Senator Anne C. Cools (Liberal) of Canada, at a Calgary Workshop on Family Conflict, presented an analysis of the doctrine “In the best interest of the child.” She had found that the first time the term had been mentioned in any legislation was in a 19th Century ruling, in a hearing by the Lord Chancellor in Britain — the highest Court in the U.K., responsible for questions of judiciary equitability and ethics — in which it became established that children have the right to both of their parents and that the King will be the protector of that right. She then recounted a trail of decisions during which that premise became modified repeatedly until it came to mean today that children are the property of, and an adjunct to, their mothers, with most of those changes having taken place during the last three decades. She concluded by asking how it was possible to come from the beginnings of a doctrine with such noble intentions to where we are now. (Source: http://fathersforlife.org/fv/fv_workshop_calgary_98.htm#SenCools).
When asked about her own opinion on the issue as a lawmaker, Senator Cools who is a member of the Special Federal Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access Reform in Canada, stated the following: “I believe that the law should make, no preference for one parent over another and the system has to vindicate and support the prin
ciple that children deserve both parents”. Parliament has not supported that principle, she says, and that is why the courts support the gender bias against men. “When a marriage dissolves, that is the end of marital responsibilities, not parental ones, and the law must reflect that. Children are not property, they are gift and we owe them a duty.” (Source: http://fathersforlife.org/famlaw/justdads.htm).
At the same Calgary Workshop on Family Conflict, Wayne Lenhardt, L.L.B., founder of the Independent Lawyers Society, reported on justice accountability, in a presentation named “Something funny happened to justice on the way to family court.” He described a system out of control, in which there is not even a pretence of adhering to the rules of evidence, in which judges base capricious decisions on “opinions that they pick off the wall” and frequently have total disregard for factors introduced in filed affidavits — obviously not having read them at all. He recounted a number of instances that would have boggled the mind of Franz Kafka. He told of the absurdity of having child support guidelines to govern fair and equitable calculations of child support amounts, only to have those guidelines circumvented when judges routinely impute the incomes of the fathers who are ordered to pay extraordinary amounts of money that bear no relation to their ability to pay. In one case, he said, the father had an income of $40,000/year, but the judge “imputed” his income to be $60,000/year [impute: to lay the responsibility or blame for, often falsely and unjustly]. Wayne Lenhardt asked where these people come from to apply imputation as a principle of justice.
In our current system of patronage appointment of judges, he said, it isn’t likely that we’ll be blessed with judges whom we can expect to possess fairness and objectivity. Holding up the Sept. 21, 1998 issue of the Alberta Report featuring Chief Justice Antonio ‘The Fixer’ Lamer of the Supreme Court of Canada, he referred to a comment by Ted Byfield in one of his frequent columns on judiciary activism, in which Ted Byfield had suggested that the constitution should perhaps be discarded because it didn’t provide a valid framework for guiding and regulating our lives. However, Wayne Lenhardt said that Ted Byfield should have considered that perhaps there is very little that is wrong with out Constitution, and that an obviously better alternative would be to hold judges responsible and accountable for upholding the Law, and, instead of getting rid of the Constitution, to get rid of the judges who circumvent the Law.
Wayne Lenhardt explained that and why it isn’t possible to hold judges accountable for anything these days, because the legislators refrain from doing their job of telling the judges what their responsibilities are, and that the judges are left to ply their games with absolute power and total lack of control by anyone but themselves. To complain to anyone about the misconduct of the judiciary is useless, he said, because such complaints ultimately arrive at the very same judges who make a mockery of our constitution. With nobody holding them accountable and with them only being accountable to themselves, he asked in whose favour they’ll rule when they hear such complaints. Source: http://fathersforlife.org/fv/fv_workshop_calgary_98.htm#SenCools