Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Stringent legal test for an interim variation of a final parenting order and interim relocation was central, requiring a strong prima facie case, urgency, and proof of best interests.
• The proposed relocation of the children from Ontario to Dubai (a non-Hague Convention jurisdiction) raised serious enforceability and international child abduction–type concerns if a later order required their return.
• Conflicting and incomplete evidence about the mother’s new employment, income, and financial circumstances in Dubai undermined her claim that the move offered clearly superior stability and opportunities.
• The children’s stated wishes to move to Dubai were questioned in light of the Voice of the Child assessor’s view that their preferences were not independently formed but closely aligned with the mother’s narrative.
• Allegations of family violence and parenting deficits against the father, alongside CAS involvement and prior shared parenting arrangements, presented disputed factual issues unsuitable for resolution on a short-record motion.
• The existing 2-2-5-5 shared parenting status quo, and the risk that an interim relocation would effectively predetermine the final result, led the court to conclude that a full trial, not an interim order, was required.

Facts of the case

The case concerns two Iraqi Christian parents, Norra D’Silva (the mother) and Furat Ilia (the father), who married in Dubai in 2006 before the father emigrated to Canada in 2008 and later sponsored the mother’s immigration in 2009. Their two children, D (age 12) and M (age 9), have been raised in Ontario and currently attend a Catholic school in Oakville. They have never lived in Dubai, but visited for three weeks in the summer of 2025. A final order of March 16, 2023 established a shared parenting regime with a 2-2-5-5 schedule and granted the mother final decision-making authority on major issues.
After that order, serious conflict persisted. The parties disputed who had been the primary caregiver before 2023, whether the father had improperly restricted the mother’s time with the children when she left the matrimonial home, and the extent of the father’s day-to-day involvement during his parenting time. The father, a real estate agent and architect, earns at least $100,000 per year. The mother asserted she previously had a successful professional career in Iraq and Dubai before relocating to Canada at the father’s behest and claimed that her limited success in Canada was due to him allegedly defaming and sabotaging her in their shared cultural community.
By late 2025, the mother had sold her Ontario home and moved to Dubai, where she said she had secured a sales position, rented a home, and arranged spots for the children at an international English-language school. She then brought a motion seeking an interim variation of the final order to allow the children’s relocation to Dubai pending trial. The father opposed this, characterizing the move as an attempt to unilaterally dismantle the shared parenting arrangement and greatly restrict his relationship with the children.
In the background, there was also a property equalization component: the mother asserted that the father owed her an outstanding equalization payment of $62,500, allegedly due on December 31, 2024. She further stated that she held approximately $300,000 in a Canadian bank account which she suggested could serve as security for compliance with any future return order. These financial issues, however, were not the subject of the motion; they were relevant only to context and to the mother’s argument that she would return to Canada with the children if ordered.

Positions of the parties

The mother argued that it was in the children’s best interests to relocate with her to Dubai before trial for several reasons. She asserted that, in substance, she had always been the primary caregiver, notwithstanding the shared arrangement ordered in 2023. She claimed that, after a three-week trip to Dubai in summer 2025—where they stayed in hotels and enjoyed numerous recreational activities—the children had clearly expressed a desire to move there. She also relied on a closing letter from the Halton Children’s Aid Society identifying parenting concerns about the father, including an incident where he allegedly slapped D once or twice, allowing M to play across the street with only a walkie-talkie for supervision, and speaking negatively about the mother to the children.
Further, the mother alleged that the father was frequently absent during his parenting time and used another woman for school drop-offs and pick-ups, suggesting the children were effectively being cared for by third parties rather than by him. She contended that relocation would reduce conflict, expose the children more to their Arabic culture, and allow them to build relationships with their maternal extended family, including a seventy-five-year-old grandmother and a maternal aunt who, she said, would assist in Dubai. She emphasized the purported academic, social, and extracurricular benefits of the international school in Dubai, where D could play soccer and M could dance and swim, and argued that the move would significantly enhance her own career prospects and economic stability.
The father opposed interim relocation on multiple grounds. He stressed that the status quo of shared parenting had been in place for roughly two and a half years and that moving the children to Dubai would effectively remove him from their daily lives for most of the year. He acknowledged that he hired a woman to assist with some school transportation but rejected the suggestion that he was largely absent during his parenting time. He also disputed the mother’s narrative about the children’s wishes, arguing that their only meaningful exposure to Dubai was the three-week holiday trip and that their stated preferences were heavily influenced by the mother.
He further contended that the mother had herself engaged in problematic conduct, including allegedly withholding the children from him during the prior summer when the CAS was involved and then closed its file without further action. He framed this as part of a pattern that led him to bring his own motion to change, seeking final decision-making authority for the children. On the financial side, he characterized the mother’s expectations in Canada as unrealistic and her new employment claims in Dubai as poorly supported and implausible, particularly given the high income she claimed to earn in an apparently entry-level sales role.
Both parties raised concerns that would require credibility findings at trial. The mother alleged a long history of sabotaging behaviour by the father, while the father denied many of her allegations and highlighted the children’s long-standing life, schooling, and community ties in Ontario.

Governing legal framework

The court framed the motion under two interlocking areas of law: interim variation of a final parenting order and interim relocation of children under the Divorce Act. For interim variation, Kurz J referred to his own articulation in Epshtein v. Verzberger-Epshtein of a stringent four-part test: the moving party must show a strong prima facie case of a material change concerning parenting, that the issue is important, that circumstances are urgent or pressing, and that the proposed variation is in the child’s best interests. A “strong prima facie case” was distinguished from the lower “serious issue” standard; it demands a high, though not guaranteed, likelihood of success based on the record available on the motion.
On relocation, the court cited the Divorce Act provisions (ss. 16.91–16.94), which govern notice, objection, and the best-interests analysis specific to relocation. These require the court to consider factors such as the reasons for the relocation, its impact on the child, the caregiving history and time each parent spends with the child, compliance with notice requirements, any existing geographic residence clauses, the reasonableness of proposed parenting time changes post-move, and the parties’ historical and likely future compliance with orders and agreements. Where there is equal or substantially equal time, the relocating parent generally bears the burden of proving that relocation is in the child’s best interests, and the court retains discretion in interim contexts about how to apply those burden provisions.
The court also adopted established principles on interim (temporary) relocation, particularly from Plumley v. Plumley and subsequent authorities, as summarized in N.P. v. D.H. These decisions stress that interim relocation orders are exceptional because they can effectively determine the final outcome; courts are more reluctant to alter an existing status quo, especially where there are genuine issues for trial, material factual disputes, or significant distances involved. Interim relocation is more likely to be justified only in compelling circumstances—such as clear, non-controversial benefits to the child that will be lost without an immediate move, or where the result at trial appears close to inevitable on the available record.
Finally, the court raised international enforcement policy concerns. Dubai is not a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. This meant that, if the children were allowed to move there on an interim basis and a later trial decision ordered their return, Ontario authorities could not rely on the Hague Convention mechanisms to enforce that return, sharply increasing the risk that any interim relocation would be effectively irreversible in practice.

Court’s analysis

The judge concluded that the mother’s motion was premature and that the record did not meet the high threshold for an interim variation of a final parenting order to allow relocation. Several evidentiary deficiencies and contested issues drove this result.
First, the court examined the mother’s assertion that relocation was justified by significantly enhanced employment and financial opportunities in Dubai. The only documents produced were a brief employment letter that did not specify her income, no written employment contract, and a single pay stub that she said represented the equivalent of $11,460 per month, or about $137,520 per year. The judge noted that the pay stub did not clearly identify the period it covered, that the nature of the goods or services she sold was unspecified, and that there was no evidence of qualifications that would justify such a high salary for what appeared to be an entry-level sales position. He contrasted this with her sworn financial statement, in which she claimed monthly expenses of $14,399, suggesting that, even if her income claim were accepted, she would still be operating at a significant monthly deficit. Overall, the court found this aspect of her evidence “scant” and raising as many questions as it answered.
Second, the court viewed the children’s expressed desire to move to Dubai with caution. Their wishes were based on a three-week “honeymoon”-type vacation involving hotel stays and leisure activities, not on any realistic experience of day-to-day life in Dubai. Importantly, the Voice of the Child assessor, Stephen G. Cross, expressly concluded that the children’s views did not appear to be independently formed. He observed that their language and reasons for wanting to move were strikingly similar to the mother’s, and that they seemed preoccupied with the Dubai narrative she had repeatedly presented to them. He further noted that at their ages the children could not fully appreciate the implications of leaving a parent, their friends, and their familiar school and culture in Canada. The court gave this professional assessment considerable weight in doubting the reliability of their expressed relocation preferences at the interim stage.
Third, the proposed support from the maternal grandmother in Dubai was found to be speculative. The grandmother is seventy-five years old, lives in Iraq approximately 2,200 kilometres from Dubai, and has had very little relationship with the children, not having seen them since M’s christening about eight years earlier. There was no clear evidence she could legally move to and reside in Dubai. Given her age and distance, the court even suggested that the caregiving relationship might be reversed in practice, with the mother potentially needing to care for the grandmother rather than the other way around. The role of the maternal aunt was also not fleshed out with concrete details.
Fourth, the court re-emphasized the importance of the existing parenting status quo. The father was an equal caregiver under the 2-2-5-5 regime, and while there were allegations that he was not personally present during all of his parenting time, those were contested and required trial-level fact-finding. The allegations of family violence and parenting concerns—such as the alleged slapping incident and supervision issues identified by CAS—were also disputed. While the CAS closing letter lent some support to the mother’s concerns, it was not determinative, and the father denied or downplayed much of that conduct. The court found that these issues could not properly be resolved on an interim motion based on written materials and required full evidentiary testing at trial.
Fifth, the judge placed significant weight on the international enforcement risk created by relocating the children to a non-Hague jurisdiction. Because Dubai is not a party to the Hague Convention, any future trial order directing the children’s return would not benefit from the convention’s established enforcement mechanisms. Although the mother stressed that she had returned the children after their summer vacation in Dubai and that she now held substantial funds in Canada which could be treated as security, the court found that these assurances did not eliminate the risk that a return order could not effectively be enforced. The judge viewed this as a powerful structural reason for caution in granting an interim relocation, particularly where the record did not overwhelmingly support the move.
Finally, the court addressed the mother’s argument that, having sold her Ontario home and moved to Dubai, she had effectively “burned her bridges” in Canada and needed the children with her there. Kurz J rejected the notion that her unilateral decision to relocate and divest herself of local ties should drive the interim result. To the contrary, he held that her choices did not justify altering the children’s residence on a temporary basis in a way that would likely predetermine the eventual trial outcome. Instead, the broader constellation of disputed facts, questions about her new life in Dubai, and the gravity of the relocation decision all pointed toward deferring such a decision until a full trial could be held.

Outcome and next steps

In the result, the court dismissed the mother’s motion for an interim variation of the March 16, 2023 final order and refused to authorize the children’s relocation to Dubai on a temporary basis. The shared parenting arrangement, with its 2-2-5-5 schedule and the mother’s final decision-making authority on major issues, therefore remains in place pending trial, subject to any future orders in related proceedings. Recognizing the need for comprehensive adjudication, the judge directed that the matter be placed on the spring 2026 trial blitz and indicated that a clinical investigation by the Office of the Children’s Lawyer under s. 112 of the Courts of Justice Act would likely assist the court at trial; the parties were invited to bring a short procedural motion if they wished to seek that involvement.
On costs, the court identified the father—the respondent—as the successful party on the motion and invited him to serve brief written submissions for costs within fourteen days if the parties could not reach an agreement. The mother was given a further fourteen days to respond, with the judge stating that he would make no costs award if no submissions were received. No specific costs figure, damages amount, or other monetary award was set out in this endorsement. Accordingly, while the father is clearly the successful party on this motion, the total monetary amount, if any, ultimately ordered in his favour cannot be determined from this decision alone.