I actually work in the area of pension division on marriage breakdown. The way it is in Canada is that all provinces permit the division of pension benefits on marriage breakdown; Manitoba requires it. Usually there's a limit, such that only 50% of the pension benefits can be transferred from the plan of the spouse to the other spouse.
The difficulty many spouses run into is that if the money is transferred from the pension plan, it usually goes into a personal RRSP. Typically that means, especially if it's coming from a defined benefit plan, that it goes into the personal RRSP and then the non-member spouse has to manage it. That's where value is often lost, because if people don't manage their investments very well, it's not surprising: investing is very difficult. There's a lot of loss of value there, when this happens.