses, since she needed an operation after the divorce (although there was no finding that alternative means of paying for it were unavailable).
Meanwhile, in the Asgari case, they denied a husband alimony despite the fact that he made one-fifth of what his wife made, as a result of losing his job due to disability after a severe work-related injury. This was so even though it was a no-fault divorce and he was the primary caregiver for the child.
The court even ordered him to pay part of his meager disability pension to his ex-wife.
Hans,
The comments section isn’t large enough to chronicle events of that type. Start your own blog on th topic – you’ll have ample material for a lifetime, just in the injustices such as that have ben done in the past 20 years.
Sad, but common. There’s a reason the marriage rate is falling…