Parental union: what changed on 30 June 2025

Québec was the only province where two people could live together for twenty years, have children and separate without any division of property between them. That was not an oversight: it was a long-standing choice not to impose the rules of marriage on de facto spouses.

On 30 June 2025 that choice was qualified on one precise point: a child in common. Since that date, de facto spouses who become the parents of the same child come automatically under a regime called “parental union”.

«Automatically» is the important word. There is nothing to sign, nothing to declare and nothing to register: the regime applies because the law says so, whether you know it or not.

The regime covers de facto spouses whose common child is born or adopted on or after 30 June 2025. What counts is the child’s date, not the couple’s: two people together for fifteen years come under it the day their first child is born after that date.

It does not apply to married or civil union couples, who already have their own regime, nor to de facto spouses with no child in common, nor to those whose children were all born before 30 June 2025. For them the earlier rule still holds: living together creates nothing.

That is the first thing to check, and the simplest: look at your youngest child’s date of birth.

The regime creates a limited common patrimony made up of property used by the family: the family residences, the furniture in them and the vehicles used for the family’s travel, where they are acquired during the union.

When the union ends (separation or death) that patrimony is in principle divided in equal shares, regardless of which of the two paid for it or whose name is on the contract.

What is not in it stays with each spouse: accounts, investments, the RRSP, the business, the cottage that is not a family residence. What goes in and what stays out is more precise than it looks, and it is exactly the kind of question better asked before than after.

Until now, a de facto spouse did not inherit. With no will, the estate went to the children, the parents or the siblings, and the survivor could find themselves having to buy back their own children’s share of the house they live in.

Since the reform, a spouse in a parental union takes one third of the estate where there is no will. That is real protection, and it remains narrow: it covers only the spouses the regime applies to, and one third is not everything.

A will remains the only way to go beyond what the law provides, and the only protection for de facto spouses the regime does not cover.

The regime does not turn de facto spouses into a married couple. It does not create a full family patrimony, it gives no right to spousal support, and it does not settle what happens to the rest of your property.

Nor does it replace a protection mandate: if one of the two becomes incapable, the other has no automatic authority over their affairs, parental union or not.

Three documents cover what the regime leaves open, and they are often prepared together because they answer the same three moments: separation, incapacity and death.

The law also provides that spouses may arrange the effects of the regime between themselves. That is a decision to be taken informed and in writing, and it is one of the reasons to discuss it early rather than when the question arises.