The Price of Protection

A survivor sleeps in a car tonight. Meals get skipped. Every hour of legal help costs $300 to $600 - money spent fighting to keep a child safe from the person the survivor escaped.

Across the courtroom sits the abuser. Well rested. Well fed. Well represented - often with the very money the survivor was never allowed to touch.

This is Alberta’s family justice system for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Escape is supposed to be the hard part. Too often, it is only the beginning…

The court that should deliver protection instead delivers a bill - one so large that survivors are priced out of justice altogether, pushed into debt and housing insecurity for the chance to be heard.

None of this is anecdotal. It is systemic. High legal fees, narrow legal aid eligibility, and courts that let money set the pace of litigation have created a simple, brutal equation: the wealthier the abuser, the longer the fight. The longer the fight, the more the survivor loses. Wealth should never buy anyone the power to keep doing harm. Right now, it does.

Litigation Is the New Weapon

Family disputes involving violence are rarely straightforward because one party often does not want a resolution. For an abuser with resources, litigation itself becomes the next instrument of control. File another application. Demand another hearing. Force a trial no one needs. Each move costs the abuser money they have and the survivor money they don’t.

The court data shows how well the strategy works. Of roughly 278,500 family law cases active in Canadian civil courts in 2024/2025, 61 per cent were carried over from previous years - a share that keeps climbing as delays and backlogs mount (Statistics Canada). Every extra month of litigation is another month of invoices. For one side, that is an expense. For the other, it is a countdown.

And the invoices are staggering. National legal fee surveys put the cost of family litigation at:

• Uncontested divorce: roughly $1,000–$2,000
• Contested divorce: $15,000–$25,000
• Five-day custody trial: $45,000–$53,000
• High-conflict family dispute: commonly more than $54,000

Those are national averages, mostly from 2021, before years of fee inflation. Today’s real numbers are likely higher. For a survivor who fled with nothing, they might as well be millions.

Trading Survival for a Lawyer

Financial abuse rarely travels alone. It comes with the violence: controlled accounts, hidden income, sabotaged jobs. Many survivors leave with no savings and no access to family money - then must somehow fund a court battle against the person who still controls it.

So, they trade. Savings, gone. Credit cards, maxed. Housing surrendered. Meals, skipped. Second and third jobs, worked between court deadlines - while drafting legal documents alone at midnight.

Then comes the cruellest turn. The exhaustion and instability that the litigation itself created get repackaged as evidence. The survivor who gave up an apartment to pay a retainer is told they cannot offer a stable home. The cost of the fight becomes the case against them.

Too Poor for Justice, Too “Rich” for Legal Aid

Legal Aid Alberta does essential work. Anyone seeking an Emergency Protection Order in a family violence situation qualifies for that help, regardless of income. But an EPO is a shield for days and weeks. It is not a lawyer for the months or years of a contested parenting dispute. For that, survivors must pass a financial eligibility test based on net household income.

A survivor with one child must fall under a net annual income threshold in the low $30,000s to qualify - approximately $31,380 under the guidelines introduced in April 2024. Work full-time at minimum wage and you can land above that line: too “high-income” for legal aid, nowhere near able to fund a $50,000 trial. Legal Aid Alberta does exercise discretion in borderline cases, but discretion is not a system. The gap remains.

Inside that gap lives the “missing middle”:

• survivors who do not qualify for legal aid,
• survivors who cannot afford private counsel, and
• survivors forced to represent themselves against an abuser’s legal team.

Self-representation in a violence case is not just hard. It is dangerous. It asks a survivor to master court procedure without training, argue for a child’s safety under pressure, and - in some cases - personally cross-examine their abuser. The system calls this access to justice. It is nothing of the kind.

A System That Extends the Abuse

The family justice system was built to resolve disputes. For survivors, it too often becomes the abuse’s next chapter - a venue where financial control, intimidation, and procedural games continue with the court’s unwitting help.

Why does no one stop it? Because each part of the system sees only its own fragment. The judge sees a procedural application. The registry sees a filing fee. The lawyer sees a retainer. No one is positioned to see the whole pattern: a survivor being methodically exhausted into surrender, one invoice at a time.

What Alberta Must Do Now

This is a design problem, and design problems have fixes. Five would make an immediate difference:

1. Expand Legal Aid Alberta funding

Raise income thresholds and capacity so a full-time minimum-wage worker fleeing abuse is never disqualified from representation.

2. Build sliding-scale legal services

Create structured, affordable representation for the missing middle - as system design, not charity.

3. Penalize abusive litigation tactics

Give judges clear tools, and a clear mandate, to impose real costs on litigants who weaponize court process to exhaust the other party. Make the strategy unprofitable and it will stop.

4. Make courts violence-informed

Mandate trauma-informed training for judges, lawyers, and court staff, and establish specialized domestic violence court streams - so coercive control is recognized, not rewarded.

5. Fund community legal clinics

Back the organizations that provide representation, case management, and navigation to survivors who would otherwise face the system alone.

Safety Should Never Go to the Highest Bidder

Until Alberta confronts the financial barriers built into its family courts, survivors will keep facing impossible choices: rent or a retainer, groceries or a court date, feeding a child or fighting to protect one.

No one should have to go bankrupt to escape abuse. And no abuser should be able to buy more time to do harm. Justice must be accessible, affordable, and built around the realities of violence - not blind to them.