Say you’re a step-parent of a young child for a few years. Say you break up with that child’s biological parent. Should you be put on that child’s birth certificate in addition to the biological parents, and be awarded partial custody? In New Brunswick, the answer is yes.
This clarification comes to us from the New Brunswick Court of King’s Bench, which
last week to grant partial custody of a five-year-old boy to his mother’s ex-girlfriend-turned-boyfriend.
That’s the short version. The long version is, in 2020, a New Brunswick woman named J.K., and her ex-husband, D.K., had a son, L, the child at the centre of the is court battle. But they didn’t exactly know it at the time. The two already had one child together in 2017 and separated in 2018. They continued to have sexual encounters after their separation, but since J.K. was also seeing other people, the parentage was unclear until court-ordered paternity testing took place.
In 2019, J.K. began dating a woman who worked at her first kid’s daycare, K.M. This ended later in the year due to toxicity (“there was violence on both sides,” was the court summary of K.M.’s testimony), and J.K. ultimately moved back in with her husband — not as a couple, but not in an asexual way either, because it was during this time that their now five-year-old son was conceived. In early 2020, J.K. began seeing an old college friend named C.C, and found out she was pregnant. She believed him to be the father, but he was struggling with drugs at the time, and didn’t see him as ready to take the role.
When the pandemic hit, J.K. resumed her relationship with the woman from daycare, K.M. They were together during the pregnancy — K.M. was even listed on the birth certificate as a parent — and for the two years that followed, splitting up in 2022. K.M. identified as a woman when the child was born, but transitioned afterward and took on the role of a father figure. Post-breakup, J.K. returned to C.C., and they’ve been together since; in 2024, they even had two kids. They’re the primary caregivers of L.
There’s also a layer of geography to all this: the mother and her trans ex lived in Saint John initially, but in 2024 the mother moved two hours away. Still, both households shared custody of the child, him going back and forth between the two as they continued to fight for full custody in court.
K.M. petitioned the court for parental rights and for full custody (or partial custody, if the mother moved back home). The biological parents and C.C. petitioned for K.M. to be cut out of the child’s life completely.
K.M. won a compromise: custody every third weekend.
New Brunswick law defines a “parent” as someone who “who has demonstrated a settled intention to treat a child as a child of the person’s family” — and the presence of K.M. in L’s life from day 1 as a parental figure
that definition for the judge. As for apportioning custody, most parenting time was awarded to the biological mother — but some weekends will go to the unrelated step-parent because the judge believed it to be in the kid’s best interests.
“Although L has had three father figures in his life so far, only one father has been present since birth (and even before) until now. That father is the applicant, K.M.,”
the judge.
The judge found it important that the child had formed sibling-like relationships with the children of K.M.’s new wife (though, it’s possible that they lost custody of those two kids; the
on that point). The judge also gave some weight to K.M.’s intention to enroll the kid in French immersion (something the mom wasn’t about to do). He expressed some skepticism at the biological family’s religious views, particularly relating to transgender matters.
“Given the mother’s evidence about her parents’ (negative) views on LGBTQ relationships, this could raise concerns about what will be said to the child about the reality of transgender people. For the time being, however, this has not been raised,” he noted. Elsewhere, he referred to K.M.’s female name as a “deadname,” adopting the terms of gender ideology. It seemed that the judge viewed gender ideology as the neutral state of nature, possibly a reason to favour K.M.
So, what does it all mean? In New Brunswick, at least, you can get custody of someone else’s kid, even if both of their biological parents are in the picture.
Reading between the lines, you can find some additional reasons why the judge leaned this way. The kid in question’s mother has a handful of mental illnesses and a history of drug addition. She wasn’t all that credible in court, her story laden with “significant contradictions.” She claims to have been sober in 2019, but
again in 2023 for a brief period. When she moved two hours away, the new home initially
. Her partner, C.C., also has a history of drug abuse and relapsed in 2023; he is a sex offender, convicted of having non-consensual sex with a previous girlfriend as she slept.
You get the impression that the judge may have seen a better parent in K.M. — who isn’t perfect, either, having recently pleaded guilty to cannabis distribution charges, but who was more forthright and didn’t appear to be living with a sex offender. As for who the kid wants to live with, it’s hard to say; each claims the kid says concerning things about the other.
Decisions like these confuse what a family actually is. And while it does make sense for step-parents to take an active role in their stepkids’ lives, they still aren’t the real parents. Canadian law is increasingly moving towards a family model detached from true kinship: a Quebec judge
that multiple parents can go on a birth certificate earlier this year, following a B.C. court
. And in that year, an Alberta court
that a stepfather had to provide support for children that weren’t his — even after they turned 18.
In 2022, meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Canada said that kinship carries “minimal weight” in determining where a child goes: “changing social conditions … have diminished the significance of biological ties,”
the unanimous court. It’s not an absolute rejection of the biological nuclear family, which has carried our civilization for centuries, but it is a departure.
We’re moving towards something like the common-law marriage for parent-child relationships, where the state imposes a legal relationship on people without their consent, and that’s something to be concerned about. It means that real parents who allow unrelated adults to become a fixture in their kid’s life can ultimately lose some of their parental rights in the process.
National Post
