PROBLEMS WITH FAMILY COURTS RUN FROM COAST TO COAST TO COAST,

WRITES CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD, AS SHE DETAILS ONE FATHER WHO HAS SPENT A THIRD OF HIS LIFE BATTLING A PUNISHING SUPPORT ORDER.

To borrow shamelessly from Jules Dassin’s 1948 film, the police procedural The Naked City, “There are eight million stories in the family courts. This is one of them.”

One by one: It’s the only way I can muster the will to lift my head from the avalanche of emails, with their attendant mountain of pain, that resulted from a couple of stories I wrote this week about the Ontario family courts.

I should point out this one story is also one-sided, but backed up at significant points by court orders and other documents in my possession.

As it turns out. the family courts problem isn’t confined to Ontario but rather runs, as Peter Mansbridge says ad nauseam, from coast to coast to coast.

T.D. is a 45-year-old father of two who has spent fully a third of his life in the Manitoba courts, trying both to see his kids, now young adults, and to get out from under the punitive support orders made during his highest-earning year as a power engineer in the oilfields.

He now lives and works in Alberta — the money is better and this man needs all the money he can earn.

He and his former wife separated in June of 2002. It was, by his account, less a marriage than an uncomfortable arrangement between prickly roommates. They always had separate friends, vacations and lives. They were together for five and a half years.

Yet here he is, a decade after the divorce was finalized, still operating under a court order that has him paying $4,000 a month in spousal support.

And worse: According to that order, the “spousal support … is not variable … unless and until (his ex-wife’s) annual gross income exceeds $55,000 …”

Shockingly, given that the ex gets $48,000 a year in support from him, she’s never earned that much.

Provincial guidelines suggest that in short, modern marriages like T.D.’s, spousal support is reasonable for half the years married.

Yet he was married for fewer than six years, has paid it for twice as long and, though he’s now seeking to vary the lifetime order, may be doomed to pay it forever.

That doesn’t count child support for the two children, of course.

The 2009 order — agreed to by the woman who was his second lawyer, and is now a judge, without, T.D. says, his knowledge or consent because he was off work for depression — has him paying $3,497 a month, plus extras for babysitting, sports, camp, etc.

T.D. made a common mistake, and left his childhood home (which he’d bought from his parents) with his wife and children in it when the marriage ended. He had a better schedule to take care of the kids — he worked Monday to Friday from 7 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. — but his wife opposed anything but one overnight visit a week and wouldn’t let him pick them up at school if it wasn’t his scheduled day, or even get in his car.

They were then living in a small Manitoba town, and she began spreading rumours that he had abused her; that’s when T moved provinces, knowing that as he says, “Police arrest first and ask questions later in domestic abuse cases.” He was never charged.

He has twice battled depression, once in 2006, when he moved back in with his folks and quit a job he’d had since high school, and then again in 2009, when the original final order of one judge was varied — again, as he says, without his knowledge — to up the support he had to pay and attempt to preclude him from ever stopping spousal support.

T.D. also had bad luck. His first lawyer, Richard Allen Paul Holmes, was given a three-year suspension by the Law Society of Manitoba in 2010 for various counts of professional misconduct. The case that accounted for most of the findings was T.D.’s: He launched a complaint against Holmes.

According to the “discipline case digest” of the law society, Holmes failed to tell T.D. to comply with an order to provide financial disclosure to his ex and of the consequences. Holmes also failed to tell T.D. that he had to “preserve the former marital home” and instead tried to sell it — while acting for the purchaser and buyer.

He was also found guilty of sending T.D. an “offensive” and unprofessional email; T.D. remembers him saying once, “I hate defending men.”

T.D. has paid $705,000 in support, or about $48,500 a year, since they split. His ex’s lawyer wants another $630,000.

As he put it in a telephone interview Thursday, “I am so sad my testicles ever descended.”

T.D. finds the system sexist, biased against fathers and punishing.

His kids are 19 and 20 now.

He hasn’t had formal access to them since the divorce was finalized — his former wife won sole custody while he was off work, living with his parents and not at all sure they wouldn’t one day find him “with a shotgun and a bottle of whiskey” — but sees them when he can.

A couple of years ago, he got both kids cellphones so they can at least stay in constant contact. He has remarried.