Quebec has one of the highest proportions of unmarried couples of any place in the world. In 2006, the proportion reached 35 per cent of all couples in the province, compared to only 13 per cent in the rest of Canada.

Out of the 1.2 million Quebecers living in unmarried -- or de facto -- unions, 60 per cent of them, or about 720,000, think they enjoy the same legal protections as their married counterparts, according to a poll.

Unfortunately for them, this isn't true.

This fall, the Quebec Chamber of Notaries commissioned a survey of more than 800 Quebecers. Misinformation about the legal rights of those in unmarried unions was astonishingly high. Worse, large numbers of people are making important decisions based on their lack of knowledge.

The survey showed that 77 per cent of Quebecers in an unmarried union believed, wrongly, that the lower-earning spouse would have a right to alimony in the event of separation and 64 per cent thought, again wrongly, that property accumulated during their life together would be divided equally on separation.

The fact of the matter is, as the chamber pointed out in recent interviews, that only couples who sign a cohabitation contract can, if they stipulate it, have the same legal protections as married couples. Yet, according to the survey, only 21 per cent of unmarried couples have signed such a contract.

A third of unmarried spouses believe, inaccurately, they will inherit their partner's estate even in the absence of a will. Fewer than half of unmarried spouses have a will, the survey found.

If people go into an unmarried union knowing the facts and decide that they don't want the protections of marriage, that would be fine, said Montreal lawyer Miriam Grassby, a specialist in family law. But most of them don't do that. They make some of the most important decisions of their lives without knowing very much about their rights.

"If you take time off to be at home with your children, it will have an impact on your financial situation," said Grassby. In an unmarried union, not only is there no automatic spousal support in the case of separation, but statistically there is a much higher risk of separation. While a child's right to support is protected no matter whether his parents were married or living together, unmarried unions are, statistically, less solid than marriages.

"A couple could sit down and say, 'Statistics have shown that a child from a de facto union is three times as likely to end up in a single-parent family as a child born to a married couple,' and decide they are better off getting married," said Grassby.

In her practice, Grassby has acted in cases where after 20 years of cohabitation, a spouse learns, to her shock, that she has no automatic claim on property or support. "The client is frankly devastated. She has been living in a home for 20 years and he says to her, 'Please leave and, by the way, I owe you nothing.'"

The chamber survey found that two in three unmarried couples are homeowners, but in one in three cases, the family home is in the name of only one of the partners.

Grassby said that with so many Quebecers believing that there is no legal difference between being married and living together, it becomes a case of "not knowing what they don't know." And when everyone thinks things are fine, no one talks about making changes or lobbying for greater protections or a change in legislation.

"I don't think there should be less protection in Quebec than in the rest of the country," said Grassby. "The law should be changed here, at least to match the law in other provinces."

Elsewhere in Canada, common-law spouses are eligible for spousal support if they have made a life together for a period of time, three years in the case of Ontario, two years in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

Property, however, if not held jointly by both common-law partners is not automatically subject to equal division on separation in other provinces. Provinces have been deliberately careful not to remove a couple's right to choose whether to marry or to set up a household under their own rules.

But Quebec's notaries have rightly called attention to a serious problem: When choices are made by people who are acting with no information or wrongly assuming that the law is on their side, it isn't freedom so much as misplaced faith.

Janet Bagnall writes for the Montreal Gazette.