Re: 'Dad finds children dead in bathtub' by Caroline Overington (4 Feb 2010) The Australian

As I Canadian, I would like to correct for your readership Ms. Overington's assertion that "Canada has a shared parenting law similar to Australia's" [see below].
 
On the contrary, Canada does not have a rebuttable presumption of shared parenting, nor your wonderful mediation/arbitration services, or the "Magellan" project for timely processing of abuse allegations, or provision for sanctions for false allegations or perjury. Unlike Australia, Canada has comparatively asymptotically zero in comprehensive statistical tracking and monitoring to signal the need for adjustments in laws or programs. Moreover, the concept of your world-class Australian Institute of Family Studies or Family Council is foreign to Canadian thinking.
 
Additionally, Canada does not have your progressive "Income Share" child support system with provisions for a reasonable income reserve above minimum subsistence together with cost adjustment to reflect changed cost allocation for each parental household in shared parenting arrangements.
 
The Canadian system is based on an Income Equalization model which always assumes the custodial parent has 100% custody and makes identical income to the paying parent who is assumed to be indefinitely single. This translates to a crude flat percentage of income model based on payer income and number of dependents.
 
The province of Quebec is the only exception with its Income Shares model similar to that of Australia. In fact, it is up to 50% lower than the federal version which , by definition, includes imbedded spousal support. Even then, Quebec Child Support costs are significantly higher than comparable Australian amounts.
 
It is interesting to note that Australian experience with shared parenting mirrors that of other jurisdictions adopting shared parenting variants in that divorce rates have actually decreased with shared parenting arrangements resulting in comparatively fewer incidences of domestic violence.
 
The Canadian model can be roughly compared to you 1995 "reforms" that were replaced by your Shared Parental Responsibility Act and accompanying Child Support reforms.
 
What Canada and Australia do have in common is that repeated polls indicate 80% of Canadians support equal shared parenting regardless of age, region, political preference, or gender. This corresponds to the 80% of Australians who have affirmed the soundness and fairness of your reforms as reflected in your recently released Evaluation Reports.
 
Australians should know that they represent the gold standard for not only family law reform, but a truly novel humanistic model recognizing the institution of the family as the bedrock of society with state programs to support the family throughout all phases of family transitions.

George Piskor
Canadian Equal Parenting Council
www.canadianepc.com

The Australian
4 February 2010

Dad finds children dead in bathtub
By Caroline Overington

His greatest fear was that his estranged wife would take his children from their home in a tiny, snowy town in Canada, and run away to Australia.

So scared was he of losing them, he'd taken their passports and hidden them away.

The effort was in vain: Curtis McConnell, 31, of Millet, near Edmonton in Alberta, on Tuesday entered the house he once shared with his infant children to find something so much worse.

According to local reports, his wife, Allyson Louise McConnell, formerly of Gosford on the NSW central coast, had not taken the children.

She had allegedly drowned them in the bathtub and left their bodies in the water, for him to find.

Mr McConnell pulled the children - Connor, 2, and Jayden, 10 months - from the tub.

He rushed blindly to a neighbour's house, but she could see that it was just too late.

Mrs McConnell, maiden name Meager, wasn't at the scene.

According to reports, she had driven to a local Toys R Us, abandoned her husband's Chrysler sedan in the car park, and then thrown herself from an icy bridge on to a busy freeway. She survived and is being treated in hospital.

The couple had been involved in a bitter custody battle over the boys. Court documents revealed Mrs McConnell wanted to bring them to Australia to live with her mother, Helen, in Gosford.

Mr McConnell wanted them to stay in Millet, population 2100, which is about 50km from Edmonton, where his family has lived for generations, and where the children were born.

In December, a judge had banned Mrs McConnell from leaving the country, and ruled that the children should stay in Canada on an interim basis, while the matter was being sorted out.

Canada has a shared parenting law similar to Australia's, although the role played by parents before separation carries greater weight.

An affidavit lodged with the Court of Queens Bench, Alberta, dated December 10 last year, says the couple met in Canada in November 2005, when Allyson was in Canada on a work visa. They married in NSW on Australia Day, 2007.

Allyson got Canadian residency in April 2007 and the couple moved to a house on 52nd Street in Millet about a year ago.

According to the affidavit, Mr McConnell "noticed our relationship began deteriorating in approximately September 2009 when the respondent told me that she was not happy. We attempted marriage counselling, but that was not successful.
"Notwithstanding, we have been parenting our children equally in the same household."

Until last month Mr McConnell was sleeping in the basement. He was paying $657 in monthly child support and, according to Curtis, he was as much responsible for caring for the children as his wife, waking them each morning and getting them ready for the day before he worked an afternoon shift at a hardware store.

"She has been threatening me that she wants to move back to Australia with our children," Mr McConnell said in his affidavit.

"I am completely opposed to this and I am fearful that she will attempt to do this without my consent or knowledge."