Overview and Assessment of Approaches to Access Enforcement: An Update

Canadian Access Enforcement Services

The statutes and regulations of Canada and all the provinces and territories are available free online. As well, all provinces and the Northwest Territories and the Yukon provide online information about laws, procedures or services available for parties. These sites, often aimed at non-represented litigants, generally encourage focus on the best interests of the child and non-adversarial resolution of disputes. Many provide access to on-line parental education programs. See:

Two decades ago, the Special Joint Committee recommended that the federal, provincial and territorial governments work together to ensure that supervised access facilities are available in every part of Canada (Canada, 1998b: Recommendation 34). Since then, there has been significant expansion of supervised access and other government services to assist parties with parenting conflicts and other family law matters. This is particularly important because of the rise of self-represented parties in family court.

Manitoba is an example of a province that primarily provides information. Its Family Justice Resource Centre assists parties with their family justice related questions. Most parties using the service are self-represented parties in family court matters or people who are experiencing family breakdown and don’t know where to start dealing with legal issues. The staff give parties information about court processes and forms, alternatives to the court process such as mediation, the parenting program For the Sake of the Children and other programs offered by Family Conciliation Branch, and other resources such as the lawyer referral program, family law and child support publications, the Manitoba Courts website, and the Manitoba Family Justice web page and links. In Winnipeg, the FJRC staff will also prepare orders when requested by self-represented litigants, and review divorce judgments prior to filing to ensure compliance with rules of form and content.

Ontario is an example of a province with an excellent web site that includes legal information, information about available services and an online parenting education program. In 2012, Ontario expanded the family justice services available in the Family Court of the Superior Court of Justice to all court locations that hear family matters.  As a result, families in all regions of Ontario now have access to on-site and off-site mediation services provided by court-connected service providers, as well as Family Law Information Centres and Information Referral Coordinators.

Ontario now requires parties in the majority of cases to participate in a Mandatory Information Program that provides information about separation/divorce and the legal process, including

  1. The effects of separation and divorce on adults and children
  2. Alternatives to litigation
  3. Family law issues
  4. The Family Court process
  5. Local resources and programs for families facing separation and/or divorce.

Ontario’s Supervised Access Program has been developing strategies for working with long-term clients in supervised access. Ontario’s program does not have a time limit on service, and currently 26% of the program’s families have been with them for two or more years. As well, the Supervised Access Program has been doing work in the area of Virtual Visitation – supervised access over large distances with the use of supporting technology, for example, Skype visits). Many of the Supervised Access Centres are offering this service as a means to address some of the physical challenges that come with being a province-wide service in Ontario, but also as a new opportunity for families where the child is local and the non-custodial parent lives out of the province.

Ontario’s Supervised Access Program has been running for 25 years. It is one of the longest-running programs in the world.

Although governments are involved in access enforcement, as outlined above, and provide services relating to access disputes, the enforcement of access orders is largely the responsibility of individual parents. Except in the case of criminal proceedings, individual parents must retain their own lawyers or act for themselves and initiate enforcement proceedings. In general, preliminary screening of custody and access disputes to identify the particular interventions that are appropriate is not widely available. When an assessment is needed, parents must seek an agreement or order for the assessment and often arrange and pay for it themselves, or do without. When they do not live in an area where mediation and supervised access services are provided, they often must do without or arrange and pay for mediation and organize supervision of access themselves.

An important question is whether or not governments can ensure that important services such as parental education, evaluations, mediation and supervised access are available to all, and the extent to which governments are willing to fund such services. As well, in some provinces and territories, civil legal aid may be available to parents to enforce access orders, depending on the merits of the case and financial eligibility.

Provinces and territories could each establish an office with responsibility for providing these services and for enforcing access orders when preventive and alternative measures fail. Currently, no province or territory provides a government agency to enforce access orders. Although governments in Canada have drawn back from this sort of responsibility – at one time Ontario’s Director of the Family Responsibility Office and the Yukon’s Director of Maintenance and Custody Enforcement had responsibility for enforcing custody orders, but statutory amendments have eliminated this responsibility – it may be worth further consideration. A model for such an office is Michigan’s Friend of the Court program, discussed in the next part of this report, which is mandated to provide all these services and to enforce access orders.