What this is really about is the concept of “common law”, which means that the government can tell you you’re married, even if YOU don’t think you are.
If you don’t feel like clickety-clicking, here are the details: Susan Bussey, who was injured in a car accident, and cannot work, rented out her basement to a longtime friend, Lorraine Houde. Houde collects Welfare benefits. She is also a lesbian. She pays rent to Bussey, as if she were a stranger. Their friendship does not factor into their business dealings.
In 1999, the government of Quebec amended welfare laws to include same-sex partners as spouses.
You can see where this is going.
After an investigation where welfare officials documented 23 pages of gossip from the neighbours, as well as the oh-so-relevant :rolleyes: facts that Houde and Bussey share a mailbox, and that Bussey once listed Houde as an “emergency contact” on a form, they decided that Bussey and Houde are spouses, and that Bussey repay $35,000 dollars of welfare benefits that were supposedly obtained fraudulently.
Bussey and Houde’s lawyers were only able to obtain 10 pages of the 23-page rag that the welfare “pitbulls” wrote up on the “couple”, and on the pages they did recieve, there were paragraphs that had been blacked out. On top of this, is the fact that investigators may have obtained information illegally. When Houde was told that she did not have the right to have a lawyer present at a meeting with investigators, she threw her reading glasses down on the table in front of her in exasperation. For that action, she was charged with assault. Cake, meet icing.
May those slimy mofos be bent over a boulder in the Canadian shield, bound, sodomized with large chunks of rabbit meat, and set upon by ravenous, rabid weasels.
With gay marriage looming inevitable (thank jebus), this whole common-law statute is becoming completely out-fucking-dated.
What I don’t get is why schmucks think that gays are a threat to the “sanctity of marriage”, while common-law marriage isn’t. I mean, duh. What’s LESS sacrosanct than a government official barging in and declaring random roommatage suddenly marriage?
If you’d read the article, you’d know that there are no “witnesses” other than the two women, who insist they are not spouses. Bussey is suing the investigators for slander for saying she was a lesbian.
Wait, I take that back, another “witness” would be Houde’s sister, who says
There is also the fact that Houde was involved for 29 years with someone who was not Bussey. They’ve since broken up, but they were together exclusively while Houde was living with Bussey.
I think it’s funny that you’re accusing me of not knowing my facts when you can’t even click on the link. Or read the link, if you’re clicking finger is working.
I’m with you all the way on the rant. That sucks. But this bit just sounds…sort of messy, more than really uncomfortable. I mean, rabbits aren’t that large, so how bad could that be? Might even be fun, if you’re into that sort of thing. Unless the meat was frozen…
Honestly, duffer, I would hardly give Catty Cathy Next Door credibility by calling her a “witness”. The emphasis in the sentence you quoted was on “gossip”, which makes whatever the neighbours saw just as worthless as any episode of Hard Copy. Gossip is not and never will be, a worthwhile source of information.
Well, it would depend on the reporter’s POV while writing the story. Let’s say I’m cooking meth in my house. A common tactic is to use foil to black out windows so nobody can see in. However, when I work nights, I use foil to darken the room so I can sleep. This can start gossiping that I’m a meth cooker. I’m not, of course, but if they gossip about an actual cooker, and he’s busted, then it’s testimony.
Let the courts decide which it is, unless you know them personally. That was the crux of my 1st reply. Sorry if it was misunderstood
If the neighbors were reporting only what they had been told by others – ‘gossip’ - then that testimony is likely hearsay, and probably should not be accorded much weight. (I know there are exceptions, both as to the admissibility of hearsay in administrative proceedings and to the hearsay rule itself.)
If the neighbors were reporting things they personally saw and heard, then their testimony certainly seems legitimate.
All I have to go on is the article you posted, and I don’t see how you can draw from that a strong inference that the neighbors’ testimony was entirely hearsay.
My question would be: how would an opposite-sex couple be treated in the same circumstances?
They would have to “witness” something pretty darned explicit (granted I’m in Ontario, not Quebec). To qualify as being common law spouses the relationship has to be conjugal (or you are raising kids together – implying “conjugal”) and you have to be more or less publicly known as spouses. As in your co-workers know you live with your “spouse” and it’s common knowledge that your household is based on a relationship that is the equivalent of marriage.
I lived with a guy for a few years. As housemates. Just housemates. It was a two bedroom townhouse.
We’d often get mail addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Housemate, and even our landlords sent us mail to Mr. and Mrs. Housemate. Some of our neighbours thought we were a young couple (the guy right next door knew we weren’t because he asked.)
This could have been potentially yucky. Though if it ever came up, you’d just have to testify under oath that you were not “involved”.
However, the Canadian civil service sucks! I mean really, really sucks! (e.g./ Canadian immigration fucked up the five-year-old’s immigration process. My mom has been trying to help the family sort it out. The child is now 20.) Whether it’s provincial or federal – if some idiots start fucking around with your particular case, getting things cleared up can take years. If some government employee has decided to rabidly chase you down as a welfare cheat, it causes a chain reaction that a can a looooong time to sort out.
It was my understanding that the parties had to be intending marrige for it to be a common law marrige. That is based on American law, though, not Canadian. I wish one of the Lawyers would come by and comment on this.
Just a small nitpick: the Gazette, in its usual sloppiness, refered to this as a “common-law marriage.” It’s a surprisingly little-known fact that there’s no such thing as a “common-law marriage” in Quebec because we don’t have common law here. De facto unions, as they’re called here, carry none of the benefits of marriage.
Still, some branches of the provincial bureaucracy consider “lovers” as responsible to their partner, in things like pensions and welfare. This usually means that “de facto” couples have some of the responsibilities of a married couple, and none of the benefits.
Accepting this standard as accurate (even though I note that Hamish has clarified that Quebec, as befits its French heritage, doesn’t use the English common law), suppose the neighbors could testify that the two women spoke openly of being lovers, were seen passionately kissing, discussing the adoption of a child, and wore wedding rings which they had given to each other. Would that testimony suggest to you that the standard you propose had been met?
I have lived in a nice two room apartment for the past 15 years. Because I have been there so long and I am so good about paying my rent, I hadn’t had a rent increase in three years.
The building is sold. I received a notice from the new landlord, signed by the City’s Rent Board, that I am getting a 12% increase in my rent–4% a year for three years. I don’t like it, but it’s perfectly legal. Then comes the kicker. Start with a base rent of $664 and add $79.68. According to the notice, this equals a new rent of $793.68.
HOW COULD ANYONE MAKE THIS MISTAKE WITH MY MONEY? I mean, to get $793 from $664, don’t you have to add over $100?
Well, I’m just assuming the new landlord is just stupid and didn’t do it deliberately. However, maybe he should have found out what I do. I work in property management, including handling rental properties, so I know people on our City’s Rent Board! I’ve just had a lovely half-hour talking with both the new landlord and Liz of the Rent Board, and my rent is now corrected. The $50 “mistake” will cover my electric bill for the year.
I suppose I should move, but I’d rather stay here. But I don’t think the new landlord and I are destined to be friends.
Ooh, thanks Hamish. I guess I still have my Ontario brain in (I’m a transplant). It’s a pet peeve of my mother that she and my stepfather would be considered “common-law” (which DOES exist where they live), if they admitted it (which they don’t). Every year, on their tax forms, they both check off “single” and report their own income only. My mom hates it that the gummint can tell her she’s married when she isn’t. It’s probably the closest she’ll ever get to being a Right Winger.
That little fact just makes this whole thing worse: It’s even more obvious they’re just looking for an excuse to kick someone off the roster.
It works both ways. A few months ago, I had to inform a friend who grew up in Saskatchewan that he wasn’t common-law married to his girlfriend, though the two of them had lived together for years. It’s a basic assumption for a lot of people that if they live together long enough, they have the protections of a married couple. That’s simply not the case.
That’s actually why they brought civil unions into this province – in other provinces, there were same-sex common-law couples, but no equivalent here. Civil unions were a way of compensating for that.
No argument here. They tend to assume the worst as a general principle, largely because of the paranoia going around about welfare fraud. Having been on welfare myself, and known more than a few people who have, I know that much of what gets said about people who are on it is self-righteous and self-serving.
This province has a very high unemployment rate, and it was higher just a few years ago. There are more people than jobs, so there’s going to be a lot of honest people on welfare, especially given how tight the rules are now for (un)Employment Insurance.
Oh, and if your mother’s looking for someone to blame for common law, the villain would be Henry II of England. He’s the one who consolidated/replaced England’s local customs as a common-law system.
The Franks, meanwhile, adopted Rome’s civil-law system when they set up the Kingdom of Francia, in what’s now northwestern France.
Quebec’s civil-law system was very controversial. England originally intended to abolish it after the Conquest of Quebec, as part of a program of general assimilation, but their governors – James Murray and Guy Carleton – opposed the assimilation program, and so England gave it up. Quebec’s civil law system is one of the grievances of the American colonists listed in the Declaration of Independence: