Child Custody Lawyer in Mississauga

The language changed in March 2021

Amendments to the federal Divorce Act and Ontario’s Children’s Law Reform Act took effect on 1 March 2021. “Custody” became decision-making responsibility, the authority to make significant decisions about a child’s health, education, culture, language, religion, and significant extracurricular activities. “Access” became parenting time, the time a child spends in the care of each parent.

Older orders and agreements using the previous terms remain valid and enforceable. But new documents use the new language, and the shift in framing genuinely matters: the question a court asks is not which parent is better, but what arrangement serves this particular child.

The only test is the best interests of the child

Section 24 of the Children’s Law Reform Act sets out the factors. The child’s physical, emotional, and psychological safety and wellbeing is the primary consideration. Beyond that, the court weighs:

• The child’s needs, given their age and stage of development
• The nature and strength of the child’s relationship with each parent, siblings, grandparents, and other important people
• Each parent’s willingness to support the child’s relationship with the other parent
• The history of care of the child
• The child’s views and preferences, given due weight according to age and maturity
• The child’s cultural, linguistic, religious, and spiritual upbringing and heritage, including Indigenous heritage
• Any family violence, and its impact on the ability to care for and meet the needs of the child
• Any civil or criminal proceeding relevant to the safety or wellbeing of the child

Note what is absent from that list: which parent earns more, which parent left, and whose conduct ended the relationship. Courts are consistently uninterested in adult grievances that do not bear on parenting.

Building a parenting plan that survives contact with reality

A good parenting plan is specific enough to be enforceable and flexible enough to be livable. “Reasonable and generous parenting time as agreed between the parties” is neither, and it is the wording behind a remarkable share of return visits to court.

• The regular schedule, with exact exchange times and locations
• Holidays, school breaks, and birthdays, usually on an alternating-year rotation
• How and when the child may travel, and who holds the passport
• Which decisions are joint, which are sole, and who decides if you deadlock
• How the parents will communicate, and how they will not
• Notice requirements for schedule changes
• A dispute resolution clause, mediation before court
• A relocation clause, dealing with notice and consent

Relocation has its own rules

Since 2021 there is a formal relocation regime. A parent who intends to relocate with the child must give at least 60 days’ written notice, setting out the proposed date, the new address and contact information, and a proposal for how parenting time will work afterwards. The other parent has 30 days to object in the prescribed form.

Who bears the burden of proof depends on the existing arrangement. Where parenting time is substantially equal, the relocating parent must show the move is in the child’s best interests. Where the child spends the vast majority of time with the relocating parent, the objecting parent carries the burden. Between those two poles, the burden is shared.

Relocation matters are among the hardest in family law and they are time-sensitive. If a move is proposed, in either direction, get advice immediately rather than after the notice period runs.