Making fathers equal parents
I could scarcely believe my eyes when I read your Nov. 24 editorial ("Moving toward more balance in divorce law") and column by Jody Paterson ("Children left out in custody controversy"), both written in support of a legal default position (presumption) of shared parenting.
Words cannot express the joy I feel that a parliamentary committee is actually going to acknowledge fathers to be equal parents before the law.
For 13 long and difficult years I have worked towards this goal, sacrificing much, trying to prevail against ingrained conservative social bias and vehement feminist orthodoxy. Only one party, the Libertarian party of Canada, has ever enshrined the concept of shared parenting in its party policies (see http://www.libertarian.ca/).
Every citizen of Canada should be grateful to Liberal Senator Anne Cools for her steadfast support of shared parenting. She stood nearly alone, supported only by thousands of mostly impoverished ordinary Canadians who have seen first-hand the devastating effects of the current system on their loved ones.
Will shared parenting work? All the evidence indicates that for most people, most of the time, it works better than any of the alternatives, regardless of how the divorced parents get along with each other. And it meets the Charter requirements of "equality before the law," "innocent until proven guilty" and every other time-tested principle of justice.
I have only one minor criticism of your editorial, where you state that "Ultimately, divorce courts should be aiming for the best interests of the children, not the parents." Your statement contains an implicit assumption that there is some conflict between the interests of children and the interests of their parents. There is not.
The committee's recommendations are an important step, but they still need to be drafted into legislation and then passed by Parliament. This will be no small task, with many obstacles to over come.
Ken Wiebe
director, Libertarian party of Canada
Published November 28, 1998 Victoria Times-Colonist Newspaper page A15