Previously in Part 1, we saw how family court sells the illusion of justice while families sit in the audience paying the price. Part 2 steps further behind the curtain.
Justice Without Preparation
There is another quiet but devastating feature of family court culture that families rarely understand until they are inside it: decisions that reshape their lives may be made by judges who have only skimmed the material, if they have read it at all.
Lawyers are warned not to overwhelm the court with hundreds of pages, but some cases are genuinely complex. They have years of history, patterns of coercive control, and a trail of reports, messages, and involvement from police or child welfare that actually matters to assessing risk and credibility. The evidence is not padding. It is the story.
In any real circus, the ringmaster knows the acts. They know who is flying, who is catching, and where the risks are. In family court, too many ringmasters walk in without reading the program. They flip through the script while the performers are already mid‑air and then pretend they have seen the whole show. When they get it wrong, it is not their bodies hitting the ground.
Many families watch judges walk into the courtroom without having meaningfully reviewed the file. They open briefs and reports for the first time while the hearing is already underway, reading as counsel argue and, if at all, the parents get to speak. The age‑old expectation that decision‑makers arrive prepared seems to have disappeared somewhere between overburdened dockets and institutional burnout. But these are not traffic tickets. These are people’s lives, children’s homes, and long‑term safety plans.
When a judge is effectively meeting the case in real time, reading on the fly and asking for quick submissions on deeply complex histories, it is hard to believe that the resulting ruling is the best that could be delivered. There may be crucial context buried in those pages that never gets reached in a hurried review. There may be patterns that only emerge when a decision‑maker has the time and willingness to sit with the material, not just skim it. Yet families are expected to live with the consequences, often for years.
If the system truly believes that it is deciding in the best interests of the child, then preparation is not optional. It is the minimum standard. A judge who has not fully understood at least the key evidence, the central safety concerns, and the history of the file is flying blind and asking families to accept that as justice. For the parents and children on the receiving end, that does not feel like a careful, child‑focused process. It feels like another symptom of a system that has normalized cutting corners on the very people it is supposed to protect.
Credit: Pexels
A Hollow Substitute for Resolution
Settlement conferences are meant to test whether the parties can move toward resolution, but too often they function as little more than a checkpoint. The emphasis is on whether the parties have edged closer to agreement, not whether the proposed outcome is fair, trauma‑informed, or even safe.
Before a family even reaches that point, they may wait months just to get before a judge for the first time: filing materials, getting in front of a clerk, securing a date for an initial case conference, and then waiting again for that conference to actually be heard. By the time a second settlement conference, pre‑trial, or trial is in sight, a year or two can easily have passed, along with huge amounts of money and emotional energy, without meaningful resolution.
For many families, mediation, arbitration, or med‑arb could produce a more focused, faster, and less destructive process. Not every case can or should be diverted out of court—there are situations where power imbalances, safety concerns, or urgency require a judge. But not every case needs to spend years in a grinding sequence of conferences and appearances before anything of substance is decided.
We keep being told that judges are overwhelmed, that dockets are overflowing, and that there simply is not enough judicial time to give families the hearings they need. Judges’ organizations, legal commentators, and justice reports have been warning for years about backlogs, delay, and access‑to‑justice failures.
So if the courts are this overloaded, why has Ontario done so little to seriously rethink who helps decide cases?
In Part 3, we ask: if judges are so overloaded, why hasn’t Ontario changed the cast? And why do so many lawyers help keep families trapped in the ring?
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