Well there is so much happening in family mediation these days.
There is the Chief Justice, Warren Winkler, someone for whom I have the greatest of respect because he is such a leader among leaders. But I don’t think I agree with him about creating a “presumption” that all difficult cases in family court are good candidates for mediation, and that a triage judge should decide which ones are not good candidates. I will always believe that the only effective and safe mediation in family law is truly voluntary mediation that begins with full screening for power imbalances and violence, and this model falls short on both counts from what I can tell. But, I will have to write more about that later.
And there is the province’s excellent expansion of court-connected mediation to the entire province, which has most of the family mediation community fully occupied these days. Many jurisdictions have had the benefit of free on-site mediation, provided by accredited mediators, for a long time. It is long overdue in places like Toronto and elsewhere. But I will have to write more about that later, too.
There is the blog post that I promised a long time ago to a fellow lawyer and mediator in the U.S. about the continuing challenges with the collaborative law process– the confusion clients can get about exactly who is their lawyer, and what their relationship is with the other person’s lawyer, and what happens when a client is unhappy with something the other lawyer has done. The process has potentially introduced a whole new set of contractual relationships…. but that is something I will also have to write about later.
And there are the upcoming meetings of the AFCC and the OAFM, both good organizations that support family mediation in this province and elsewhere…
And I promised another colleague that I would write about the first meeting of the Family Arbitration section of the ADR Institute of Ontario April 15…. chaired by my good friend and colleague Tom Bastedo…but that too will have to wait.
Because I am off to Nunavut! I will be teaching a family mediation course there to lawyers who want to become accredited mediators but lack a territorial accreditation organization. I have a strong desire to understand better how profoundly our past legal and social treatment of our first nations continues to affect everyone in Canada, and how little many of us truly understand about our own shameful legal first nations history. I have been to Inuvik, NWT before, but never anywhere in Nunavut and I can’t wait to get there and learn as much as I can.
And when I get back I will write about all these other important things.
