Is Quebec conservative or liberal with regard to family law? There have been two interesting developments in Quebec family law recently, making it hard to tell.

The first happened on April 25, 2025, when a Quebec superior court ruled that recognizing only two parents is an infringement of equality rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. What happened next is nothing short of astounding. Quebec will contest this ruling, with Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette saying, “The Quebec model we’ve chosen is two parents.”

The second consequential change was a longer time in coming. Bill 56, “an act respecting family law reform and establishing the parental union regime,” came into effect at the end of June 2025. The law forces all cohabiting Quebec couples who have a child born after June 30, 2025, to share at least some assets in the event their partnership dissolves. This marks the end of Quebec’s tenure as the only province in Canada that treated marriage and cohabitation as completely separate.

What are we to make of both? In some respects, they have little to do with each other. One affects how families are formed, while the other concerns the benefits available and support payable at the time of union dissolution. Yet both address the complicated phrase “the best interests of the child.” And both speak to how Quebec is approaching family law and social policy in apolitical and unpredictable ways.

Cohabitation in Quebec

It was only 12 years ago that a case addressing the dissolution of a cohabitating relationship in Quebec went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. The 2013 Lola case involved a wealthy businessman, Eric, and his partner, Lola, who together had three children but never married. In this case, the court ruled that support obligations and asset division apply only to those who get married, not “de facto spouses,” thereby maintaining Quebec’s status quo.

This did make sense: living together and marrying remain fundamentally different. People who live together are not necessarily signing up for marriage, often wanting the freedom not to wed. Marriage is, most often, a decision made purposefully with an eye to permanence, whereas cohabitation is often about seeing how things go.

But where cohabitation rates increase, as they are all across Canada, the state begins to wonder about child welfare. Indeed, in a recently published paper about Quebec’s Bill 56, Quebec Superior Court Justice Robert Leckey opens by saying, “Unmarried cohabitation bedevils policymakers and legislative drafters as they try to respect autonomy, protect the vulnerable, and fairly compensate childcare and other domestic labour.”

These questions are so bedevilling (a strong word in a world that gives a collective shrug as to how people live out their relationships) because of the need to respect autonomous decision-making in contrast with protecting the vulnerable, mainly children and those parents who have foregone income to care for them. The rest of Canada seems less concerned with autonomy and has essentially declared couples living together to be effectively married after a certain period of time and/or when a child is born. Quebec has now found its own compromise toward doing something similar, just on a time lag.

This lag is particularly interesting when we consider how high cohabitation rates are in Quebec. There, cohabitation makes up 43 percent of all couples; in neighbouring Ontario, it is only 16 percent. And it may be that Quebec’s situation was becoming untenable—that more vulnerable people were at risk when break-ups occur. What many couples living together do not realize is that cohabitation has a higher likelihood of breaking up, even if a couple does eventually marry. As the wry saying goes, living together is good preparation for divorce.

The Quebec two-parent model

Legal recognition of more than two parents has moved through Saskatchewan and Ontario, and most recently, one territory, Yukon. But Newfoundland and Labrador and British Columbia have also responded to court cases by declaring the children concerned each had three parents. These changes uproot centuries of legal and cultural tradition around who constitutes a parent. There is much at stake here, but one angle is that eradicating the concept of natural parents de facto increases state power; first on entry into family life because the state now has greater power to decide who and how many adults can be parents to one child, and at the point of family breakdown, when adjudicating divorce between three or more parents becomes more complicated.

When Ontario was presented with the charge of discrimination against diverse family forms in 2016, as Quebec just was, it waved a white flag of surrender. Bill 28, the All Families Are Equal Act, removed all references to “mother,” “father,” and “natural parent” from Ontario law, also allowing for legal recognition of up to four parents. At the time of the bill’s debate, there was little room for dissent; anyone opposing the new legal regime was cast as ridiculously old-fashioned, anti-diversity, and hateful.

These are far more difficult charges to level against Quebec. Most are aware of the ways in which the Roman Catholic Church was thrown out in the Quiet Revolution, and along with it, religious sexual mores.

That said, Quebec’s push-back and declaration of a two-parent norm is not simply a Quebecois curiosity—Manitoba did so in 2022. This creates space for other provinces to follow suit.

In the child’s best interests

In theory, changes to family law are always made with the “best interests of the child” in mind. This goes both for justices who decry a two-parent norm as discriminatory and those who support the two-parent norm. The social conservative in me might like to think the Quebec justice minister is concerned with the same things as I am—family stability, fertility, knowing where we come from, and the other assorted benefits that come to children via healthy marriage. While research suggests children benefit from having two parents, the outcomes typically contrast two parents and one, not two parents and many.

Unsurprisingly, however, Quebec has other reasons for rejecting the decision of the Superior Court. Quebec’s legal tradition is not common law. Instead, they have a civil code. This approach does not reference case law, Jean-Christophe Jasmin, Cardus Quebec Director, points out. “The Civil Code gives clear standards, which judges apply,” he says. “In the ruling of the Quebec Superior Court, the judge didn’t simply say that a two-parent limit violates the Charter. He said Quebec must rewrite its Civil Code to conform to his reading of it. That’s why the pushback is so direct: it’s not just that an Ottawa-appointed judge is dictating terms—it’s that he’s demanding Quebec overhaul a legal tradition rooted in French civil law that predates Confederation and was deliberately preserved after the Conquest. And all this, based on a Constitution Quebec never ratified.”

Furthermore, for Quebec and elsewhere, the “best interests of the child” is far more likely to be strictly a financial concern, not necessarily an ethical one. Other comments in the media from the Quebec justice minister about the duty children have toward parents in Canadian law point in this direction. “A child [upon reaching adulthood] has maintenance and financial obligations towards his or her parents,” Mr. Jolin-Barrette said.

Here, I find myself for the first time considering that with low fertility, a more-than-two-parent norm exacts a duty of care on an only child, now adult, that will likely be onerous, if not financially, then emotionally. On the changes to cohabitation law, there is likewise an element of financial concern: making cohabiting couples more like married couples ensures that the vulnerable are not the purview of the state. In effect, where we eschew marriage but still have kids, the state ends up creating something pretty darn close to marriage for us, without our explicit consent.

A 2022 paper by the Manitoba Law Reform Commission highlights that British Columbia’s government decided that the financial needs of aging seniors are better met not by adult children but through other programs, like subsidized housing and the Canada Pension Plan. But subsidized housing and public benefits will not be sustained on goodwill alone. Without having more children (read taxpayers), there is less capacity for the welfare state to perform what it has done to date.

As it turns out, in Quebec, the best interests of the child intersect with the best interests of the state, which does not want responsibility for the care of families when relationships fail. In both the case of defending two parents and in assigning some rights to cohabiting couples, this is neither conservative nor liberal, but rather a pragmatic approach to family policy based on their legal tradition.

• Andrea Mrozek is a senior fellow with Cardus and is co-author of the book “I…Do? Why Marriage Still Matters.”