Canada Legal .com Articles

By: Steven Benmor, B.Sc., LL.B., Family Lawyer

Jurisdiction: Ontario (Canada)

Previously, the Ontario Court of Appeal, in the March 2, 2001 decision of in Chapman v. Chapman, considered whether access by a grandparent to grandchildren who live with their parents should be imposed over the wishes of those parents.

In that case, the court decided that the grandmother’s conflict with her children was unfortunate, but there was no evidence that the parents’ refusal to permit the grandmother access to her grandchildren was detrimental to them. Thus, the court ruled that the decision of parents to refuse a grandparent access should therefore be respected by the court and the children’s best interests should be left in the exclusive domain of their parents.

This ruling may have been loosened by the June 4, 2004 decision of Justice Sproat in the case of Dobre v. Dobre.

In that case, the grandparents on the father’s side applied to the court for access to their grandchildren, 5 year old Alexandra and 3 year old Antonio.

The children’s father did not participate in the court case because he was attending a treatment program for his drug addiction. The children’s mother opposed the application.

The court decided that it would be in the children’s best interests to have a relationship with their paternal grandparents and the rest of the father’s family. The court granted the grandparents supervised access at an access centre for 3 hours per week and invited them to have unsupervised access after a re-introduction period.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 25th, 2005 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Family Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.