Every so often a judge stops writing like a judge and starts writing like a person who has run out of patience.
Burton v. Harrison, 2026 ONSC 4350 (CanLII) https://canlii.ca/t/km8rr is one of those decisions. It is nineteen short paragraphs long. It contains no case citations, no analytical framework, and no attempt at judicial understatement. What it does contain is a family court judge telling the family law bar, the Office of the Children’s Lawyer, and one litigant in particular exactly what she thinks of a motion over the possession of Maui The Cat.
The endorsement deserves attention not because the outcome is surprising, but because of what the judge chose to say on the way there, and what her frustration exposes about a body of law that no longer matches the way families actually live.
The parties separated in 2023. Before Justice Mountford was a motion for household chattels and for the return of Maui The Cat. The chattels portion was adjourned so the mother could retain counsel and file materials. That left Maui.
The court’s disposal of the issue is stark.
Maui is a cat. The cat has lived with the parties’ daughter since separation. The father claimed ownership on the basis that the cat was a gift to him but, on his own evidence, he left the cat behind when the parties separated, and he does not currently have any parenting time with the child. Three years have since passed and now he wanted the Maui back.
The motion was dismissed and the father was ordered to pay $1,000 in costs to the mother, with the court expressing the hope that the money would be used for the benefit of the child, described in the endorsement as the real victim of the motion.
Judges are ordinarily careful to keep their exasperation in the subtext. Justice Mountford put hers in the text. She noted that divorce court in Hamilton is so backlogged that trials are being set for September 2027 – over a year away – and that families wait months simply to reach an initial case conference on where children will live, how they will be supported, where they will go to school, and who will make decisions for them.
Against that backdrop, she observed, the court was occupied by two experienced counsel arguing about Maui The Cat – one billing a client, one funded by the public purse, with a Children’s Lawyer and a courtroom funded by the province. Her assessment of that state of affairs was a single sentence:
“This is an abomination.”
The judge did not mince words. She even rebuked the Children’s Lawyer who filed an affidavit about Maui The Cat, with exhibits such as photographs of the cat, photographs of the cat with a child, and (wait for it) a greeting card purportedly sent by Maui The Cat to the child.
The court’s point was not that the affidavit was not probative or relevant but that the Office of the Children’s Lawyer turns families away every year for lack of capacity, yet a social worker with thirty years of experience had spent that scarce capacity documenting a cat’s correspondence.
Next the judge turned to the father with two words of advice, “Grow up!”
The endorsement is both snappy and humorous. There is an obvious tension in the ruling that laments the judicial time consumed by a cat and then devotes nineteen paragraphs to it, including a public rebuke of a self-represented litigant, a immature father, senior counsel and of a Children’s Lawyer who was, presumably, doing what she was retained to do.
Whatever one makes of the tone, the frustration behind it is not idiosyncratic. It is the accumulated frustration of a system that has been asked to do too much with too little for too long.
The doctrinal wrinkle nobody should skip past. Paragraph 7 states the Ontario position bluntly: pets are property. That is orthodox. Warnica v. Gering, 2004 CanLII 50065 (Ont. S.C.J.), aff’d 2005 CanLII 30838 (Ont. C.A.), remains the foundational statement that courts are not in the business of making custody orders for pets. Coates v. Dickson, 2021 ONSC 992, softened the analysis by adopting a broader, multi-factor approach to ownership – who acquired the animal, any express or implied agreement, who cared for and maintained it, and other indicia of ownership – rather than the narrow “who paid for it” test applied in cases such as King v. Mann, 2020 ONSC 108. Duboff v. Simpson, 2021 ONSC 4970, applied that framework and confirmed that the court has no general discretion to redistribute property, though gift and trust arguments remain available.
Justice Mountford’s complaint is about proportionality: that pet disputes consume court resources they do not merit. That is a fair complaint. But it is an argument about forum, not about value. It does not follow that the dispute did not matter to the family; it follows that a courtroom is a ruinously expensive place to resolve it.
In closing, Justice Mountford added that if she had to determine ownership, she would use her parens patriae jurisdiction to order that Maui The Cat had been gifted to the child.
This article was recently published by LEXISNEXIS’s LAW360 at: https://www.law360.ca/ca/family/articles/2514273/maui-the-cat-and-an-impatient-family-court-judge
Steve Benmor, B.Sc., LL.B., LL.M. (Family Law), C.S., Cert.F.Med., C.Arb., FDRP PC, Acc.D.C., is a full-time Divorce Mediator/Arbitrator and principal lawyer of Benmor Family Law Group, a boutique matrimonial law firm in downtown Toronto. He is a Certified Specialist in Family Law, a Certified Specialist in Parenting Coordination and was admitted as a Fellow to the prestigious International Academy of Family Lawyers. Steve is regularly retained as a Divorce Mediator/Arbitrator and Parenting Coordinator. Steve uses his 30 years of in-depth knowledge of family law, court-room experience and expert problem-solving skills in Divorce Mediation/Arbitration to help spouses reach fair, fast and cooperative divorce settlements without the financial losses, emotional costs and lengthy delays from divorce court.
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