Children can have more than two legal parents, Quebec court says

Montreal Gazette

30-04-2025

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Some children have more than two parents, a Quebec Superior Court judge has ruled, and the province must update its laws to recognize that.
Justice Andres Garin found in an April 25 decision that the province's Civil Code, which only allows children to have two legal parents, violates constitutional protections against discrimination.
While family status isn't one of the characteristics specifically named in the section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantees equal protection and benefit of the law, Garin ruled it is an immutable characteristic that is sufficiently similar.
'In fact, from the child's point of view, the family to which they belong is a completely immutable personal characteristic. One thing's for sure, you don't choose your parents!' he wrote. The children involved 'didn't choose the nature of their multi-parent families. They each have three parents. That's their reality and they can't do anything to change that.'
Each of the individual parents also chose to raise a child with two other people for profoundly personal reasons, which represents a personal characteristic that should be considered immutable, he wrote.
Garin struck down more than 40 articles of Quebec's Civil Code, but he suspended that decision for one year to give the government time to change the law.
The ruling combines two separate cases involving a total of three families. In each, three people consider themselves the parents of a child or children. The parents cannot be named due to a publication ban that forbids identifying people in family law cases that relate to the interests of a child.
One of the families involves a married man and woman who entered into a romantic relationship with another woman, who had a child with the man. While all three are raising the child, born in 2022, only the biological mother is listed on the birth certificate.
In another case, a lesbian couple wanted to have children, but wanted the biological father to be involved. A child was born to one of the women in 2011, fathered by a friend, and while the couple broke up in 2015, they want the former couple and the father to be recognized as parents of the child.
In the third case, a woman became infertile due to leukemia treatment, but still wanted children. Her male partner had a child with one of their friends, a woman who was divorced and also wanted children. The three are raising the child together. Another child was born to the couple, who had frozen an embryo before the cancer treatment, through a surrogate and they want the woman with whom they are raising their other child to also be considered a legal parent of the second child.
Mona Greenbaum, founder of the LGBT+ Family Coalition, which helped bring one of the cases, said that while little will change immediately, the ruling is a major step for the families involved and others like them.
'These families exist and the children in these families need to have the same protections as kids in any other families,' she said.
Legal recognition means that all the parents involved will have the same legal rights and responsibilities, Greenbaum said.
'For instance, something as simple as getting a report card from school for your kid, or travelling with your child, or making a medical decision, all those things require that you're the legal parent,' she said.
It will also ensure that children can inherit from a parent who dies without a will and that if there is a breakup, children will still have access to all the people who have parented them and that parents won't be able to just leave and not pay child support, Greenbaum said.
'It's an amazing judgment, because it redefines what will be socially, legally recognized as a family, so it's expanding the definition to reflect what actually exists in reality,' she said.
The Quebec government had opposed the challenge on the grounds that recognizing at most two legal parents didn't violate anyone's rights.
Asked if the government will appeal, a spokesperson for Justice Minister and Attorney General Simon Jolin-Barrette said the government is analyzing the decision and declined to comment further.
Laws in Ontario and Saskatchewan allow children to have more than two legal parents, and a similar bill has been tabled in the Yukon. British Columbia allows more than two parents to be recognized in family situations involving assisted reproduction, though court rulings in that province, as well as in Newfoundland and Labrador, have ordered three people to be legally considered the parents of a child in specific cases.