John-Paul Boyd Arbitration Chambers

Hey Canadian family law types, start your CPD credits off right in 2021 while getting up to speed on the amendments to the Divorce Act! Join me, psychologist Glenda Lux, Wayne Barkauskas, Q.C., Sagesse's Carrie McManus and lawyer Allison Mitic for the Legal Education Society of Alberta's new course, Coercive Control and Family Violence. This course runs for two half-days on 17 and 24 February 2021. Glenda goes first and will provide family law professionals with an understan...ding of how coercive control presents in family law disputes and the impact of coercive control on the development of parenting plans. Wayne, Carrie, Allison and I will follow up with a refresher on the Protection Against Family Violence Act, a review of the amendments to the Divorce Act addressing family violence and a discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the tools available to deal with family violence in the context of family law disputes. For more information and registration go to https://www.lesaonline.org//coercive-control-and-family-/. This is going to be a really useful course!

There are still a few spots left in the National Family Law Arbitration Course. This 40-hour course starts in February 2021, and includes two optional pre-course programs for lawyers and mental health professionals interested in working as parenting coordinators. The faculty includes senior family law arbitrators, mental health professionals, judges and academics from BC, Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario, with special guest speaker Sen. Murray Sinclair. The course is accredited by the Law Society of British Columbia and the Family Dispute Resolution Institute of Ontario (FDRIO). For more information including registration, visit https://nflac.ca. Special discounted rates are available for members of ADR Institute of Canada, FMC, OAFM, FDRIO, FAMLI and Mediate BC. Sign up now!

Hey everyone, join me tomorrow for a remote presentation on developing parenting plans. This is the third in a three-part series I'm providing for Alberta Health Services' fantastic Community Education Service focussed on the wellbeing of children after separation. We'll talk about considerations in developing parenting schedules and the sort of things you need to think about when figuring out how you'll make decisions for children, and how these considerations can change dep...ending on the age of the children and the level of conflict between the parents. The presentation will be run through Cisco's awful Webex platform, but it's free and open to anyone who wants to join. Register here: https://communityeducationservice.webex.com//onstage/g.php. We'll start tomorrow, Tuesday 8 December 2020, at 10:00am mountain, noon eastern and 9:00am pacific.

Two bits of good news about the new National Family Law Arbitration Course! First, we are deeply honoured that Senator Murray Sinclair has agreed to speak about Indigenous perspectives on arbitration. Senator Sinclair was the first Aboriginal judge appointed in Manitoba and served as a chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in Manitoba. He was the chief commissioner of the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2009 to 2015 and was appointed to the Senate in 2016.... Second, we're also adding two superior court judges to the faculty, one from Ontario and one from Alberta, to talk about the role of the courts in arbitration proceedings. I'm pretty sure about who we're going to ask to speak and will post again when they've confirmed. See the current list of faculty on the course website at www.nflac.ca.

I am really very pleased to announce the new National Family Law Arbitration Course, a 40-hour professional education course organized by myself and two senior family law counsel, Lorne Wolfson and Lawrence Pinksy. This course is designed for professionals dealing with family breakdown and restructuring, and is intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to the arbitration of family law disputes in Canada. It includes two optional 7-hour pre-course programs for mental he...alth professionals and family law lawyers interested in working as parenting coordinators. While good arbitration courses abound in this country, they tend to focus on employment, construction and other corporate and commercial disputes; none are designed to address the special nature and special needs of family law disputes. This course will fill that gap. It will be taught by established family law lawyers, arbitrators and academics practicing in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario, including Wayne Barkauskas QC, Professor Rachel Birnbaum, Tom Dart, Herschel Fogelman, Aaron Franks, Cheryl Goldhart, Stephen Grant, Arlene Henry QC, Alf Mamo, Danny Melamed, Krysta Ostwald QC, Eugene Raponi QC, Brahm Siegel and Bryan Smith, as well as Lorne, Lawrence and me. The course will be provided through an interactive virtual platform in February and March 2021, with the pre-course programs running in January. (This course will not be provided as a passive webinar. Participants' active engagement in class discussions and exercises is required.) Download the current syllabus and registration brochure from https://nflac.ca and read the full list of faculty. Please join us. Contact Lorne Wolfson (Torkin Manes LLP, Ontario), Lawrence Pinsky (Taylor McCaffrey LLP, Manitoba) or me (John-Paul Boyd Arbitration Chambers, British Columbia and Alberta) for more information about the course.

This video gives you a fun, step-by-step guide to the do-it-yourself divorce process in British Columbia, a process that lets you get divorced without having to see a judge. It describes the sole divorce process (when you're doing it by yourself) and the joint divorce process (when you and your ex are cooperating to do it together) in enough detail that you can get through the process without having to hire a lawyer.

Hey everyone, join me today at 10:00am mountain time (that's noon for you folks in Ontario) to participate in my presentation for Alberta Health Services's Community Education Service about resolving family law disputes out of court. This is a free program that'll be broadcast by Webex. It's important to know about the ways that family law problems can be resolved out of court as these processes are all cheaper and faster than resolving problems in court, and are more likely... to produce results that last longer than the results that you'll get in court. Because these processes are quicker than going to court, they also tend to minimize the amount of conflict that children are exposed to. We'll talk about negotiation, mediation, collaborative negotiation and arbitration, when each process is a good idea and when they're not. We'll also talk about a special process called parenting coordination that's a mix of mediation and arbitration intended to help parents in elevated levels of conflict. Join me at https://communityeducationservice.webex.com//onstage/g.php!

It's been a *long* time since I've last posted! I've been up to my eyeballs since the beginning of August. It's as if everyone turned the heat down to adjust to the pandemic, but everything began to come to a boil as school started again and the summer came to an end. On top of that, continuing professional development season kicks into high gear around mid-September, adding to my workload. I am tremendously grateful, now that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, for...Continue reading

Heather Hui-Litwin, of Litigation Help-Public Legal Education and Self-Rep Navigators, had a chat with me a month or so ago about arbitration in family law disputes. Heather turned our conversation into a series of public legal education videos, on topics including what to expect at arbitration, can you represent yourself at arbitration and understanding your arbitration agreement. Check out the full list of videos on Heather's Litigation Help website at https://litigation-help.com/videos-on-arbitration-with-joh/ or on her fantastic YouTube public legal education channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfTSHhH6DmqKfUCJIgGbo4g.

I've got two new videos up on my YouTube channel, Five Minute Family Law, in a new series on parenting after separation. "Children's Best Interests" is all about the tests the court, arbitrators and parents apply under the federal Divorce Act and British Columbia's Family Law Act to figure out the parenting arrangements that are best for a child. "Being a Guardian" is a little more technical and talks about when parents are presumed to be the guardians of their child under t...he Family Law Act, how guardians can appoint people as guardians in their wills, and how people can apply for a court order appointing them as a guardian. Being a guardian is important because guardians have parenting time with a child and decision-making responsibility for a child, the right to make decisions about the child, including emergency decisions when the child is with them, and the right to get information about their child's health, education and welfare from anyone who has that information. People who aren't guardians (including parents who aren't guardians!) can have an order or agreement giving them time with a child, but that's it. They don't have the right to get information about the child and they don't have the right to make decisions about the child when the child is with them. Check these and my other public legal education videos out at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzCWEyKKny_W3qDfyrSM-6Q.

The nice folks at the National Self-Represented Litigants Project have published two new primers for people litigating family law and other civil disputes without counsel, one general primer on representing yourself (https://representingyourselfcanada.com//upl/2020/06/So-you’re-representing-yourself.pdf) and another that focuses on negotiation, mediation and court-based settlement processes (https://representingyourselfcanada.com//Settlement-Smarts-). Both are worthwhile ...reading for people who are involved in a legal dispute, and the primer on settlement processes will be useful for mediators who work with parties without lawyers. Really great work from the NSRLP and JulieMac. Julie Macfarlane is a prof at Windsor and the author of a ground-breaking study on litigants without counsel published in 2013, "Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants". Read Julie's study here: https://representingyourselfcanada.com//09/srlreportfinal.. Thanks Julie, Dayna Cornwall, Moya McAlister and all the other awesome people at the NSRLP!