25 years is a long time. It’s a quarter of a century, a generation, and longer than the twenty-first century has had to run thus far.
Mr. Doran Flock and Ms. Arlene Flock bought a home in Calgary as joint tenants in 1993. Several months later they separated and Mr. Flock moved out and left the payment of Property related expenses to Ms. Flock. They were divorced in 1999 but a dispute over their joint property was unresolved.
In 1993, the Oslo accords were signed, the first world trade center was bombed, and the co-author for this blog-post would not be born for 8 more years. Now he has completed his undergrad at Redeemer University and is enjoying himself by writing about a case that is 8 years older than himself. When the life history of a case feels more like archaeology than contemporary events it speaks volumes.
One year after the twin towers fell, the Flocks in 2002 agreed to have an arbitrator resolve their property issues. The arbitrator took 33 months to deliver his award but Mr. Flock then applied to set aside the award and he succeeded: in 2007! The dispute over the resolution of the dispute continued until Ms. Flock died seven years later in 2014; and Crimea was annexed by Russia.
It took about as long as Ukraine was unmolested by Russia for the case to come to a final head. The time had of course produced different facts: the newly divorced Ms. Flock had a litigation representative named Mr. William McKen. He was also the sole beneficiary of Ms. Flock’s estate and he started to live on the property in the year of the divorce in 1999. Ms. Flock and Mr. McKen married in 2009 and Mr. McKen paid no rent but contributed to all of the property-related expenses, spent $145,000 on renovations, and completed paying off the mortgage in 2017– three years after her death.
Thus, the litigation background to the recent Flock Estate v Flock 2022 ABCA 229 is rich with human events. The litigation survived two marriages, a divorce, the death of one of the two joint-tenants, $145,000 dollars of home renovations, and an inflation increase that raised the cost of a basket of goods and services in Alberta costing $1 in 1993 to $1.62 in 2014.
The arbitration phase of this dispute is dispiriting since the first arbitral hearing was held in early 2003 and once it was concluded and then set aside the court felt too much time had gone by to be confident that remitting it to the same arbitrator would produce a timely result. This pyrrhic victory seems to have high centered the dispute until Ms. Flock’s death in 2014.
