Professor Nicholas Bala has received a grant of more than $200,000 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a major program of research on family justice.  

The Bala-headed research team will spend the next five years working on three interrelated projects that will study a variety of issues, including the long-term effects of shared parenting, litigation abuse, parental alienation, and responses to family violence in racially diverse communities. 

Bala is acutely aware of the complexity and scope of the challenges he and his colleagues face as they work at their SSHRC-funded study, but he remains optimistic about its value. “Making changes in the family justice system is trying to hit a moving target since attitudes and behaviours in our society are changing, and new issues and concerns are constantly arising,” he says. “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

One part of the ambitious program of research that he and his team have undertaken is already partially complete. It involves surveys, interviews, and focus groups made up of judges, lawyers, social workers, the clients of lawyers, and self-represented litigants about the effects of the increasing use of virtual family court proceedings. 

A second set of studies is following up with professionals, parents, and children in Ontario family cases decided over the past decade to learn about long-term outcomes of court involvement. 

The third set of studies that will focus on the Peel Region of Ontario – home to one of Canada’s largest racialized and immigrant populations – should allow for a better understanding of the challenges being experienced by those diverse populations, and it will explore systemic-discrimination concerns. 

“Our analytic approach to the research will include an intersectional analysis of the effects of gender, income, race, sexual orientation and immigration status, representation by counsel, and family violence victimization on engagement with the family-justice process and outcomes,” he explains.

The 10-person multidisciplinary and multiracial research team he has assembled to collect and interpret the data being collected is as diverse as it is skilled. In addition to Bala, it includes two other experienced legal scholars, Professor Claire Houston, Law’07 (Western Law), a social work professor, a psychologist, two community-based professionals, a family lawyer, and a family mediator.

Says Bala, “We’ve already written several papers, and that’s well and good. But to me, I hope we can effect meaningful changes in Canada’s family-justice system – changes in the attitudes of lawyers, changes in the knowledge and attitudes of judges, changes in legislation, and in the role of the family courts.”

He is eager to see that the work he and his team are doing will help improve the family justice system and make it more responsive to the needs of all Canadians – especially children. While that goal may sound nebulous, it’s one that’s important to aim for.

“I realize the kind of changes I’m hoping to see won’t come from just the work that I do. It will come from the work I’m doing with others. Helping to bring about meaningful change has always been my goal in all that I’ve done and in all that I’m still doing,” says Bala, who graduated from Queen’s Law in 1977 and later earned an LLM from Harvard. 

“I received my first SSHRC grant in 1999, and I expect this Insight Grant will be my last one. I’ve decided to retire when I reach the judicial retirement age of 75.”

Bala is widely recognized as one of Canada’s leading experts on family law. In addition to his engagement on the SSHRC-funded study, he recently has been working with other professionals to develop the Parenting Plan Guide that is assisting judges, lawyers, and mediators when they devise post-separation arrangements for the care of children that will improve the system and hopefully will reduce the litigation abuse that too often is a problem for the courts. This Guide is now being used in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. 

In many ways, the latest SSHRC research work for which Bala has secured funding will build upon the many initiatives in which he long has immersed himself and promises to be the culmination of much of the work he has done in the course of his distinguished career, which now spans 46 years. 

“There are researchers who define success by looking at the number of publications they’ve authored. I’m not one of them. I prefer to measure success by how much real change the research I’ve been involved in has brought about,” says Bala. 

By Ken Cuthbertson, Law’83