Common lawlessness in Quebec - the land without wedding rings

There's a case in Montreal court these days about the billionaire and his Brazillian girlfriend/common-wife.
   She wants a big settlement but according to Quebec law, she is not entitled to one because she is not officially married, although in practice she is.
   Quebec has a lot of such unmarried couples. According to Statscan figures from 2005, 34.6 of women in Quebec are living in common law relationships.
   Quebec's rate of couples living together out of wedlock is almost triple the rate in the rest of Canada, where only 13.4 percent of women are in unmarried cohabitation fake-marriage situations. Other countries are all far lower than Quebec. Britain, which studies show is the most sexually active country in Europe sees only 15.5 percent of couples in common law relationships.

   After 30 years about half of all married couples get divorced. That's well higher than anywhere else in Canada and roughly double the rate of the Maritime provinces. Divorce, of course, leads to poverty and psychological damage on children. Traditionally the separation rate for common law couples is even higher than the divorce rate.
   Quebec has Civil Law, the Napoloenic Code, as it's known. We do not practice Common Law here, so Common Law relationships is a misnomer. There's no such thing as a common law relationship, so there's no compensation for women splitting up from such a relationship.
   So living in Quebec is a great deal for rich men. Sure, they'll be on the hook for child support payments but beyond that it's zilch. And even those child support payments might be a bit tricky to get. To get a good deal, a separated woman with children often has go to weeping in front of a judge, claiming that she's too psychologically shattered to get a job on her own.
   These women are entitled to less than women elsewhere, as the anonymous common-law wife-of-a- Montreal - billionaire has learned recently. The woman, who cannot be named due to a publication ban, has three children with a Quebec billionaire who cannot be named either. The woman, from Brazil, has hired a lawyer in an attempt to overturn the provincial law and get a big settlement for herself.
   Feel free to guess who the people involved are. Canada's 23 billionaires include seven from Quebec. They are, according to the Globe and Mail: Paul Desmarais, Robert Miller, Charles Bronfman, Stephen Jarislowsky, Emanuele (Lino) Saputo, Jean Coutu, Guy Laliberte. So proceed by process of elimination. The names involved in this case are mentioned elsewhere on the internet if you're determined to find out.
   The policy which seems unfair to women is, strangely, just fine with the Quebec Council on the Status of Women. In the 1980s there was a debate on the subject of what unmarried women should get upon separation and the feminists decided that palimony should not be doled out here. I can only speculate on why they decided this, perhaps they felt that women should get out into the workplace and apply some of their ambition to the workplace. I rang them up to see if their policy had changed and no, it has not, according to rep Beatrice Farah. She declines to comment on this case because it's before the courts.
   Aprox. 170,000 women in Montreal are living in unmarried marriages with no right to support money upon separation. Only about 72,000 such women live in Toronto, where - like the rest of Canada - they are entitled to sue for support regardless of whether they have a ring on their finger or not.