Getting Back Into a Shared Home Safely After Violence

The situation

Kwame and Chidi had lived together for about six years in a mortgaged home in Ottawa that they owned jointly. Kwame worked as an elementary school teacher earning roughly $78,000 a year; Chidi ran a small plumbing business that brought in somewhere around $55,000 to $65,000 net most years. Together their household income sat in the $130,000 to $140,000 range, comfortable enough to carry a mortgage payment of about $2,700 a month and to each be contributing to a workplace pension. On paper, they looked like any established couple.

The relationship had been deteriorating for close to a year, with arguments that grew sharper and more frequent. One night, an argument turned physical. Kwame left the home immediately, spent the night at a colleague's place, and by the next morning had moved into a friend's spare room — a friend named Ming, who lived across the city and offered a place to stay without hesitation. Kwame had left with a work bag, a phone charger, and little else. Clothes, teaching materials, identification documents, and a laptop needed for lesson planning were all still in the house.

The legal problem

Because Kwame and Chidi were common-law partners rather than a married couple, some of the protections people associate with a shared home did not apply automatically. The Family Law Act's matrimonial home provisions — the rules that let a married spouse claim a right to stay in the home regardless of whose name is on title — are reserved for married spouses. Kwame's right to the property came from a different, more basic source: being a registered joint owner. As a co-owner, Kwame had every legal right to be in the house. The problem was safety, not entitlement.

Returning without a court order was not a realistic option. Chidi still had keys, still considered the house home, and the argument that led to Kwame leaving had not been an isolated flare-up — it capped months of escalating conflict. Simply going back and hoping for the best risked another confrontation. Waiting the usual months for a family law case to work through the ordinary court schedule was not realistic either: Kwame needed clothes for work within days, needed the laptop to prepare lessons, and needed some certainty about where they would be living for the next several weeks while a longer-term separation was sorted out.

The Family Law Act allows a restraining order to be sought by partners who have lived together, married or not, where there are reasonable grounds to fear for one's safety. Separately, as a joint owner of the property, Kwame could ask the court for an interim order giving exclusive possession of the home — a temporary arrangement where one owner is permitted to live in a jointly owned property while the other is required to stay away, pending a fuller resolution of their financial and property affairs. Combining the two was the path forward, but it needed to move fast.

What we did

1. Documented the incident and the pattern before it. Kwame's account of the night in question needed to stand on its own in a sworn affidavit, supported wherever possible: a photo of a visible injury taken the next morning, a text message sent to Ming describing what had happened, and a note of the exact time Kwame left the house. We also asked Kwame to set out the pattern of escalation over the preceding months, since a single incident described in isolation is often harder for a court to weigh than the same incident placed in its context.
2. Filed on an urgent basis rather than the standard track. Ordinary family law motions are scheduled weeks or months out. Where there is a credible, well-supported claim of family violence and an immediate safety concern, the court can be asked to hear a motion on short notice, sometimes with reduced notice to the other side. We prepared the motion record — the affidavit, a supporting brief, and the proposed order — specifically framed around urgency, explaining why Kwame could not simply wait for the regular hearing list.
3. Asked for two things in the same motion. The restraining order addressed the risk of Chidi contacting or approaching Kwame directly. The exclusive possession request addressed the home itself: an order that Kwame could occupy the property and that Chidi was to stay away from it and arrange to retrieve personal belongings only at scheduled, supervised times. Asking for both together meant Kwame would not need a second, separate proceeding to deal with the house once the personal safety piece was resolved.
4. Coordinated with police before the hearing. Kwame had reported the incident to police, and we obtained the report number to include in the record. A police report does not decide a family court motion, but it corroborates the timeline and shows the court that the account was reported promptly, not raised for the first time in litigation.
5. Planned for the practical handover. Anticipating that the order might include terms for retrieving belongings, we drafted a proposed schedule — a single supervised visit, coordinated in advance, rather than leaving the details to be worked out between two people who were not currently speaking safely to each other.

The outcome

The motion was heard on an urgent basis within days of being filed. The judge accepted Kwame's evidence, granted the restraining order, and granted interim exclusive possession of the home. Chidi was ordered to vacate and was permitted to return only once, on a scheduled date, accompanied by a third party, to collect personal items — Kwame's belongings were separately gathered and left ready for pickup by Ming in the meantime.

Within a week of the incident, Kwame was back in the family home, sleeping in a familiar bed, teaching from familiar materials, with a legal order in place rather than an informal hope that things would stay calm. The exclusive possession order was explicitly interim: it settled who lived where while the couple's larger financial questions — how the equity in the house would eventually be divided, what would happen to the pensions each had been building, and how the mortgage would be handled going forward — were worked out in the months that followed, either by negotiation or, if needed, at a later court date. Those questions took longer to resolve, as property division between separating partners usually does. But the piece that could not wait — where Kwame would sleep that week, and whether Chidi could walk back in unannounced — was settled fast, and it held.

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