COURT FILE NO.: FS-20-00016669-0000 DATE: 20230704

SUPERIOR COURT OF JUSTICE - ONTARIO

RE: ADELE TEVLIN, Applicant AND: VLADISLAV SOBOLEV, Respondent (self-represented)

BEFORE: Akazaki J.

COUNSEL: Justyna Waxman, for the Applicant

HEARD: June 29, 2023

REASONS FOR DECISION

AKAZAKI J.

INTRODUCTION

[1] On Wednesday, June 21, 2023, the grade one teacher at Taddle Creek Montessori School ended the afternoon a few minutes early to celebrate the last day of school at a nearby park. The Applicant mother had already sent her son’s nanny to accompany him with the class to the park and then to take him to karate lessons. The Respondent father then arrived at the park, wearing a shirt with the slogan, “Make Canada Free Again.” A verbal altercation ensued after the mother rushed to the park to insert herself between the father and their son. The son started to cry. He was soon consoled and went to play with his friends. The police were called. After the son returned to the mother’s home, he told her: “Papa ruined my graduation.”

[2] The mother brought two motions that came before me, to suspend the father’s parenting time pending his undergoing a psychiatric assessment, and to find him in contempt of court.

[3] The reader of the above family law narrative, as described in the mother’s evidence, would not be faulted for seeing merit to the mother’s case and for holding the father accountable for the disturbance of the children’s end-of-term outing. At the hearing, the father identified the missing context to the piece, viz. the Order of Justice Shore, December 22, 2022, which read:

[1.] The father shall have regular parenting time with the child as follows:

[b] Every Monday and Wednesday after school with the father picking up from school until 6:30 pm, when the father drops the child off.

[4] It had been his turn to pick up the child from school. When the father arrived at the school, he discovered the child had left for the park in the care of the nanny. One could tell he was angry, but he was in control of it. The nanny called the mother. The mother and her husband berated him. When the mother went to the park to prevent the father from then exercising his parenting time, she violated the court order. She was responsible for the scene at the graduation and for the fact that the child, in the words of her counsel, “is now terrified at the prospect of seeing the father.”

[5] As an additional act of entitlement and condescension, her motion asked the court to require the father to check in for an assessment at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health before he could enjoy any more time with the child. When I suggested family therapy as a better alternative to defuse the situation in which she would take part, she declined. She maintained that it was the father who needed to be assessed for a mental disorder. She had only suspended parenting time to protect the child from harm, and that there was nothing wrong with her. The hubris of the mother’s attempt to summon the family court’s powers against the father does reveal the source of the tension – and the likely route to a better path forward.

BACKGROUND AND PRIOR LITIGATION

[6] The parties started seeing each other in May 2015. The mother became pregnant soon thereafter. They lived together for the first half of 2016, then they separated. Since separation, the mother has been the main caregiver of the child, who just finished grade one. Between 2016 and 2020, the parties tried but failed to formalize their parenting arrangements. As in many family law disputes, they blamed each other for the impasse and fanned their mutual hostility.

[7] After the WHO declared the worldwide Covid-19 Pandemic in March 2020, the father became an organizer of protests against the lockdown. (Later, this protest extended to other public health measures such as mask mandates and vaccination programs.) Citing his refusal to abide by these measures, the mother brought a motion on July 3, 2020, to suspend in-person contact with the child. On July 7, 2020, this court made an order suspending his in-person parenting time until he obtained a negative test for Covid-19 or self-isolated for fourteen days, and until he committed to follow the public health protocols.

[8] The July 2020 motion could have been a clash of anxiety-driven compulsions. The mother may have sought to protect her child from a virulent disease of which not much was known. The father is a libertarian, whose identity rapidly merged with the Covid-19 protest as an assault by the state against his basic freedoms. The court ruled on the side of protecting the child and his family against the risk of infection. The ruling, in turn, triggered a strong situational reaction on the part of the father. His view was that the mother had found a wedge and capitalized on it in order to mobilize her law firm against his contact with the child. He could have appealed the order. He could have abided by it and thwarted what he perceived to have been a strategy to alienate him from the child. Instead, he absented himself from the child’s life for almost two years.

[9] The court grapples daily with the fact its decisions, by relieving one party’s stress, risk inflaming the other’s. In family, law, however, it is important not to create winners and losers. I say this because the mother, at one point in the argument at the park, called the father “a loser.” He thanked her for that comment, and she said, “Yeah, you’re welcome.” The mother’s evidence and her arguments in support of the motion indeed consisted of ad hominem attempts to spin her breach of Justice Shore’s order into an act of child protection against an extremist and an unhinged person.

[10] In 2016, the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore had predicted the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. He had come to that conclusion by interviewing the people whom Hilary Clinton had put down as Trump’s “basket of deplorables” and finding that there was a large segment of post-industrial America that opposed globalization and encroachment of their freedoms by the state, controlled by elites. Despite the success of the Trump administration’s public-private partnership in the development of two MRNA vaccines against Covid-19, the former president himself became the ultimate leader of the anti-vaccine and anti-mask political movement. It is common for many to look down their noses at the proponents and acolytes of the anti-vaccine and anti-mask ideology, in the way respectable people viewed members of the hippy counterculture in the 1960s. The movement is by no means innocent. Countless deaths ruined lives can be traced to the spread of false information and conspiracy theories about Covid-19.

[11] The July 2020 court order and the pandemic virtually exiled the father from his son’s orbit for almost two years. According to the mother, he spent these months travelling the country to promote a misguided campaign against public health measures, and he had little or no contact with the child although permitted to reach him by video chat. Her litigation conduct after he did return, however, might lead one to suspect she was happy that he had kept away.

[12] On May 13, 2022, the father attempted to file a notice of motion to restore his pre-pandemic parenting time. On May 16, 2022, Justice Shore made an Early Judicial Intervention direction as follows:

The parties had an equal timesharing arrangement prior to Covid. During Covid the schedule was interrupted. The Respondent would like to restart the equal time sharing arrangement. Although this in and of itself is not urgent, the Respondent has not had contact with the child since April 30, 2022, despite the court order requiring frequent contact. I therefore find the matter to be urgent and will schedule an early case conference date.

[13] Whatever the father’s political or existential rationale for self-exile from his son’s life after the July 2020 order, Justice Shore made it clear that he had to return from the wilderness and retake his role as the son’s father. The father’s idea of reunification was then to arrive unannounced at the mother’s home to speak with the child at the doorstep and to stream it on Facebook. In response to the re-emergence of the father on the scene, the mother brought a motion for a restraining order against him. That motion was eventually resolved on consent on July 4, 2023. In the affidavit filed in support of the motion, the mother stated that she had been concerned “for years about the negative influence that Vlad's increasingly radical views have had and will have on our son.”

[14] The intractable nature of the conflict in this case clearly stems from (a) the mother’s aversion to allowing the father a role in the son’s life because she did not want his politics and world view to infiltrate their son’s upbringing and (b) the father’s stridency and insistence that he impart on his son the views that the mother finds objectionable. The written submission filed on behalf of the mother complained that “Vlad continuously exposed [their child] to his various controversial causes and campaigns, including his newest campaign called “Fathers Are Essential.”

[15] At this root level, the controversy between the parties contains many of the elements of families in which one of the parents has found religion or has fallen under the influence of a charismatic leader. This must be distinguished from alcoholism or substance abuse, violent crime, and terrorism. Perception or even proof that a parent is misguided, delusional, or embarrassing, cannot justify court intervention. The core of a civil society is the capacity of every constituent to live peacefully with the objectionable.

[16] In 2020, the litigation launched by the mother caused the father’s focus to expand or transfer from protest against Covid-19 restrictions to his conversion to the fathers’ rights movement. The latter is a vestige of mid-20th-century judicial approaches to parenting that used to strongly favour of mothers. This was in no small part to fault-based divorce, a system that required proof of adultery or cruelty. The pendulum had swung from the earlier English common law, which treated children as the property of the husband. The father’s rights movement survived on its momentum, even after almost three decades of the “maximum contact” principle under Gordon v. Goertz, [1996] 2 S.C.R. 27, at para. 24, which created a presumption of gender-neutral equal parenting. The more child-centred approach in Barendregt v. Grebliunas, 2022 SCC 22, at paras. 131-35, did not return the law to the pre-Gordon regime that many fathers had considered unjust.

[17] At the end of the hearing of the motion, the father read from a prepared speech by stating that the motion was yet another attempt to bias the court against the father. He does not know that the phrase, “fathers are essential,” could have been paraphrased in hundreds of post-Gordon decisions of this court. To the extent that the father has tried to indoctrinate a child in grade one about the importance of having a father in the child’s life, the mother pointed out, rightly if rhetorically, that the father had absented himself after the 2020 court order. I appreciate that the mother feels, perhaps correctly, that the pro-father message carries a bite to it that is indirectly disparaging of her in the way that his social media posts came out directly that her litigation strategy was to keep him out of their son’s life.

[18] The father’s compulsion to implicate his personal relationship with his son in social media political campaigns does, indeed, seem to indicate either a defect in his ability to sense boundaries or, ironically, a desire to test where such boundaries might be. The mother contends that he is mentally unwell and that psychiatric intervention must be made a condition of his continued parenting time. She is confident that he will be found to be an unfit parent, and that the court will not allow him to come near their son until he comes back a different person. She never addresses the fact that he is also the father of two young daughters, with whom he would like the son to develop a sibling relationship.

[19] The parties are therefore locked in a struggle for the prevalence of each’s negative opinion of the other. The power of this court can disabuse neither the father of his contention that the family law system is biased against him, nor the mother of her belief that he must be clinically diagnosed for holding very strong views. Only when they stop fighting each other will they realize they should not have been fighting. The court has, however, attempted to broker some cease-fires.

[20] There were several interlocutory skirmishes following the father’s dramatic and inappropriate attempt to reunite with his son. In each instance, both parties failed to read the room or even the express words of the court. The father failed to appreciate the court’s fulfilment of its duty to keep him in the child’s life, and the mother failed to see that it would take more than irregular behaviour to move the court to cut him out of it:

a. On October 14, 2022, Justice Shore made a consent order the father’s supervised parenting time, expressing the following view: “What needs to happen now is the reintegration of the Father into the child’s life, having regard solely to the best interests of the child.”

b. On December 22, 2023, Justice Faieta heard the mother’s motion to expand the scope of the restraining order to a 5 km perimeter around the mother’s house and school, as well as amendments to the orders against making certain types of posts on social media. Justice Faieta refused the expand the existing orders but did sanction the father for his breaches of orders regarding social media, by requiring him to pay costs of the motion on an elevated scale.

c. As stated at the outset of my reasons, the supervision element was removed from the father’s parenting time by Justice Shore at the settlement conference of on December 22, 2022.

[21] There is a further settlement conference scheduled for July 26, 2023. It is in the run-up to the July 26, 2023, hearing that the motions before me arose. Before rendering judgment, it is important to focus on the events that happened, as opposed to how the parties tried to spin them.

IMMEDIATE CONTEXT OF THE MOTION

[22] The parties attended before Justice Kraft on June 19, 2023, at a To Be Spoken To Court (TBST) hearing. At that hearing, the mother sought leave to bring a motion to reinstate a supervision condition on the Father’s parenting time that Justice Shore had lifted on December 22, 2022. The unsupervised time entailed six-hour alternating weekend intervals, three hours after school on Mondays and Wednesdays, and certain days over the Christmas vacation. When asked whether the mother had asked Justice Kraft to make a temporary order suspending father’s parenting time, counsel for the Applicant stated that Justice Kraft had not been prepared to make that order. Thus, the mother, who was marked by Justice Kraft in her endorsement as having been present, would have known the court’s unwillingness to change the existing court order until the return of this motion.

[23] According to the mother, she had requested the TBST attendance because “Things took a dramatic turn for the worse when on May 21,” when the father forced the child to have a haircut. In the exchange of text messages between the parties after the haircut, the mother had stated: “Okay great. Dave [the mother’s husband] gives him haircuts once a month he doesn’t like to do it.” There ensued a less light-hearted text argument between the mother and the father about the father’s encouragement of the son to get over his fear of haircuts. The mother then alleged that the son came home upset and agitated, telling her that the father had made him get the haircut against his will.

[24] At the TBST, the father’s brief stated that the child threw a temper tantrum when he was sat down in the chair at the barbershop. The father’s account was not a sworn affidavit. The evidence of the barber was not tendered on the ensuing motion. The sensible thing to do would have been to speak to the barber. Children’s haircut anxiety may not have made it into the DSM-5, but the haircutting industry is a repository of anecdotal wisdom on the subject. There was no probative evidence from either side on the motion about what happened at the barbershop to justify the mother’s allegation that the father displayed unfitness as a parent. Indeed, the mother knew the child’s aversion to haircuts and was relieved that the father had taken him to the barber.

[25] The burden on the motion to reimpose supervised access has not been met by the mother’s interpretation of what may have happened at the barber’s: See V.S.J. v. L.J.G., at paras. 1 and 137. In the absence of cogent evidence supporting the high bar for a supervision order (such as an affidavit from the barber), I would have dismissed the motion as constituted at the TBST hearing before Justice Kraft.

[26] It turned out that the contempt motion was not served by special service, as required under subrule 31(2). Counsel for the mother asked the court to consider it having been served by email. I asked the father whether he received the contempt motion. He responded that he had received a large number of documents from the mother’s counsel and that he could not verify whether he had received it. I did not believe the father’s response. Being a very engaged litigant with knowledge of legal processes, I doubt that it escaped his notice that the motion materials contained a notice of motion to find him in contempt of various court orders. Nevertheless, given that the mother’s counsel had attempted to squeeze the contempt motion in on the coattails of the one-hour motion timetabled by Justice Kraft, it had to be adjourned in any event. I was not prepared to validate service of a contempt motion, in the absence of evidence of the efforts to serve him. I cannot rely on his presence in court as grounds for validation, since a party should not be subject to service of process in the precinct of the court. This is an old common-law rule, the violation of which is considered to be contempt of court.

[27] Having regard to the fragile trust that the father has in the court system, and the fact there was really no time to hear the contempt motion, I hereby direct that any return of the contempt motion must start with an attempt to adhere to the special service rule, followed by a motion for substituted service or validation of service. Any attempt to effect service within the precinct of the court when he is required to attend for another purpose is prohibited.

[28] Turning then to the parenting motion, I observe that, at the TBST hearing, the proposed motion was for supervision to be reimposed, whereas the motion before me was for a complete suspension of parenting time. The rationale for the change in the motion relief was an incident that occurred on June 21, 2023, when the father went to pick up the child on the last day of school (“graduation”) and found the nanny there, under instruction from the mother, to pick him up.

[29] According to the mother’s affidavit, following the attendance before Justice Kraft, she attempted to negotiate his agreement to the reimposition of supervision. After he declined, she deposed, “I had no choice but to suspend his parenting time altogether pending the hearing of the motion.” In other words, Justice Kraft’s refusal to suspend his parenting time made her defy Justice Shore’s order.

[30] The mother then deposed that this decision to deny him parenting time infuriated the father. (As a cognitive therapist, she ought to have known it would have that effect.) The mother, therefore, admitted that she had stopped the father’s parenting time as ordered by Justice Shore on December 22, 2022, before this motion came before me.

[31] In the sequence of events between December 22, 2022, and the mother’s breach of that order, there was no allegation that the father had breach it himself. Justice Shore’s October 14, 2022, order did contemplate that the resumption of social media posting of “any pictures, videos or recordings of the child, or any personal information regarding the child” would cause the cessation of the father’s parenting time. There was therefore no justification for the mother’s breach of the order in the interval between the attendance before Justice Kraft and the motion before me.

[32] Instead of waiting for this motion to be heard in ten days, she decided to deny the father parenting time. By doing this and by seeking the court’s approval of her self-help, in direct violation of Justice Shore’s order granting him parenting time, the mother put her own conduct under the lens. I will now turn to the evidence of what transpired on June 21.

[33] Both of the parties filed links to videos of the incident. I did view the evidence filed by the father over the objection of the mother, but it was conceded that the evidence was duplicative. The only real differences were that (a) the video submitted by the father was filmed by another person and provided a wider angle, whereas the one linked from the mother’s affidavit showed the father filming himself only; and (b) the one submitted by the father showed the mother attacking the person holding the recording device. According to the mother, the videos she filed in court were captured before the father took them down from the father’s social media.

[34] Regarding the father’s affidavit and links, he had filed a brief affidavit in support of a 14B ex parte motion asking for a restraining order against the mother for having intruded on his parenting time. The court had not allowed it to be filed, but at my direction I had the court send it to the mother’s counsel to be treated as a reply affidavit to the motion. As I had predicted, the father considered this to have been unfair treatment by the court, but I explained to him that by failing to present both sides it did not really qualify for an ex parte motion. The mother’s counsel objected to the video content because it had been received late, but she conceded that it was a recording of the same incident only from a different angle.

[35] For the purpose of my analysis of the incident, I need not rely on any material filed by the father. I will only rely on the transcript of the incident as prepared by the student assisting counsel for the mother. Apart from the occasional typographical error, I found the transcript to be faithful to my review of the digital recordings filed by the mother’s counsel. (The only exception to this is the transcription at 7:33 – 7:43 of “Part 2” of the recordings. I could distinctly hear the mother’s husband swearing at the father in a very agitated voice. Overall, the husband was the most aggressive voice during the incident, although his intervention was rather short.)

[36] Part 1 of the recordings started with a conversation between the father and the nanny. The nanny was evidently concerned and unhappy that the father is there to pick the child up from school, contrary to the instruction she received from the mother to pick him up. He told the nanny that the child will be taken to his karate lesson and dropped off at the mother’s home. The father told the nanny to “talk to them,” presumably the mother and her husband, and that “they can explain to you the court order.” He then said: “I am not – Adele is violating the court order.”

[37] Part 2 of the recordings started with the mother’s voice on the nanny’s telephone, on speaker. The mother stated: “We are coming to the park, you are not going with him.” There ensued an argument, followed by the father asking for assistance from the teacher. The teacher stated that her understanding was that the son was in the care of the nanny and that if the nanny is with the son, “Vlad is allowed to have his supervised time.” On being told the mother wanted them to stay at the park, the teacher said they had to wait because the nanny was “the supervisor.” The father then stated: “It’s incorrect. The court order, he’s supposed to be in my care.”

[38] The remainder of the recording of the incident, transcribed in Parts 2, 3, and 4 to Exhibit “C” of the mother’s affidavit, continues with the arrival of the mother. The parents argued. The father reminded her that the court order allowed him to be with his son on Mondays and Wednesdays and that he would drop him off. He asked her why she was there, to which there was no response. The child started to cry. He eventually left the parents to continue arguing and went off to play. At some point, either the mother or her husband telephoned police.

[39] After the mother took the son home, the son told her that “Papa ruined my graduation.”

[40] After the incident in the park, the police advised the mother that the father would face charges for breach of a condition that he refrain from being within 500 metres of the mother and for creating social media posts denigrating her and her husband. I do point out that it was the mother who approached the father, and not the other way around. The summoning of the police in these circumstances was only relevant to emphasize the topsy-turvy legalities of the situation informing the mother’s position in the motion. The mother came within 500 metres of the father. The father was there following a court order.

[41] In assessing the significance of the incident in the park – the premise for the motion to suspend the father’s parenting time altogether – I return to my original assessment of the conflict as the clash between two polarized anxieties. The mother and her husband evidently considered the father to be a bad influence on the child. In her view, the father has become a leader of “radicalized citizens.” The father is a very intense person who is determined to impart his world view on the child. He is distrustful of the justice system. In the attendance before Justice Shore in December 2022, he thought he had obtained an order from the court that he negotiated in his favour, to atone for the time he spent away from his son. The idea that the modest fruits of his participation in the judicial process are now in jeopardy in the mother’s motion clearly terrifies him.

[42] The father believes that the incident in the park was orchestrated by the mother. The teacher’s mistaken belief that the court order required supervision on the father’s parenting time could also have been evidence that the mother had misled the school about the court order. In the context of a family law proceeding solely involving the parenting of a child, parents should be working together to find a just result that focuses on the needs of the child, not devising ways to get what they want out of the situation. It was hard not to deduce an element of strategy in the following basic sequence:

a. The mother denied the father parenting time, in violation of Justice Shore’s order of December 22, 2022, and after Justice Kraft refused to grant a temporary suspension of parenting time.

b. When the father attended the school to pick up the son as ordered by Justice Shore, the mother sent the nanny and then intervened herself, to prevent the father from exercising his parenting time.

c. Afterwards, the child blamed the father for ruining his last day of grade one.

d. The mother brought a motion against the father to deny him parenting time, citing the father’s anger toward the mother as evidence that he is mentally unfit to be with the child.

ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION

[43] The easy legal and procedural resolution to the motion as framed by the mother’s counsel is that it must be dismissed. How can the father’s parenting time be suspended as a consequence of the mother’s breach of his court-ordered turn to pick up the child from school? If I decide to dismiss the motion outright, I would not need to decide whether the father should be required to check himself into CAMH as a condition of the continuation of his parenting time.

[44] Unlike other civil forms of civil litigation, family disputes involving parenting time with children require the court to observe the principle in subsection 24(6) of the Children's Law Reform Act “that a child should have as much time with each parent as is consistent with the best interests of the child.” Interpreting the mirror provision in the Divorce Act, the Supreme Court in Barendregt required the court to value the bond with the parent from perspective of the child’s needs. An understanding of the sources of conflict is required to determine the remedy that will start the parents on a more constructive working relationship and to quell the need for repeated court intervention. This was clearly the direction in which Justice Shore attempted to move the case, last May.

[45] The dispute between the parties is, at its root, a playing out of conflicting anxieties about the philosophies of the parties about the world in general. Until the court and the parties recognize this, either the conflict will perpetuate, or the mother will succeed in making the father an outlaw. Neither outcome serves the child’s best interests.

[46] The father has exhibited a lack of respect for boundaries, especially when it comes to the child’s best interests in shielding him from the online community to which he belongs. The 2020 revisions to the Children's Law Reform Act include controlling behaviour in the definition of family violence, but I did not construe the father’s conduct as controlling the child. Putting a child’s photo or video on social media is not in itself a form of violence. Otherwise, much of the family-rated content on Facebook or Instagram posted by parents outside of family litigation could instigate child protection proceedings. Many of the Covid-19 protesters at Queen’s Park involve their children. Teaching children about unfounded or unpopular beliefs is not, per se, unlawful in Canada.

[47] Putting the child in the middle of family conflict is, without a doubt, inappropriate and potentially harmful. Many family law orders contain injunctions against disparagement of the other spouse within earshot of the child. The posting of a child’s photo on a social media site, if accompanied by content disparaging the other parent, crosses into that damaging territory. Because the contempt motion was not properly before me, I will leave the forensic analysis of the father’s social media posting to the judge hearing it. However, I do observe that the father’s infantile compulsion for this type of “publicity stunt” behaviour betrays a blindness to the fact that it plays right into the mother’s hands.

[48] The mother evidently brought the motion, even though she was the one in breach of a court order, because she felt that a court would be reluctant to decide in favour of a father whom she believes is a bad influence. At some not too unconscious level, she and her husband would like the father to go away and leave them alone. Her affidavit skirted around the Goldwater Rule against psychological diagnosis without consent, by asking the court to require the father to undergo an assessment at CAMH, after he required the child to sit still for a haircut and exercised his court-appointed parenting time. When I suggested to the father that, instead of a mental health assessment, family therapy would be appropriate, he agreed and the mother refused. The mother, through her counsel, denied the root of the conflict being her aversion to the father being in the child’s life because of his strident political views and his intense character. She maintained that he was the one with the mental problem, not her.

[49] The child’s complaint after the barbershop and the father’s exercise of pickup time did not constitute evidence that the father suffers from a psychosis or other serious mental condition that would prevent him from safely exercising his parenting time. What the evidence of the arc of the conflict, from 2020 forward does establish is that the father is a very difficult person to deal with in sharing parenting time with a child. In this regard, clause 24(3)(i) of the Children's Law Reform Act requires me to consider this in any decision regarding parenting in the best interests of the child:

the ability and willingness of each person in respect of whom the order would apply to communicate and co-operate, in particular with one another, on matters affecting the child

[50] The father’s difficulty in observing boundaries, including those set by the court, is compounded by the mother’s denial of her role, under the above provision, to accommodate the father’s existence in her family. Indeed, the mother’s evidence that her son thought that her father ruined his “graduation” was not accompanied by any evidence that she has done anything to disabuse the child of this false belief. By inserting herself between the child and the father in breach of the court order and by instigating the disturbance at the park, the refusal to correct the injustice of the false belief in the father’s fault in the situation amounted to the very parental alienation of which the father had accused her of having perpetrated. At this moment, it is hard to deny the causal equivalence in the parents’ infliction of harm against the child. Their conflict must stop. As hard as it may be for her to do it, it is she who must explain to the child that she was in the wrong. To allow him to hold the false cause of resentment against the father will have lasting repercussions for the child’s development of a moral compass, as well as for his future relationship with his father.

[51] For this reason, family therapy by a clinical psychologist involving the parents and the child is the only way I can see as a path to a more peaceful coexistence in the best interests of the child. Since Justice Kraft has already requested the Office of the Children’s Lawyer (OCL) to be implicated in the file, one might express some cautious optimism that therapy may be on the cards, despite the reluctance of the mother to acknowledge her role as a co-instigator of the conflict. The judge presiding at the settlement conference scheduled for July 26, 2023, will be able to provide further assistance in navigating the parties to a peaceful resolution to the dispute. At this juncture, I do not view the father’s behaviour to be an overriding factor requiring something equivalent to a child protection order. The parties need to understand that they are forever linked by the child, and that they must learn ways to cope with it.

[52] The parenting schedule ordered by Justice Shore in her December 22, 2022, therefore remains in place. In order to clarify the weekday parenting time during the summer months, it should be modified by providing that during the months of July and August, the father shall have parenting time with the child from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., with pickup and drop-off in the same sequence as the weekend parenting times in paragraph [1][a] of the December 22, 2022, order. If the mother still refuses to comply with the order, the order may be enforced by the Toronto Police Services. I therefore make that change order and otherwise dismiss the motion, with costs.

[53] The father is presumptively entitled to costs of the motion, although he is self-represented: Janik v. Drotlef, 2018 ONCJ 426, at paras. 24-45. Generally, such costs are limited to work that would otherwise have been done by a lawyer. The father’s materials were not extensive, but he did have some written notes to deliver his submissions. Unless I hear from him or from the mother’s counsel within ten days that costs submissions are warranted, I hereby fix the costs of the attendance and preparation payable by the mother to the father in the amount of $1,500.

Akazaki, J.

Released: July 4, 2023