Two things. One tonight, one at half past eight tomorrow morning.
Victoria Justice Access Centre
Open 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, Monday to Friday. Call right at 8:30.
Not the courthouse. This is where the process actually starts, they help with the paperwork, and it is free.
The first sentence decides which stream you get put in. Say this before anything else:
"I left my husband yesterday and I have my four-year-old daughter with me. There has been family violence for years, and there has been drug use around my child. I need to know the fastest route to an interim parenting order."
Family violence is the term in the Family Law Act. It is the phrase their screening is built around, and it is the one that gets acted on. "Abuse" is the word you would use talking to a friend. It is not the word that moves a file.
It sounds like it means being hit. It does not. The definition in s. 1 covers psychological and emotional abuse directly — intimidation, harassment, coercion, threats, unreasonable restrictions on your financial or personal autonomy, following you, damaging your things. It applies whether or not he intended to harm you. And a child counts as exposed whether they watched it happen or simply lived inside it.
Years of that, with no physical contact at any point, is family violence in the full legal meaning of the phrase. Not a stretched version of it. Not a lesser category. The same term, carrying the same weight, engaging the same sections of the Act.
You will want to soften it when you are actually on the phone, because even "abuse" feels like more than you are entitled to claim. Say the harder phrase anyway. If you open with "I'd like to apply for custody," you get handed the standard process and lose weeks.
Free lawyer, no appointment, no means test at this stage. Two things to ask them for: advice on the protection order, and a letter to him confirming Maple is safe and with you. Legal Aid BC's own guidance is that letter should come from a lawyer rather than from you — cleaner, and it does not open a channel for him to reply to you directly.
Victoria is an early resolution registry. That means the parenting application cannot be filed straight away — there is a needs assessment and a resolution session first, and it takes weeks.
A protection order application does not wait for any of that. The rules put it ahead of the queue.
So the protection order is the fast lane, and the parenting order moves behind it. That is the whole reason you raise both in one conversation instead of asking only for the parenting order and being told to come back in a month.
There is a second document with this one. Read it, then look at the part headed What each entry needs. That is the shape every entry takes.
Start with the last twelve months and work backwards only if you have it in you. Half an hour is a full session. Not late, and not on your own — have someone in the room.
It does not need to be written well. It needs to exist. Someone at the Justice Access Centre will help turn it into the version that gets filed.
That is normal and it is not a failure of memory. After years of this, the mind files things away so you can keep functioning, and they do not come back on command.
Call Adam. He has been told most of it as it happened and he can put dates and order to things you cannot reach. Use him as the reference — talk it through, and you write it down.
One call at 8:30. One page tonight. That is the whole list.