No Ring, No Equalization: A Richmond Hill Couple's Wake-Up Call

The situation

Liang, a police sergeant, and Kajan, an accountant, had lived together in a house in Richmond Hill for eight years. They had a six-year-old daughter, Xia, shared bank accounts for household expenses, and to everyone who knew them, they were a married couple in every sense but the paperwork. They had simply never gotten around to a wedding, and neither had felt any urgency about it.

That changed when Liang was offered a promotion that came with a transfer to a detachment outside the GTA. The move meant selling the Richmond Hill house, buying a new property in the new city, and untangling eight years of finances that had never been formally documented. Liang mentioned to a colleague, going through her own separation, that dividing things would at least be straightforward since they weren't married and had no debts to speak of. The colleague, whose own separation had been anything but simple, suggested Liang check that assumption before signing anything on a new house. Liang and Kajan booked a consultation together.

What the review found

The first thing our team explained is the single most misunderstood point in Ontario family law: equalization of net family property, the process that divides the growth in a married couple's assets roughly evenly on separation, applies only to married spouses under the Family Law Act. Common-law partners, no matter how long they have lived together or how many children they have raised, are not entitled to equalization. There is no statutory formula that adds up what each partner owned at the start of the relationship and splits the difference at the end.

That mattered immediately, because of how the Richmond Hill house was held. Kajan had purchased it two years before Liang moved in, using savings and a down payment from a family gift, and had never added Liang to title. Over the following eight years, Liang had paid roughly half of every mortgage payment, half of the property taxes, and had personally covered about $60,000 of a kitchen and basement renovation from police overtime pay. The house was now worth roughly $1,150,000 with about $400,000 remaining on the mortgage, leaving equity of roughly $750,000 — all of it, on paper, belonging to Kajan alone.

Had they been married, that equity growth during the relationship would generally have been shared through equalization regardless of whose name was on title. Because they were common-law, Liang had no automatic claim to any of it. The only path to a share would have been a claim in equity — arguments like unjust enrichment, where a court can order compensation if one partner was enriched at the other's expense with no legal reason for it, or a constructive trust, where a contributing partner is recognized as having earned a share of a specific property through money or effort put into it. Both are real legal doctrines Ontario courts apply to common-law separations, but they require litigation, evidence of exactly what was contributed and when, and a court's discretion — nothing close to the predictable formula married couples get. Liang had eight years of mortgage transfers to point to, which helped, but proving a share of the house through litigation could easily have consumed a large slice of whatever was ultimately recovered, and taken well over a year to resolve.

Our team also flagged what Liang and Kajan were entitled to that they hadn't realized. Common-law partners in Ontario who have lived together continuously for a set minimum period, or who have a child together, can be treated as spouses for the purpose of claiming spousal support — ongoing payments from one partner to the other after separation, calculated with reference to income and the length of the relationship. Liang and Kajan qualified on both counts. So the picture was uneven in both directions: no automatic claim to shared property, but a real and enforceable right to support if incomes diverged.

What we did

1. Mapped the actual contribution history. Our team asked for eight years of mortgage statements, the renovation invoices, and records of who had paid which household bills, to see clearly what a future unjust enrichment or constructive trust claim would actually be worth if the relationship ended without an agreement.
2. Explained the fork in the road plainly. Liang and Kajan could marry, which would bring equalization into play automatically going forward, or they could enter into a cohabitation agreement — a contract between common-law partners that sets out, in advance, how property and support would be handled if they separated. They were not ready to marry on a timeline forced by a job transfer, so they chose the agreement.
3. Drafted a cohabitation agreement that reflected what had actually happened. The agreement recognized Liang's eight years of financial contribution to the Richmond Hill house by setting a formula: if the couple separated, Liang would be entitled to a share of any equity growth from the date they began living together, calculated similarly to how equalization would have worked had they been married, rather than needing to prove a court claim from scratch.
4. Addressed the new property before it was purchased. Because the relocation meant buying a new home together, the agreement specified how that property would be titled — jointly, with both names on it — and how a future separation would treat it, so the same title imbalance would not repeat itself in the new city.
5. Built in a spousal support framework. Rather than leaving support to be litigated later based on incomes at the time of separation, the agreement set out how support would be calculated if the relationship ended, using an approach both of them understood and had agreed to while the relationship was healthy.
6. Recommended updated wills and beneficiary designations. Common-law partners do not automatically inherit from each other the way married spouses can under certain circumstances, and Liang's pension and life insurance beneficiary designations still listed a parent from before the relationship. Both were updated alongside the agreement.

The outcome

Liang and Kajan signed the cohabitation agreement about six weeks before the relocation closed. The Richmond Hill house sold for close to its assessed value, the new property outside the GTA was purchased with both names on title from the outset, and the couple's finances going forward were governed by a document that reflected what they had actually built together rather than by whatever a court might later decide was fair.

No separation followed. The point of the exercise was never to predict one — it was to remove the gap between what Liang and Kajan believed the law provided and what it actually provided, while there was still time to close that gap voluntarily. Had the relocation gone ahead without the review, and had the relationship later broken down, Liang would have been left arguing for a share of a house held entirely in Kajan's name, using contribution records instead of a statutory formula, in a court process that could have taken well over a year and cost a meaningful share of whatever was recovered. Instead, the couple spent a modest, fixed amount of legal work resolving the question permanently, on terms they agreed to together rather than terms imposed after a breakup.

The agreement also gave both of them something less tangible: clarity about where they stood. Kajan no longer had to wonder whether being generous about the house was fair to Liang. Liang no longer had to wonder whether eight years of mortgage payments had bought any legal security at all. Both questions had answers before the move, not after a crisis.

What you can learn from this