Building a Parenting Plan Around a Father's MS Diagnosis

The situation

Hanna spent thirty years running a dental practice in Oshawa before retiring and converting the building into commercial rental units, work she still manages closely at seventy-two. Her son Meron followed her into dentistry and built his own practice a few kilometres away. Meron and his wife, Anita, had been separated for about eight months when Hanna first called Treadstone Law, and their separation was, by most measures, going reasonably well. They had agreed on a shared parenting schedule for their two children, ages six and nine, and were working through the division of their family property with their own respective lawyers.

What brought Hanna into the picture was Meron's health. He had been diagnosed with relapsing multiple sclerosis roughly a year before the separation, a condition that causes periodic flare-ups affecting balance, hand coordination, and fatigue. Most weeks he functioned normally. Some weeks he could not reliably drive, manage a school pickup, or get through an overnight parenting block without help. The parenting schedule he and Anita had drafted between themselves did not mention his condition at all, and Hanna was worried that silence would eventually produce a crisis — either a missed handoff that damaged trust between the parents, or a flare-up that left a child without a reliable caregiver on short notice.

What worried the family

Hanna's concern was not that Meron was an unfit parent. Multiple sclerosis does not, on its own, say anything about someone's capacity to raise children, and nothing in the file suggested Anita saw it that way either. The problem was structural: a parenting plan written for two healthy adults trading weeks back and forth has no answer for the week one of them cannot safely manage an overnight shift. Without a plan for that scenario, the fallback in practice becomes whoever happens to be available — usually Anita, sometimes Hanna, occasionally nobody, at which point the children's routine absorbs the disruption.

Hanna also had a more personal worry. She had been an active, near-daily presence in her grandchildren's lives before the separation, and she wanted that relationship to continue regardless of how the parenting arrangement between Meron and Anita eventually settled. In Ontario, a grandparent has no automatic legal right to time with a grandchild. Under Ontario and federal family law, a non-parent — including a grandparent — can ask the court for what is called a contact order, which sets out time with a child, but courts generally expect that request to go through the parents first, and will weigh whether the arrangement serves the child's best interests rather than the grandparent's wishes. Hanna did not want to end up in a position where her relationship with the children depended entirely on how well Meron and Anita's co-parenting held together during his flare-ups.

There was a third layer neither Meron nor Anita had raised with their own lawyers yet: the property side of the separation was still open. Between the matrimonial home, Meron's dental practice, and various investment accounts, the couple's family property was in the range of $2.5 million to $3 million, and the equalization payment — the amount one spouse owes the other so both end up with a roughly equal share of the property accumulated during the marriage — was still being negotiated. Hanna suspected, correctly, that any parenting terms agreed upon now would sit alongside that financial negotiation, and that the two would inevitably influence each other.

What we did

1. Clarified Hanna's actual legal position before anyone assumed one. We explained that Hanna had no independent right to a parenting role and that pursuing a contact order through the court, while legally available to her, would likely be read by Anita as an adversarial move — and could damage the very relationship Hanna was trying to protect. We recommended she pursue her goal through cooperation with Meron and Anita's own negotiation rather than a separate legal proceeding, reserving the court route only if that cooperation broke down.
2. Drafted language for a health-contingency clause. Rather than trying to predict every bad week in advance, we proposed a parenting plan addendum that defined what counted as a flare-up affecting Meron's caregiving capacity, set out a short notice period he would give Anita when one occurred, and named a backup caregiver — Hanna — who could step in for specific blocks of time without triggering a formal change to the custody schedule. This kept decision-making authority between the two parents while giving the family a working answer for the scenario that had prompted Hanna's call.
3. Coordinated with Meron's family lawyer rather than duplicating their work. Hanna was not a party to the separation and we were careful not to act as though she were negotiating Meron's terms for him. We reviewed the draft parenting plan, flagged the gap around Meron's health, and sent our proposed contingency language to Meron's lawyer to raise with Anita's lawyer, keeping Hanna's involvement transparent to both sides rather than working around them.
4. Addressed the financial link directly. Anita's lawyer raised a fair concern: if Hanna became a routine backup caregiver, would that reduce the parenting time Anita was entitled to, and should that affect the ongoing property or support discussion? We worked with Meron's lawyer to keep the two issues separate on paper — the contingency clause was framed strictly as coverage for documented flare-ups, not a standing reduction of Anita's time — while acknowledging that if flare-ups became frequent, the parenting schedule itself might need to be revisited later.
5. Set realistic limits on Hanna's formal role. We advised against seeking any court-recognized status for Hanna at this stage. A grandparent named informally as a backup caregiver in a parenting plan has a real, functioning role in the children's lives. A grandparent pursuing a contact order against the wishes of one parent starts a legal process that can take the better part of a year, cost significantly more than the flexibility gained, and often hardens positions that were previously workable.

The outcome

The negotiation took about ten weeks, running alongside the broader separation talks. Anita agreed to the health-contingency clause, with two conditions of her own: flare-ups had to be confirmed by Meron in writing within a set window, and Hanna's coverage was capped at a defined number of days per month unless both parents agreed otherwise. Meron accepted both conditions. The result was not the open-ended, standing role Hanna had originally hoped for — she does not have independent legal time with the children, and if Meron and Anita's co-parenting relationship changes, the arrangement could change with it. But it gave the family a written, working answer to the exact problem that had been worrying her, without a court proceeding and without turning Hanna into a party opposing her son's former wife.

On the property side, the equalization payment settled separately at roughly $310,000 owed by Meron to Anita, reflecting the value of the dental practice and the matrimonial home relative to what Anita brought into and out of the marriage — a figure that moved only slightly from where the two lawyers had it before Hanna's involvement began. The parenting plan and the property settlement were signed within two weeks of each other, and six months later the contingency clause has been used four times, each time without incident.

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