Legally Speaking with Michael Mulligan
Legally Speaking with Michael Mulligan
Sugar, Support, and Frankie
A seven‑month marriage sparked on a sugar‑arrangement site, a $12,000/month support bid, and a dog named Frankie—this one has layers. We open with a candid walk‑through of interim spousal support: what it’s for, how courts weigh “capacity to pay,” and why selling capital assets to fund an opulent lifestyle isn’t the same as earning income. The applicant’s luxury‑level budget meets judicial scrutiny, while the respondent’s push to impute escort income and point to family wealth hits legal limits. The end result—$4,000/month plus a retroactive lump—shows how judges balance short marriages, realistic needs, and the difference between lifestyle and income.
Then the plot thickens. A same‑day, ex parte protection order leads to disputed removals from the home and a tussle over Frankie. We unpack how BC’s Family Law Act treats companion animals: not as handbags, but through factors like who provided care, safety concerns, and well‑being. On an interim basis, Frankie stays put—illustrating how courts separate urgent stability from final outcomes and insist on full candour when seeking protective relief.
The second half pivots to evidence law and a rare rebuke: the province sought a lifetime ban on a man from a welfare office, relying on an internal incident report as a “business record.” Both the trial court and the Court of Appeal said no. We explain why “ordinary course of business” demands reliability—think automated receipts and bank statements—not a narrative drafted post‑incident for litigation. Even beyond admissibility, the appellate court flags proportionality: a permanent injunction is an extraordinary remedy, not a default response.
If you care about how courts actually draw the line between income and spending, how interim orders stabilize without deciding the future, how pet custody really works, and when business records are admissible, this conversation is your blueprint. Listen, share with a friend who loves law done plainly, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.
Follow this link for a transcript of the show and links to the cases discussed.
You read that right. Okay. That is uh fortunately not uh part of the I'm sure the uh uh warning labels on a website called Seeking Arrangement, uh which uh is a apparently a website which is intended to connect up sugar babies, a quotes, with sugar daddies slash mamas. Uh and apparently the site works. Uh this particular case uh involved a 23-year-old uh who wound up uh eventually marrying a 77-year-old sugar daddy. They uh managed to find each other uh on that site. Uh probably not surprising to uh many listeners, uh that was not a successful uh not a successful uh marriage, or at least for very long. Uh the uh couple began cohabiting in March of 2021. They that that lasted a while. They they got married uh on April 4th, 2023, uh, but I guess things went downhill seven months later, as of November 2024, they separated permanently, uh, which brings us to the case we're going to talk about first. Okay. And this is an unusual case. It's a BC decision, just came out, uh, and it is uh an application for interim spousal support, which is indeed a thing. Um and uh pursuant to section it's fifteen point two for those uh keeping score at home uh of the divorce act, uh, it sets out uh the uh reasons why uh an interim support order might be made. And I should say an interim support order is to be distinguished from like a final decision following uh a trial, right, about you know how much money should somebody get, a division of property, this sort of thing. Uh and the Divorce Act sets out why we have such things, right? Uh and uh it speaks there about various objectives, including uh recognizing economic advantages and disadvantages arising from marriage or its breakdown, after seven months in this case, uh the desire to apportion financial consequences uh for uh children, there were none happily here, uh, to relieve economic hardship and to finally promote economic self-sufficiency for each spouse with any reasonable period of time. Uh and the idea when one of these uh applications is being made is it's not intended to be a uh you know a long process. Interim orders are supposed to sort of bridge the gap between the time they're being applied for and the trial, which would eventually sort out what's to happen long term. Uh now in this particular uh case, the sugar baby applicant uh was applying for, as you said, some twelve thousand dollars per month uh in interim support. Uh and uh in uh support of that uh application, um she uh alleged that uh the 77-year-old uh soon-to-be ex-husband uh was uh uh should have a substantial uh income imputed to him despite the fact that on his tax returns uh he made very little income. In fact, as the judge pointed out, looking at his tax returns for the previous four years, they were like $22,000 in one year and twenty-nine thousand another year. One year he did uh claim $123,000, but most of it I was pretty modest. Uh and uh her argument was that this uh she said he should have an imputed income of $2.45 million per year. Uh and the argument for that was based on the opulent lifestyle uh that they enjoyed together. Uh and it would appear that it was common ground. They were living a fairly opulent lifestyle, um, uh traveling frequently, giving her expensive gifts, jewelry, handbags, watches, eating at expensive restaurants. They were really living it up. Uh but and this is the other interesting legal issue that arose in this case, uh, his evidence, which again appears to have been just completely accepted by the the judge, it wasn't a case where it's somebody who was like failing to report their income, like making money under the table or cheating on their taxes or something. What was going on for this fellow? Um yeah, his evidence was that he most of his expenses were made by the selling off of capital assets. Interesting. And so he had some uh capital assets uh in a uh corporation, and the corporation owed him a shareholders' loan. It started out back in 22 of some 2.2 million dollars, and by 2024, I guess owing to the handbags purse's expensive lifestyle, it was down to $708,000. So he was just spending his capital, basically. Yeah. Um and there is some conflicting law about well, how does that to be accounted for, right? Because that is genuinely not income, right? If you're just selling stuff and spending it, you haven't made income. Like you don't pay income tax on that, you're just you know selling off your stuff, right? It's like if you sold your house and sold the you've spent all that money over the next few years, you don't have an income, you you've just sold a capital asset. Uh now there are cases that have considered that before, and it's not as clear as just, well, you just look at the income tax returns. Uh and in fact, the way it's to be looked at um is that one of the uh considerations in setting an interim uh order for support is the sort of capacity of the person to pay. And you can take that kind of income into account in a general way uh when deciding whether there should be uh uh an interim support order. So you don't have to just stick with the income tax return, even though those were accurate, right? Uh but then the judge looked a little further at what this uh woman was uh asking for. Uh and she asked for this large amount of money, um, setting out uh various things she claimed to be um sort of necessary expenses, right? And the judge took a look at those things, uh, and uh they uh they would have paid for what the judge I think fairly described as an opulent lifestyle. Um she first of all was asking for the cost of insuring and fueling a Range Rover, which she no longer had. That was part of her monthly expenses. She also wanted tuition for a fashion school. She apparently uh previously was a uh UBC student at the time she hooked up here, but then moved to fashion design, she said, at his urging. Um she wanted $3,000 for rent, even though she wasn't paying any rent. She wanted $500 for toiletries and cosmetics, and then finally she had an item listed there of salon visits. She wanted $850 per month to pay for facials, massages, and eyelashes. There's no breakdown of how much the eyelashes were, but that was her that was her figure there. Uh and conversely, uh the uh husband on this uh uh husband in this uh circumstance, um, his uh view of it was that uh she didn't require any support, that she could uh pay for her expenses by selling the many gifts that he had given her during the relationship, uh that she had a wealthy family, and that she was capable of working, uh, including including by her own admission of previously working and earning income occasionally as a paid escort, probably not a great surprise. Uh, and he therefore are argued that they should be imputing an income of thirty thousand dollars per year for her escorting activities. Well, some of that the judge took into account, uh, but you can't, for example, argue that, well, your wealthy family should uh pick up the slack. That didn't get too far. Uh but the the judge wasn't buying her uh breakdown of why she needed this $12,000 some odd dollars per month, uh including for things like the uh you know wanting uh the cost of her online fashion school being paid for, even though she was separately asking for that under another heading. By the way, she also wanted retroactive payment for the last 11 months. So her initial claim amounted to this uh twelve thousand some odd dollars, but another hundred grand or so representing the last eleven months when she didn't get this cash. Uh the judge, I think, quite sensibly, concluded that uh that was a bit much, uh, and that her needs could be met on a much more modest budget, uh, and so uh ordered uh that uh this fellow pay her four thousand dollars per month, but it'd be retroactive, and so she'd be looking at a uh forty-four thousand dollar uh payment uh retroactively. That didn't end the case, however. There's another element to it, which also is some legal interest, um, which is that she had applied for and obtained what is referred to as an ex parte protection order. And what that means is that the same day she commenced the action asking for this money, she went to court without telling uh the husband, uh, and managed to get a judge to order a protection order claiming that she had been threatened or was in danger. And she got the protection order. Uh, and that wasn't the end of it. She got this order and then she made a report, which the husband claimed was a false report, and I should say ultimately Crown did not approve charges, but she made a complaint that he had tried to contact her through her hairdresser, as as one would. Um, and uh as a result of that, he wound up getting arrested uh and being taken into custody. Um and when he was taken into custody, um she then showed up at the former family residence uh and wound up taking a bunch of things, uh including the dog, Frankie. Uh and so she had the dog. Uh and the husband's complaint was well twofold. One, you know, she never revealed to the judge she was going to take a bunch of expensive things from the home, and she wound up taking like expensive handbags and jewelry and stuff like that, not just, you know, socks and underwear and her passport or whatnot. But then the dog. The dog was spirited away. Uh, and so he was asking to have the protection order set aside on the basis that she had misled the judge uh about what she was going to do and take from the house and the circumstances, and he wanted the dog back. Now, on the application to set aside the protection order, the judge did find, who was hearing this application, that uh there were some things in there that were kind of misleading. Like the judge intentionally had a had a discussion about what it was she wanted to get from the house when she was to attend there on some occasion. Uh, and it was clear that the judge was intended her to be permitted to get personal items like identification or her laptop, not a bunch of uh jewelry and handbags that the husband said were worth in excess of two hundred thousand dollars or scooping them up at the house. Uh, but that wasn't enough in the judge's view to set aside the protection order completely. Um, and so the judge had to then move on to what about Frankie, the dog? Yeah. And we have we have we have the Family Law Act in BC that actually sets out things that are now to be considered when determining who's to be taking care of pets. They're not treated just like the handbag. Uh and so under section ninety seven of the Family Law Act, uh there are a variety of things that a judge must decide when they are to determine who's to keep the pet. And there are things like the circumstances when the companion animal was acquired, the extent to which each person cared for it, a history of family violence, any threats of cruelty, uh whether the uh child had a companion animal. Anyways, all these factors the judge should take into consideration. She, by the way, alleged that uh the dog was for her as a uh support animal, emotional support animal, again, not surprisingly, unsurprising, not surprisingly. Uh, and she alleged that the husband had uh insisted on feeding Frankie inappropriate human food, making him ill, and so that was one of the reasons she wanted to have I guess he's giving the dog table scraps. And so on all of that, those representations, the judge concluded that she got to keep Frankie, at least on an interim basis. And so uh the net result of all of this, on all those considerations about interim orders and lifestyle and all this, was even after only a seven-month marriage, uh, he'll be paying her some four thousand dollars a month until this matter can get to trial to sort out what ought to happen long term. Uh and so really this entire thing should be appended to the the entire decision should be appended to the seeking arrangements website, uh lest any other 77-year-olds think that this might be a great idea uh to uh uh go and uh marry the uh 20-something-year-old uh UBC student uh part-time uh escort. So that's the latest from the DC Supreme Court uh in terms of some very bad matrimonial choices and how interim support works in combination with uh different kinds of income, and of course, who gets the dog on an interim basis? So that's the latest uh on uh sugar babies uh seeking interim support.
Adam Stirling:All right. Michael Malkenberg Michael is preventing a man from attending a welfare office and appeal for attempting to rely on inadmissible hearts and evidence. What happened?
Michael Mulligan:Well, I uh the province lost twice despite the fact that this man did not show up at either hearing. So uh credit to the judges involved for carefully looking at it uh without uh this man even being there. And so the the background of this goes back to uh back in 2022 uh in Kelowna when this man showed up apparently at a welfare office there, uh, and according to a report, which we'll come to in a moment, uh did things including uh using intemperate language, whatever that might be, threatening staff and using a large stick to hit the ministry office, not hitting people, apparently just the office with the large stick there. Uh and so the province responded by suing the man. Uh and uh so they started uh uh an action uh and uh served him. Uh and uh then uh come trial, I guess, of this action, the man didn't turn up. Probably not a great big surprise that the person who's alleged to have hit the office with a big stick might not be the most reliable fellow. Yes. But in any case, he doesn't show up, so they get default judgment. Congratulations, the province has won. But they then ask the judge to grant what's referred to as a permanent injunction. And a permanent the permanent injunction they're seeking would have permanently banned this man from attending uh the welfare office without prior authorization or communicating with staff through a third party, and it would last forever. Now, this is going back a bit, but uh some uh movie boss might recall, Oh brother, where art thou with the ban from going to Woolworths. It sort of had a ring of that. Uh I appreciate that maybe a little uh a little dated. But in any case, they wanted this uh permanent ban. And the uh sharp-eyed judge looked at the evidence that the province was relying upon. And the province was trying to rely upon uh this document, which was uh referred to as an IRT document prepared by uh some of the ministry staff at that office. Uh and the province was trying to use that report, which sort of sets out the complaint about what this fellow is alleged to have done, uh, and they were attempting to use that as what's referred to as a business record. And here's what that's about. So in the Evidence Act, and there's both a provincial and federal evidence act that has some of the rules, like some special rules of evidence listed in it, and in British Columbia, one of the sections of that Evidence Act, section 42, and that's the act that would apply to civil cases like this, um, uh, provides that a business record uh can be admissible uh as evidence in a civil case like this. And the idea there with a business record uh is like, let's say, for example, you're trying to prove like um, you know, how much money did somebody charge up on their credit card, for example, right? There's probably no human being you could call in from Visa or wherever to say, yeah, I was keeping an eye on it, and you know, so-and-so put $300 on their credit card, right? That just doesn't exist. It's not a human process. But the idea with that section of that act is that if you have a record which a business record which is made, and this is important, in the ordinary course of business, right? Like things like, you know, till receipts that get printed out, or, you know, bank statements that come out of the computer, things like that, right?
Adam Stirling:Yeah.
Michael Mulligan:The idea is that if you follow the other requirements to introduce a business record, those things can be introduced to prove what they say. And so that's how you would try to prove like somebody charged $300 on their credit card, right? You'd get that thing and you'd have to prove it was made contemporaneously, and you know, be somebody cut there'd be some evidence about what that thing is and so on, but you can get that in to prove those things, because frankly, it would be very difficult, time consuming, or nay impossible to otherwise prove things like that. But the rub, as pointed out by the judge, the original judge, and now the court of appeal, um, is that that particular thing that the province was trying to use to prove exactly what this man uh did was not really the kind of document produced in the ordinary course of business. And the Sharpie judge, and the Court of Appeal agreed, looked at things like, Well, how is it that that thing gets prepared? Is this just something that gets typed up anytime somebody comes along and hits the ministry office with a stick in some kind of an automated way? Like, oh yeah, let's fill out the uh office was hit today form, uh right? Yeah. It's not. And what the judge looked at was, well, this is a thing that gets filled out when like a supervisor can ask somebody to say, hey, you should make one of these reports. But the problem with that, when it's sort of uh, hey, we've just been hit with a stick, and the supervisor says to the employee, hey, let's fill out one of these reports so we can go to court, it's not really kind of an automatic thing. It's not really the ordinary course of business. And the risk is that, of course, when you know, somebody who quite reasonably doesn't want to work in an office getting hit with large sticks might be inclined to, you know, maybe uh exaggerate something, or, you know, sort of uh express something in a way that might be more favorable to whatever their objective was, like stop this man from coming in and using intemperate language. And so the judge found that well, sorry, this is not a business record, this is just something written up by the staff member when the supervisor asked them to after whatever this guy did uh he did in the in the the the office. And so the judge at trial said, no, you you win, the man hasn't showed up, but you don't get your permanent injunction. And so the province didn't like that. And so they decided to appeal it to the court of appeal, which comes to the which brings us to the decision that just came out. And once again, they duly served this man with the notice of the appeal, but again, not surprisingly given what's alleged here, he was at no-show at the Court of Appeal. But the judge of the Court of Appeal, like the trial judge, were also sharp-eyed and careful and looked at the whole background of this thing. And so uh the argument being made by the province in the Court of Appeal without this guy even being there, is they're saying, oh yeah, the judge made a mistake here, in that the uh judge, they argue, that is to say the province argued, applied this inappropriate extra test to whether this record should be in, suggesting that the judge was trying to determine whether this was reliable or not. And he shouldn't have done that, because they, I guess, want to be able to use this sort of thing in future cases, hence their trip to the Court of Appeal. Uh and uh so the Court of Appeal took the time to carefully look at that section and consider that argument and look carefully at what the judge had done. And indeed, the judge had uh considered issues about whether this might be reliable for the reason I've indicated, because it's like, you know, the employee that just says we were hit with a stick, and the manager says, well, write up this report. And so the Court of Appeal had took the time now to look at, well, what does that section of the Evidence Act mean? And indeed, they found that that language of in the ordinary course of business, and this was referencing a previous decision of uh Justice Hinkson, uh says that there must be some evidence of reliability advanced for each document before it could be admitted under section 42. And so we now have this decision, which is now clear authority, if there was any doubt given that language used by Justice Hinkson in the previous decision that was cited, is that when you refer to that language of in the ordinary course of business, there needs to be some evidence and some basis for a judge to determine uh that this appears to be reliable. Uh and the court talked about the difference between things like the automated uh till receipt that prints out or like the you know the bank's visa statement or something, uh, versus this kind of a document that's kind of written up uh by somebody in this way. And so the province lost uh and the uh trial judge's decision was upheld. And the court of appeal went on to say, and I think this is not inappropriate either, the court of appeal said even if this wasn't was a problem, which it wasn't, analyzing the document in that way, the decision to issue an injunction, a permanent lifetime ban is discretionary. And even if all that evidence was properly admissible, the Court of Appeal added they would not have exercised their discretion to from for a lifetime ban this man from going to the welfare office. Uh and so that's the latest from the Court of Appeal. The prophets got just what they asked for, and now very clear evidence about very clear law about when you can use those business records, and that's uh the latest uh from them. And uh I guess if this fellow wants to go back to the welfare office, he can do so. He just uh shouldn't bring the big stick.
Adam Stirling:So that's the latest on business records uh and the Court of Appeal. Legally speaking, on T Facts Intevity with Michael Mulligan from Mulligan Defense Lawyers. Thank you so much, Michael. Pleasure as always. Thanks so much. Always great to be here. All right. Quick break news is next.