Following decades of criticism, the federal government amended the Divorce Act in 1997 to include guidelines and support tables for the determination of child-support orders. The guidelines were meant to replace a child-support system that relied heavily on judicial discretion, which was blamed for the inconsistency between awards, the inadequacy of the amounts awarded, and inequity in the system. Normative messages about parental responsibility and good behaviour were reinforced in the new child-support regime. Through an analyses of case law, government documents, and interviews with lawyers, unique insight is gained in expanding our understanding of what is happening “on the ground,” beyond the “black letter of the law,” pursuant to the child-support law reforms. This article outlines the dominant message about responsibility that parents receive when they encounter child-support law. Further, it is necessary to consider the socio-economic context in which these reforms have occurred, as they have significant implications for the family in today's society. In the current climate of neo-liberalism, the reformed child-support legislation might be seen as one strategy in the state's reconfiguration of responsibility for the welfare of children. This research demonstrates that while the rationalization of child support has achieved some key objectives, it will fail as an anti-poverty measure.

In the United States, state-based efforts to curtail the spread of methamphetamine (“meth”) have targeted domestic producers through heightened regulation of precursor chemicals used in the clandestine meth-production process. This article examines the impact of these efforts on the exercise of police power in a rural community affected by methamphetamine. As the author shows, the targeting of local meth production has incorporated residents of rural communities into the policing process by variously encouraging and requiring them to adopt a new way of perceiving the local landscape, centred around methamphetamine. Under the new legislation, previously benign objects such as cold medicine, batteries, and drain cleaner have been re-signified as objects with criminal potential that residents of rural communities are called upon to police. This has led to the expansion of police power within and beyond the formal domains of law enforcement. Through the targeting of local production, civic volunteers, pharmacists, retail clerks, natural resource officers, and others have been drawn into the policing of the meth problem. This reveals a key dynamic in the localization of police power: as police power is localized, the local is reimagined in terms of police power.

The failure of the Supreme Court of Canada to give more than lip service to “context” when considering claims under s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms arises largely from the Court's analytic framework, which resists recognizing the social relations of power inherent in complex cases of oppression. The precise nature of the flaws in the Court's analysis is demonstrated in a number of thoughtful feminist critiques that received recognition in the recent decision in R. v. Kapp. While it is too soon to tell whether the Court intends to depart completely from the past decade of s. 15 jurisprudence, equality-seeking groups now have greater opportunities to advance alternative theoretical frameworks for Charter interpretation. This article discusses one such framework, multidimensionality theory, which focuses on the interaction of systems of oppression, conceptualized as an invisible matrix—a vast network of complex, overlapping, interactive, and mutually reinforcing systems. The operation of the systems obscures their effects, and their complexity renders outcomes difficult to predict when they interconnect at sites of subordination and privilege. One can expose the operation of the systems by looking at particular sites of oppression/privilege and considering the contradictions or “inexplicability” of the circumstances based on one system alone. The author argues that the failure of the Charter claim at the heart of the Supreme Court's decision in Native Women's Association of Canada v. Canada demonstrates the need for courts to employ multidimensionality theory in cases of complex oppression. In NWAC, multidimensionality theory reveals that the “dominant” Aboriginal groups were involved in the negotiation/performance of hegemonic masculinities within a racial/colonial context that provided them with justification to suppress NWAC's independent promotion of the interests of Aboriginal women in constitutional negotiations with the government, and that the government was complicit in this performance. By framing the freedom of expression issue as whether NWAC had a “special” right to a speaking platform, and the equality issue as exclusively one of determining whether NWAC could prove the other groups were “male dominated,” the Court fragmented considerations of patriarchy from those of racism and colonization, distorting the synergistic effect of the systems of oppression and reinforcing colonial ideology.

This article describes the emergence of imprisonment as part of the collection of child-support debt in Alberta, Canada. This approach to child poverty arose in the context of political conservatism, a shift in the feminist movement, and changes in the legal environment. Findings indicate that incarceration for support debt is increasing and that Blacks, Aboriginals, the unemployed, and those without post-secondary education are over-represented among those imprisoned for support debt. It is argued that child-support enforcement as an implement of social policy has limits, especially among low-income payors.

Through the journey of one symbolic legal institution—mahr (a form of dowry)—the article follows the ways in which Islamic marriage has travelled to Canada, the United States, France, and Germany, offering a panoply of conflicting images, contradictions, and distributive endowments in transit from Islamic family law to Western adjudication. The author emphasizes the importance of ensuring that distributive consequences, rather than recognition, occupy a central place in the assessment of the legal options available to Muslim women in Western courts. This article represents an important methodological contribution to the debates over the role of identity politics and the (im)possibility of legal transplants in comparative law. The author's argument is that mahr cannot travel to Western liberal courts without carrying with it a very complex interaction among several parties whose interests are often opposed as to its recognition. A legal realist and distributive analysis of Islamic marriage is crucial, she argues, because mahr is often used by the parties as a tool of relative bargaining power in negotiating contractual obligations related to the family. Moreover, Islamic law travels with a multiplicity of voices, and it is this complex hybridity that will be mediated through Western law upon adjudication.

This article tackles the integration of intersectionality into Canadian antidiscrimination law practices by arguing that treating the grounds of discrimination discretely contributes to the further marginalization of multi-discriminated individuals and groups. After tracing the origins and evolution of the intersectional approach to discrimination, it examines the critique addressed by the proponents of intersectionality to mainstream antidiscrimination law. Drawing on a jurisprudential analysis of 30 complaint cases claiming intersectional discrimination treated in Canadian and Quebec courts in the last 20 years, the authors set up a typology of the modes of conception of discrimination by the courts: monistic, compartmentalized, additive, and holistic (intersectional). Institutionalizing intersectionality within antidiscrimination law may be a promising avenue to reconfigure equality-safeguarding judicial apparatuses so as to better enable the struggle against multiple and interlocking forms of oppression and discrimination. Yet it can also become a liberal practice of “diversity management” that obscures structural inequalities and hallows a discourse based on individual vulnerabilities.

The dominant story of matrimonial property law reform in English Canada treats the farming family case of Murdoch v. Murdoch as the great catalyst for change, but there are persistent inequalities affecting farm women, even in provinces that have made progressive changes in the law of relationship breakdown. The farm is the quintessential family business and is both place of residence and source of income. Since the farm is not readily divisible, it is not surprising that all the major marital property law cases to reach the Supreme Court of Canada have involved farm property. What is surprising is that most provincial property reforms, though inspired by the Murdoch case, explicitly exclude farms from division, and those that include farms in the property to be divided still have mechanisms that tend to favour husbands. This article examines Canadian courts' gendered conceptualization of what constitutes a family business by examining the cases on farm property and the related legislative reforms. Feminists, and all women who have benefited from matrimonial property law reform, have an obligation to recognize the problems created by our persistent failure to understand the farm as simultaneously home and place of business.

The careers of male lawyers are radically altered by their experiences in the formation of families. These understudied male experiences fuel income differences, creating a highly hierarchical profession focused around a male mystique of “living large.” This study traces these processes across a 20-year longitudinal study of Toronto lawyers. We argue that time with corporate clients is a very specialized investment that is rewarded with partnership and earnings and that, among men, bears an unexpectedly unique relationship to having children, and that this specialized investment and its relationship to family are more culturally driven than biologically derived.

The debate over the collection of justice statistics by race continues to hinge on the same key issues that were central to the debate when it arose in the early 1990s. There has been one major change, however: whereas racial minority groups were once vehemently opposed to the collection of justice statistics by race, for fear that such statistics would be used to justify discriminatory policies, many minority groups are now advocating for the collection and publication of this data as a means to redress racial discrimination in the administration of justice. Having discussed the lack of available data on racial and ethnic statistics in the Canadian justice system, the authors sought support from the Canadian Law and Society Association (CLSA). At the 2009 annual general meeting of the CLSA, a motion for the association to take an official position in support of the collection of justice statistics by race was put forth by the authors and accepted by the association. At this time it was also decided that a committee would be established to conduct relevant research and to lobby for the collection of pertinent data. At present we are asking interested individuals or organizations who fall into one or more of the following categories to contact the first author:

(1) Those with arguments relating to the collection of justice statistics by race that have not been articulated in the debate that has taken place over the past two decades.

(2) Those with information pertaining to the collection of justice statistics by race that is not readily available or that has not been documented in the academic work referenced herein.

(3) Those who are interested in participating in the work of the committee outlined at the end of this paper.