It's six minutes and 50 seconds into my introduction.
My paper is divided into three parts. The most important thing I would like to say to you is that I have spent my life talking about what labels matter. I did a lot of gay and lesbian equality work that was all about putting the right labels on things, moving toward a functional vision of family. Despite that very significant bias that I have, labels matter in custody and access cases. The constituency is the 10%. Who are the ones we're worried about? They're the victims of domestic violence who phone my office while they are on the floor being kicked in the head by their spouse, with a child watching.
I'm not trying to be provocative. Those are the people who need access to the system, who do not, when we talk about mandatory mediation, need us to make them feel that they're doing something wrong if they need the court system, because those people do.
The other things I suggest that you look at, which aren't contained in my paper and I find incredibly compelling and important, are the DVDRC reports. The DVDRC is a committee, the domestic violence death review committee, that looks at what happens with fatal deaths in the domestic violence area on an annual basis. Those DVDRC reports tell us about the constituency. They tell us that those people are at the highest risk of actually fatal interactions. The number one time that you may get killed is at the time of separation. The number one time of murder-suicide is at the time of separation.
That's the constituency. Those are the people. Labels matter. Labels matter to third parties, to immigration.
All right, I'll wrap it up. You have my paper on why labels matter. We also have a paper that The Advocates' Society produced. I heard you talking about judicial interviews with children. We did a significant amount of work on a joint committee basis with the AFCC, which is an international, multi-disciplinary organization in family law. That paper is available. It's not in my materials, but it's available on The Advocates' Society's website. It talks about best practices for judicial interviews of children and provides a whole basis for training and discussion around it.
At the end of my paper, I did say some things that you didn't ask me about. If I were going to change the Divorce Act, what would I do? I would repeal section 9 of the federal child support guidelines, which is the single most disgusting amendment in any family law area anybody ever did, since at least Mr. Melamed and I were called to the bar, which is inserting economic interests into custody and access cases. Now, if you have 40% of the time or more—and that's since 1999—you automatically don't have to pay as much child support. This creates messed up incentives in the same way, with respect, that your draft mobility provision threatens to do. That mobility language about who's going to have substantially equal time, or whatever, that's all just the same thing.
That's why changing the labels, with respect, is a bit like lipstick on the pig. Changing the labels doesn't change the conditions under which humans fight. Humans are the users of this system. There are people who need it. I agree that if we had always started, way back, with words that didn't denote ownership, it would be better, because that's one of the things that people are offended by. The word “custody” sounds like I own the kid, that the kid's a piece of my property.
I agree that if we'd started with different language, way back, it would be nicer. That would be great. Don't change it now, unless you want to just create uncertainty. Look at what happened in the other provinces. It's all set out in my paper. It's not a fix. If you polled people...it's not a fix, I think.
Finally, on presumption of joint custody, that whole discussion, I didn't know you were going to do that. I would have written another 10 pages in my paper about all the ills of the presumption of joint custody. I will say, in response to somebody's question, that there's excellent academic literature by a woman named Jennifer McIntosh, out of Australia, and by Alastair Nicholson, former chief family law justice in Australia, and the woman who followed him, who's also the current family law chief judge in Australia. All of that is very interesting.
Jennifer McIntosh is a psychologist. I once saw Jennifer McIntosh do a slide show with all the drawings of all the children put into a presumption of equal time. The slide show had these children's drawings of their suitcases—