Two Properties, or One? Justice Pazaratz Sorts It Out – For Now
Here’s another noteworthy ruling by Justice Pazaratz – and one that was ultimately reversed on later appeal. Written in his inimitable style, the judgment begins this way:
You wouldn’t think the singular or plural should be so complicated.
Property.
Properties.
The same word. Add an “s”.
You really wouldn’t think that in a nine day trial, involving four presenting counsel — and three more lawyers as witnesses — they couldn’t keep it straight.
Or, that the court wouldn’t find out until the end of the seventh day of evidence – from the very last witness — that all the time we were talking about “property”, we really should have been talking about “properties”.
The Applicant’s lawyer — apparently the only one who knew all along about the mistake — says whether it’s “one property or two” really doesn’t matter.
I’m not so sure he’s right. Or that what he did was right.
This is a story about two houses; 151 acres; a benevolent matriarch; a pregnant bride; and a marriage contract apparently suffering from too many “cut and pastes”. More importantly, it’s a story about two children, still trapped under the same roof with a mother and father who can’t agree on either the past or the future.
With that prologue delivered, Justice Pazaratz went on to examine the merits of the former couple’s dispute, which (at least on the property side of things) related to a 151-acre piece of land that the husband owned at the date of the marriage. The matrimonial home was one of two houses on the property, the other being the husband’s mother’s home.
In 1996, the spouses had signed a marriage contract providing that in the event that they separated, the husband was entitled to exclude the assets that he owned at the time of the marriage. Neither spouse (nor their lawyers) knew at the time that the 151 acres were actually two separate properties, rather than one, and that the husband owned them both.
When the true state of affairs came to after the parties’ separation light years later, the wife claimed that the husband’s non-disclosure about owning both properties invalidated the marriage contract that they had purportedly reached.
Justice Pazaratz agreed with the wife, and held that the marriage contract should be set aside due to the material misrepresentation. At the time the contract was drafted and signed, the wife and her lawyer were misled that there was only one property. This omission rendered the contract inadequate to satisfy the disclosure requirements of the Family Law Act since it undermined the factual basis of the parties’ ostensible deal, and left the wife unable to accurately assess her rights and options.
After setting the marriage contract aside, Justice Pazaratz proceeded to divide the parties’ assets through the normal equalization process. (That ruling was later reversed by the Court of Appeal, which included comment on a “serious matter arising from the reasons for judgment given by the trial judge.” The later appeal ruling will be the subject of an upcoming Blog].
For the full text of the decisions, see:
Butty v. Butty, 2008 CanLII 23946 (ON SC)
Appeal level:
Butty v. Butty, 2009 ONCA 852 (CanLII)
