Splitting a Kitchen-Table Business After a Common-Law Split

The situation

Jasleen was 58 and worked as a call-centre representative when her eleven-year relationship with Manpreet, a long-haul truck driver, ended. They had never married. For most of those eleven years they had also been raising Jasleen's grandchild together, after her son Kwame's work took him out of the city for long stretches and he asked his mother to step in. The household ran on Jasleen's steady but modest wages and whatever Manpreet brought home between hauls — combined, well under $45,000 a year, with almost nothing set aside.

Six years earlier, to stretch that income, Jasleen had started cooking meals for a handful of neighbours and coworkers who wanted home-style food during the week. What began as a few containers sold out of the kitchen grew into a small, informal delivery operation. Jasleen cooked, priced, and took the orders; Manpreet used his days off the road to deliver, and the couple eventually pooled savings to buy a used cargo van for the runs. Neither of them ever wrote anything down. There was no partnership agreement, no shared bank account for the business, and the van — the only asset of any real value the business had — went on the paperwork in Manpreet's name alone, because his credit history was cleaner than hers.

When the relationship ended, Manpreet kept the van, kept the customer list on his phone, and kept running meal deliveries under a new name within weeks. Jasleen was left with none of it — no share of the van, no share of the goodwill she had spent years building, and no more income from a business she had effectively co-founded.

Why the law treated them differently than a married couple

Jasleen's first question, understandably, was how this could be legal. If they had been married, the answer would have been straightforward: the Family Law Act requires married spouses to equalize the value of property accumulated during the marriage, and a business built together during the relationship would normally factor into that calculation regardless of whose name was on the paperwork.

But that equalization scheme applies only to married spouses. Ontario law does not extend the same automatic property-sharing rules to common-law partners, no matter how long they lived together or how intertwined their finances became. A common-law partner walking away from a long relationship keeps whatever is legally theirs — bank accounts, vehicles, business assets — in their own name, and the other partner has no built-in right to half of it.

That did not mean Jasleen had no claim at all. Ontario courts recognize that it can be unfair — legally, "unjust enrichment" — for one partner to keep an asset built substantially through the other partner's unpaid labour and contributions, with no compensation flowing back. Where a couple has run something together as a joint venture over years — pooling money, sharing the work, and building toward a common goal — a court can order compensation even without a marriage certificate or a formal partnership contract. The difficulty is that this kind of claim has to be built from scratch, case by case, on whatever evidence exists. There is no formula and no automatic entitlement; everything Jasleen wanted to claim, she would have to prove.

And with a business this informal, proof was thin. There were no partnership records, no payroll, and no signed agreement about who owned what. Everything would have to be reconstructed from bank transfers, text messages, delivery logs on Manpreet's phone, and whatever tax filings existed.

What we did

1. Reconstructed the business from indirect evidence. Jasleen had kept years of e-transfer records showing money moving between the couple for supplies and van payments, along with screenshots of customer orders and a rough tally of what the delivery service had earned in its best years. None of it was formal bookkeeping, but together it painted a clear picture of a shared enterprise, not a one-sided hobby.
2. Quantified Jasleen's contribution, not just her hours. We didn't try to bill for every hour she spent cooking. Instead we focused on what a court weighing an unjust enrichment claim actually looks at: money she put toward the van and supplies, the value the business had built up as an ongoing concern by the time of separation, and the fact that Manpreet kept operating it — customer list and all — immediately after the split.
3. Sent a demand letter setting out the claim before filing anything in court. The letter explained, in plain terms, why Jasleen had a legitimate claim despite not being married, what compensation she was seeking, and why a negotiated resolution served both of them better than a lawsuit neither could really afford.
4. Weighed the real cost of litigation against the size of the claim. With household income under $45,000 a year and few assets on either side, a contested trial in the Superior Court risked consuming a large share of whatever Jasleen might eventually recover — regardless of the outcome. We were candid with Jasleen about that arithmetic from the outset, since it shaped every decision that followed.
5. Negotiated directly with Manpreet, without either side hiring a full litigation team. Because the amounts involved were modest, we pursued a without-prejudice settlement conversation rather than immediately starting a court claim, keeping legal costs proportionate to what was actually at stake.

The outcome

Manpreet did not accept that Jasleen was entitled to half the business's value — he pointed out, correctly, that his truck-driving income had paid for most of the household's fixed costs over the years, and that the van was legally his. But he also recognized the exposure a court claim created, and he did not want a drawn-out dispute either. After several rounds of negotiation, the two reached a settlement: Manpreet would pay Jasleen a lump sum of roughly $9,000, reflecting a share of the business's value and her contributions to it, payable in installments over several months given his own limited income. He kept the van and the business outright.

It was not an equal split, and it would not have matched what Jasleen might have received had she been married to Manpreet under the Family Law Act's equalization rules. But it was real money, reached without a trial that could easily have cost more than the settlement itself, and it recognized — formally, in writing — that her years of unpaid work had built something of value. Both sides gave up ground: Jasleen accepted less than half the business's estimated worth, and Manpreet accepted that he owed her something at all, which he had initially resisted. For a household with almost no savings to fall back on, a certain and collectible settlement outweighed the uncertain promise of a larger award years down the road.

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