When will a court restrict access to a parent's right to determine where the child should live?

British Columbia, Canada


The following excerpt is from Falvai v. Falvai, 2008 BCCA 503 (CanLII):

Accepting that perspective, restrictions on incidents of custody, such as the right to determine where the child should live, should not be inferred, for instance, from generous or specified access provisions without more. As Abella J.A. (Grange J.A. concurring) cautioned in MacGyver v. Richards, supra, at p. 445: In deciding what restrictions, if any, should be placed on a parent with custody, courts should be wary about interfering with that parent’s capacity to decide, daily, what is best for the child. That is the very responsibility a custody order imposes on a parent, and it obliges and entitles the parent to exercise judgments which range from the trivial to the dramatic. Those judgments may include whether to change neighbourhoods, or provinces, or partners, or jobs, or friends, or schools, or religions. Each of those significant judgments may affect the child in some way, but that does not mean that the court has the right to prevent the change. The inevitable genesis of a court having to make a decision is because of some stress and instability. To minimize future stresses, as opposed to more utopian and less realistic objectives, the court should be overwhelmingly respectful of the decision-making capacity of the person in whom the court or the other parent has entrusted primary responsibility for the child. We cannot design a system which shields the non-custodial parent from any change in the custodial parent’s life which may affect the exercise of access. [Emphasis added in original]

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