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A mahr written into a marriage contract is enforceable in Ontario, and how it is treated in the division of property usually decides how much money changes hands. Divorce, parenting, support and property for Richmond Hill families.
Start My Enquiry →Serving Richmond Hill and York Region | Family Court, 50 Eagle St W, Newmarket | Marriage contract and mahr claims | Initial Assessments
A great many Richmond Hill marriages begin with a written contract. In a nikah it is usually a mahr, a sum the husband undertakes to pay the wife. It is often signed at the ceremony, often in another country, often without either party imagining an Ontario court would ever look at it.
An Ontario court will look at it. Since the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed that an agreement does not stop being a contract because it has a religious dimension, Ontario courts have treated a mahr like any other domestic contract: enforceable if it satisfies the ordinary requirements, and meaning exactly what its words mean. There is no special doctrine for it.
What is less widely understood is how a mahr interacts with the division of property, and it is counter-intuitive. In 2017 the Court of Appeal for Ontario held that leaving a mahr out of the calculation of net family property was an error of law, and doing so made the total payment considerably larger, not smaller. On the facts of that case the difference was roughly seventy thousand dollars.
That is the kind of point that decides a file, and it is why we would rather see the contract at the first meeting than at the end.
Richmond Hill has a courthouse on Major Mackenzie Drive, and it hears no family matters at all. Every family case for York Region goes to the Family Court at Newmarket, a branch of the Superior Court of Justice created under section 21.1 of the Courts of Justice Act. The Ontario Court of Justice has no family jurisdiction here.
Divorce, equalization of net family property, enforcement of a marriage contract, parenting, child and spousal support, restraining orders, child protection and adoption. All of it in one court, usually before one judge on one file, which is not the case in Toronto, Peel or Halton.
This is a Small Claims Court. It is worth naming because people arrive there expecting to file a family application and are turned away. It can matter to a separating couple only where the breakdown produces a small civil claim between them that is outside the family court’s reach.
Property is where most Richmond Hill files are won or lost, so that is where we start.
A mahr is enforceable in Ontario if it meets the requirements of a domestic contract: in writing, signed by the parties, and witnessed. Family Law Act, section 55(1). A mahr recorded in a nikah routinely satisfies that, and Ontario courts have enforced them.
The harder question is what it does to the property division, and the answer surprises most people. The Court of Appeal has held that a mahr is not automatically excluded from net family property. Unless the contract itself says the payment is to be kept out of the calculation, it goes into the arithmetic on both sides: as a debt owed by the husband and an asset owed to the wife. Bakhshi v. Hosseinzadeh, 2017 ONCA 838.
Counting it in usually produces a smaller equalization payment and a separately collectible debt, rather than a larger payment. Leaving it out can inflate the result sharply, because a spouse whose net family property would otherwise be negative is deemed to have nil, and that deeming provision then does the damage. The Court of Appeal was explicit that the mahr still has to be paid on top: including it in the calculation does not extinguish it.
On the other side, the ordinary grounds for setting aside a domestic contract are fully available: failure to disclose significant assets or debts, a party who did not understand what they were signing, and the general law of contract. Family Law Act, section 56(4). A contract signed at a wedding, untranslated, without advice and without disclosure is vulnerable, and we act on both sides of that argument.
Ontario does not divide property. It equalises the growth in each spouse’s net worth during the marriage and orders one spouse to pay the other half the difference. That distinction matters, because it means the arithmetic is everything and the arithmetic turns on disclosure.
The traps we see most often in Richmond Hill are property and accounts held outside Canada, a matrimonial home owned before the marriage, where the marriage-date value cannot be deducted at all, and gifts from parents that were intended to be excluded but were not kept separate.
The rest of the work is the work any family file needs, and we do it at Newmarket. If you have been living in Ontario for a year you can divorce here regardless of where you married, and the place of the marriage does not affect the court’s jurisdiction.
Our North York office at 2 Sheppard Avenue East is about twenty minutes south of Richmond Hill on Yonge Street, at Sheppard-Yonge station. Most matters qualify for a no-obligation initial assessment. If you have a marriage contract, bring it or send it ahead. It is usually the first thing worth reading.
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