If I were to describe a place where people were not allowed to leave with their children, you may well be forgiven for thinking of the former Soviet Union or present-day North Korea. One of the last places you might think of would be a modern liberal democracy like Canada, but there is a province in Canada that has systematically denied people the chance to leave with their children for decades.
The Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador regularly occupied the bottom spot in the statistics for allowing parents to relocate out of the province with their children following divorce. No other jurisdiction in Canada has a mobility rate lower than Newfoundland and Labrador - not populous provinces like BC or Ontario and not smaller province that only hear a handful of mobility cases a year such as PEI. Even provinces with strong provincial identities such as Quebec allowed people to leave with their children, but not Newfoundland and Labrador.
From 2006 until 2011, the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador allowed mobility applications in just 36% of cases. Put another way, your application to leave with your children was twice as likely to be rejected as allowed once the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador seized jurisdiction. The average mobility rate in Canada was just over 50%, which is what you would expect where the courts had to decide a case in one of two ways.
Since 2011, the statistics for Canada have stayed the same, but the mobility rate in Newfoundland and Labrador has declined to nearly 0%. In five years, the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador has allowed just one mobility application following divorce.
The reasons for this are hard to discern, if not impossible. The Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador does not follow the legal principle that justice should not just be done, but should be manifestly and obviously be seen to be done, because it hears all family cases in secret. No members of the public are allowed to watch family trials, the media is not allowed to report on family trials and the decisions are not released onto public legal databases like CanLII.
However, following five years of research and investigation into the workings of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador, evidence is starting to come to light that suggests that this rock-bottom mobility rate is not the result of changes in the law, which has remained unchanged throughout Canada since 1985, but is the result of deliberate bias against people wishing to take their children out of the province.
In the posts that follow, many names will have been changed to protect the identities of children and also to protect witnesses and whistleblowers from repercussions. However, the stories and statistics have been verified as thoroughly as possible given the secretive nature of the Courts. If members of the government or judiciary would like to correct any accounts, they are free to do so and their comments will be published without editing or redaction.
