A case of rights versus responsibility
What do you get when you pit a Quebec billionaire against his Brazilian-born socialite wife? One nasty divorce that teaches us some critical lessons about "rights" versus "responsibility."
The female spouse in question (who cannot be named because of a law which prohibits naming parties involved in family law cases) is well-known in Quebec high society. She and her billionaire husband lived a luxurious life for 10 years and had three children before they split. Since they never married, the husband agreed to pay child support but insisted that his wife fend for herself. She's suing him for $50 million and $56,000 per month in spousal support.
That this case involves two common-law spouses should not shock us. In Quebec--which has led the country in ditching traditional marriage for common-law relationships--a common-law spouse has no right to alimony, something that especially hurts women. While the rest of Canada has granted common-law couples many or all the same rights as married couples, Quebec has hung women out to dry when it comes to alimony rights.
During the debate over family law reforms in the early 1980s, Quebec feminists supported the distinction between common-law relationships and traditional marriage. These feminists frowned on marriage and promoted common-law or "free unions" as a way to wean women off financial dependency on men.
Thus, Quebec's reforms did not require alimony in common-law cases. After all, if Quebecers were to ditch marriage for "free unions," it followed that everyone would be free to enter and exit relationships without thinking about anything or anyone but themselves.
With 35 per cent of couples in Quebec living common-law (compared to 13 per cent for the rest of Canada), many female common-law spouses are being hoisted on this feminist petard.
The law may be changed so that common-law spouses in Quebec gain the same rights as their counterparts in Saskatchewan (where there are no differences in the rights of married and common-law couples) or Ontario (where common-law spouses have an inherent right to spousal support but have no right to equal division of property bought during the relationship).
Whatever one thinks of common-law relationships, anyone with any sense of duty would never treat their common-law spouse like yesterday's newspaper.
But this issue is not just about family law in Quebec. It speaks to our need to consider personal rights versus personal responsibility. In thinking about this, one might start south of the border with U.S. President Barack Obama.
Obama has talked a lot about responsibility: not specifically about relationships, but about the nature of society. In his inaugural address he spoke about the need for a "new era of responsibility."
This "new era" would see people understand that "we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."
In this case, Obama was reflecting on the dark economic days that have befallen America and much of the world, but his vision surely relates to more than simply the pocketbook.
This sense of duty has become a foreign concept to us in the Western world, where "personal rights" and the lessening of religious influence means that the stigma of abandoning our vows to spouse, family, friends and business colleagues is sacrificed on the altar of "me."
It follows that when this "me first" ideology meets the ideology of gratification: where sex is about "me," not "we"; where people are told they must be "happy" and "fulfilled" rather than seeing that personal fulfillment is tied to the happiness of those whom we live, play and work with.
Perhaps Obama is onto something when he says we need to reclaim responsibility. In times where fear is rampant--whether that fear is about our jobs or our personal relationships--do we turn inward and leave our spouses, children, friends and neighbours to their own devices, or do we embrace duty and responsibility?
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