A New Brunswick judge awarded partial custody of a child to an unrelated stepparent — even though both biological parents are in the picture

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Say you’re a step-parent of a young child for a few years. Say you break up with that child’s biological parent. Should you be put on that child’s birth certificate in addition to the biological parents, and be awarded partial custody? In New Brunswick, the answer is yes.

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This clarification comes to us from the New Brunswick Court of King’s Bench, which decided last week to grant partial custody of a five-year-old boy to his mother’s ex-girlfriend-turned-boyfriend.

That’s the short version. The long version is, in 2020, a New Brunswick woman named J.K., and her ex-husband, D.K., had a son, L, the child at the centre of the is court battle. But they didn’t exactly know it at the time. The two already had one child together in 2017 and separated in 2018. They continued to have sexual encounters after their separation, but since J.K. was also seeing other people, the parentage was unclear until court-ordered paternity testing took place.

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In 2019, J.K. began dating a woman who worked at her first kid’s daycare, K.M. This ended later in the year due to toxicity (“there was violence on both sides,” was the court summary of K.M.’s testimony), and J.K. ultimately moved back in with her husband — not as a couple, but not in an asexual way either, because it was during this time that their now five-year-old son was conceived. In early 2020, J.K. began seeing an old college friend named C.C, and found out she was pregnant. She believed him to be the father, but he was struggling with drugs at the time, and didn’t see him as ready to take the role.

When the pandemic hit, J.K. resumed her relationship with the woman from daycare, K.M. They were together during the........

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