In his latest sharply worded decision, a Hamilton judge known for his acerbic wit and creatively written judgments skewered a legal system that he says should have prevented a case from ever arriving at his courtroom door.

The facts, Justice Alex Pazaratz said, were simple.

She wanted a divorce. Her husband agreed. Neither wanted to see the other again, had agreed to it in fact.

“They have no children. No jobs. No income. No property. Nothing to divide,” Pazaratz wrote in his judgment.

But as with many legal issues, the situation may not be quite as simple as Justice Pazaratz insists, according to Queens University law professor Nick Bala.

Both parties agreed on the need for a divorce, but the matter was contested because the wife also wanted a restraining order, something her husband opposed.

The wife alleges her husband assaulted her. He was charged but acquitted at trial in 2015. The wife maintains she fears for her safety.

That is where the potential complication arises, Bala said.

As a rule, legal aid prioritizes cases where domestic violence is a concern, and rightly so, Bala says.

The applicant in the case is a 32-year-old Iraqi woman who arrived in Canada five years ago and has never worked in this country. She receives monthly assistance from the Ontario Disability Support Program.

Her husband, 43 and also from Iraq, has also never worked in this country, and also receives disability support. They were married in September 2014 and separated five months later.

In his ruling Pazaratz acknowledged the grave seriousness of domestic abuse but insisted that such a case need not consume so much of the taxpayer’s time and money, particularly when “every day I see people with much more serious and complex problems who have been denied any help by Legal Aid.”

The judge took particular issue with the husband’s refusal to agree to an order in writing restricting he and his wife from contacting each other, even though he’d agreed to such an understanding verbally.

“It didn’t have to be a formal restraining order. All she wanted was some sort of court order – equally binding on both of them – that they should stay away from one another. Just some protection, to be less afraid,” Pazaratz wrote.

But again, the husband said he would fight such an order.

“Would a person who actually had to pay for a lawyer out of their own pocket ever fund this kind of dispute?” Pazaratz asked.

“The next time anyone at Legal Aid Ontario tells you they’re short of money, don’t believe it. It can’t possibly be true. Not if they’re funding cases like this,” Pazaratz’ decision reads.

Legal aid does face significant funding challenges and is running a deficit, Bala said. Given that, it is important for the organization to make careful choices about how and where it spends its money, but “it is too easy to be very critical of an important public service,” like legal aid, Bala said.

“I don’t see this as a gross expenditure of taxpayer dollars,” he said.

The couple’s background as new Canadians is also a potential difficulty, Bala said.

“Here are two people who may not fully understand the justice system in this country,” he said.

That said, Bala agrees with Pazaratz’s concern that when someone else is footing the bill, there may be less incentive to settle before hearing from a judge.

“Even people who are paying their lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour sometimes won’t settle without hearing from a judge,” Bala said.

Toronto lawyer Philip Epstein, editor-in-chief of Reports of Family Law, is well versed in Pazaratz’ particular manner of writing, calling it “blunt and refreshing.”

“He wants to send a clear message about how the system can be improved, and this certainly does it,” Epstein said.

In the end, both parties agreed to a mutually-binding order preventing them from coming within 500 metres of each other.

“I made a fuss,” Pazaratz wrote, “so they settled. But why do we have a system in which so much tax money gets wasted, unless someone takes the time to make a fuss?”