With respect to children, the reasonable claimant would contest Newbury J.A.’s implication that preventing conflict at the cost of excluding him from a mode of meaningful participation in his child’s life is necessarily in the child’s best interests (para. 186). The father who has been arbitrarily unacknowledged might refer to the reasons of McLachlin J. (as she then was) in Young v. Young, 1993 CanLII 34 (SCC), [1993] 4 S.C.R. 3, at p. 119, for the proposition that “conflict between parents ... does not necessarily indicate harm” (see also P.(D.) v. S.(C.), 1993 CanLII 35 (SCC), [1993] 4 S.C.R. 141). He might conclude that even at the cost of parental conflict, it is in the best interests of a child to maintain meaningful involvement with him by having his particulars registered and by the choice of that child’s surname.
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