Supreme Court of Canada will be asked to decide whether divorced couples are "lifers" who remain at permanent risk of being forced to pay money to their former partners, even after a divorce court declines to award support or cuts it off.

The issue, which affects many divorced couples across Canada, will be brought before the high court by a London psychiatrist, Adrian Hynes, who faces the prospect of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars of support to his former wife -- even though the Manitoba courts ruled he was off the hook 13 years ago.

Dr. Hynes will ask the top court to hear his appeal of a recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision that paves the way for former spouses to make spousal-support claims against each other years after such claims were disposed of by a court, said his Toronto lawyer, Philip Epstein.

"We are seeking leave to appeal [the ruling] unless the case settles very quickly," Mr. Epstein said.

Dr. Hynes had his support payments reduced in 1992, when he left a family practice and returned to school.

His former wife applied in 2002 to have the support payments reinstated, but she was turned down.

Last Tuesday's judgment by a special panel of five judges overturned the three-year-old ruling -- and unanimously overruled two decades of Ontario Court of Appeal case law.

Family law lawyers say the decision throws open the door to renewed spousal-support claims by thousands of former spouses whose circumstances have changed in the years after their original claims were permanently dismissed by a court -- either because the claims were deemed unjustified, or because the claimants dropped their demands.

By jettisoning the principle that a court can't order spousal support if the claim was previously dismissed, the decision removes the concept of finality and predictability in the law of spousal support.

That principle had allowed couples to settle their financial affairs, secure in the knowledge unforeseen support claims would not come back to haunt them, by mutually obtaining a "consent order" from a divorce court that dismissed all present and future spousal support claims.

Now the "until-death-do-us-part" bonds of matrimony may more aptly describe the shackles of spousal support. "Simply put, there is no real finality any more," Mr. Epstein observed.

The Court of Appeal cited 1997 changes to the Divorce Act, and recent Supreme Court jurisprudence in its decision. The law's new language "reflects a parliamentary recognition that the courts require significant flexibility to tailor a just result for individual cases given the multitude of circumstances in which divorcing spouses find themselves," Justice Susan Lang wrote for the court.

Two years ago the British Columbia Court of Appeal expressed similar sentiments in one of its decisions, but called on the nation's highest court to provide Canadians with "a definitive answer" to the "unsettled law."

According to Nanaimo, B.C., divorce lawyer Michael Warsh there is now "no closure, we are all lifers."

In the Ontario case, Eileen Tierney-Hynes asked an Ontario court to reinstate her spousal support payments that were terminated by the Manitoba courts in 1992.

She and her husband divorced in 1987 after 12 years of marriage during which she helped put him through medical school and raised their three children. Dr. Hynes decided in 1992 to become a psychiatrist. He asked that his support payments be cut while he retrained. The Manitoba courts ordered his child-support payments cut by one-third and wiped out Ms. Tierney-Hynes's spousal support.

In 2002, with her child-support payments about to run out and in ill health and unable to support herself, Ms. Tierney-Hynes, re-applied for spousal support in Ontario, where she now lives. Dr. Hynes, whose annual income exceeds $250,000, successfully argued in Ontario Superior Court last year her claim was barred by the Manitoba court's termination of her support in 1992.

Not so, said the Ontario Court of Appeal in last week's groundbreaking decision that sent Ms. Tierney-Hynes's claim to be determined by a trial.