Joint Custody and Guardianship in the British Columbia Courts: Not a Cautious Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In July 2010, the British Columbia Ministry of the Attorney-General released a White Paper proposing major family law changes, including to child custody law. The concepts of “custody” and “access” would be eliminated and replaced with “guardianship” and “parenting time”. Separating parents would both be defined as guardians and would be able to exercise all parental responsibilities, including day-to-day care and control, unless a court order or an agreement stated otherwise. As a result, both parents would presumptively be legal guardians upon separation should this law reform pass, introducing a form of joint custody. In order to consider the impact of these proposed reforms, it is necessary to understand the current legislative scheme in British Columbia, and how it has been used by judges. That is the objective of this article.British Columbia’s current family law statute, the Family Relations Act, has since the late 1970s used the concepts of “custody” and “access” alongside the concept of “guardianship”. This article’s study of how these concepts have been used in the past may offer some insight as to how a new regime using only “guardianship” and “parenting time” proposed in the White Paper might operate. Before reviewing the trends in the case law, I briefly outline some of the debates surrounding the trends towards joint custody awards in Canada and elsewhere and relate those trends to the use of joint custody and joint guardianship in the B.C. trial courts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.029 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".