Further Reflections on Spousal and Child Support After Pelech, Caron and Richardson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The causal connection thesis espoused in Pelech, Caron and Richardson has provoked more questions than solutions. Although conceived with the objective of providing certainty and predictability as well as national uniformity, its subsequent gestation has been fraught with complications. Professor J. McLeod, whose opinions in this context have been cited by the judiciary on frequent occasions, concludes that a causal connection between the applicant's need and a state of economic dependence engendered by the marriage is a legal prerequisite to the success of any claim for spousal support, whether it be governed by the Divorce Act, 1985 or by provincial statute and whether or not any prior settlement has been reached. This blanket approach is, in the opinion of this writer, an unacceptable extension of Pelech, Caron and Richardson. Many questions have arisen concerning the prospective application of the Supreme Court of Canada trilogy. Answers to these questions by the judiciary have generated divergent and irreconcilable opinions and dispositions. The judicial conflict cannot be rationalized simply on the basis that each case is to be determined on its own facts. Consequently, this paper does not provide a detailed analysis of the cases nor even cite the diverse judicial rulings. There must be well over two hundred cases wherein Pelech, Caron and Richardson have been cited. An examination of these decisions leads to the inescapable conclusion that the attitudes of individual judges towards marriage, divorce, and spousal support obligations constitute a major inarticulate premise that explains the wide diversity of opinions expressed and dispositions reached. In an attempt to provide some semblance of order out of judicial chaos, this writer attempts to provide a framework for future decision making that can accommodate the demands of both logic and fairness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.010 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".