Family property reform in British Columbiaâ the rule of discretion and the discretion of rules
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides a helicopter and speculative view of the new property division sections of the Family Law Act (FLA) 2011 in British Columbia, Canada. The comments are made from the perspective of an outsider, from his experience as a lawyer, mediator and family law reform adviser particularly in Australia. The paper assumes that all family property reform laws necessarily address similar international and historic patterns of family behaviour, with a predictable range of solutions on a rule-discretion spectrum in different cultures and regions. The paper relies upon various assumptions that are based upon international trends. All of these assumptions may be confirmed or qualified by statistical studies and anecdotal reflections in BC and the rest of Canada.\nThe paper suggests that:\n• The FLA initially provides that rules with a degree of certainty will govern the division of family property in BC in the future. In reality, rules travel in pairs. The vast majority of marriages and relationships will be governed by vague and currently unknown mystery maths. However, there are some standard and helpful templates for each line of uncertainty.\n• At least a decade of mystery maths will have some unintended social consequences.\n• Added pressures to the stressed court system, and other factors in BC, will predictably lead to a decrease in the number of awards, agreements and variations of spousal support (both “compensation” and “needs” based). This is a shift away from periodic, lifelong and variable towards (cyclically once again) more lump sum, short term and clean break spousal support.\n• Another consequence of the high transaction costs of narrowing down the new mystery maths will be that in BC, there will be one form of family property “settlement law” for the rich, and another for the poor and middle class.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".