F.A.C.T. Information: Child Support - Financial
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"It's a patriarchal sexist mentality to say that the cure for a poor mother's poverty is a father's income," says Gwendolyn Mink, a professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Cruz and author of a 1998 book on welfare reform, "Welfare's End."

This quote is taken from the website of the National Organisation of Women's commentary against the encouragement poor women to marry, rather than just collect welfare.

One of those older articles from before the big lie from government on Child Support: 'True deadbeat dads' are few, Ottawa says. This is from the Toronto Star when it was paper and quotes Carolina Giliberti, chief of the federal Department of Justice's family law research unit before the incompetents took it over. This article shows what child support rationally could have been, and not the destructive injustice it has become.

Amazing. The formulae for the child support guidelines were held totally secret for 2.5 years by the Department of Justice -- clearly in embarrassment for the totally inappropriate, inept and unfair formulation a partial and poor explanation of that they did was finally released on paper only in 2000. A few scanned copies of the document were made available by various people who looked at the guidelines (including FACT and Alar Soever). Now, almost 4 years later, this idiotic document has finally been released to the general public on the Department of Justice website -- undoubtedly to show how they have managed to pass of this excuse for something constructive for more than 7 years with the ax-wielding courts and provinces destroying so many parents financially. We cannot figure that this revelation of Department of Justice subterfuge and incompetence will last long at http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/ps/sup/pub/reports/csr-1997-1.html so you can click for a local PDF copy of the Formula for the Table of Amounts Contained in the Federal Child Support Guidelines: A Technical Report. If nothing else has convinced observer that the Child Support Guidelines were an arbitrary, greedy and inaccurate formulation by people who knew better, read this and then the articles that follow.

If you don't think that these people have an agenda that is considerably different from what they state, do see then-Minister Cauchon's excuse for a report on the Guidelines -- ignoring the abundant criticism -- presented in 2002 at http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/ps/sup/pub/rp/report2002.html.

Be alarmed. This is how Canada has reintroduced state-sponsored involuntary servitude on the citizens of Canada -- including debtors prisons and legal slavery (at least my relatives had a choice to get on the boat, you ex has the choice now). The magnitude of the damage is significant, and these people should be held accountable.

Lawyer Gene Colman (see http://www.4famlaw.com has looked at one of those silly decisions by the Ontario Court of Appeal known as Contino v. Leonelli-Contino (see http://www.ontariocourts.on.ca/decisions/2003/october/continoC39928.htm or, for PDF format http://www.ontariocourts.on.ca/decisions/2003/october/continoC39928.pdf). His article called Contino v. Leonelli-Contino: A critical analysis of the Ontario Court of Appeal interpretation of section 9 of the Child Support Guidelines (you can read this at http://www.4famlaw.com/Contino.htm. Colman analyses this section of the Canadian Child Support Guidelines from the viewpoint of the existing law and identifies many logical, and at times structural, deficiencies of the underlying model used for the guidelines, and their misapplication of the model by the courts. The result does indicate that clearly the senior judges have little idea what they are doing when dealing with structure of the Guidelines. Well, what would you expect. The same secretive federal bureaucrats who came up with the secret guidelines set the secret courses for the judges on support and "social issues" through the National Judicial Institute -- so any wisdom or justice is kept hidden from Canadians.

I recommend giving this article a good look because it shows some of the reasons that a proper set of guidelines need to be developed. Although Colman does not develop a philosophical framework for the development of a complete set of guidelines, many of his insights should be reflected in any fair, socially constructive set of guidelines. Perhaps this country will one day have guidelines like this, rather than what we have.

An tremondous study about the child support guidelines was published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Socity (Vol. 17, n. 1, pp. 139-162) entitled What Were They Thinking? The Development of Child Support Guidelines in Canada. by Paul Millar and Anne H. Gauthier. A copy of the working papers is available here. This seems to be the published article plus a couple of appendices. This is a copy of the article originally on http://www.canadianfamilyresearch.org which may be updated from time to time.

An excellent study by Alar Soever, entitled "The Federal Child Support Guidelines: A Breakdown of Democratic Process and the Canadian Legal System" has been made available by Alar. This is only available in PDF format, and it includes an appendix that is a scanned version of most of the document outlining the Child Support Formula from the Department of Justice making it rather large. I would note that Appendix B is very important -- it is a letter from Justice Canada admitting that the Child Support Guidelines includes spousal support, a fact that has been stated to be totally inappropriate by the Supreme Court of Canada. If the Courts actually use facts, or even listened to itself, then these guidelines would be struck down.

F.A.C.T. Federal Child Support Guidelines

Here is the long awaited updated Child Support Study from F.A.C.T.: January, 2000
As part of the review of the Child Support Guidelines, the Department of Justice decided to consult the public for input. F.A.C.T. did some analysis of the tax implications and the funds left for each family with two equivalent spouses (per the DofJ model). This report contains an updated version of the draft study based on the comments from our reviewers. What does the study show? Impoverished non-custodial parents and well-off custodial parents -- without even a second relationship. Read the report for yourself., or grab a PDF formated copy.

Federal Child Support Guidelines

The newly imposed Federal Child Support Guidelines were a demonstration of the abuse of bureaucratic power to ignore the facts before them and to impose what then Justice Minister Alan Rock called "measures to stop that discrimination in favour of divorced kids....errr...fathers". It represents the imposition in law of disciminatory and unconstitutional practices, the removal of reasonable ability to challenge them and, as disclosed by the Departments of Justice and Finance a way to take another $2 billion dollars out of the hands of the children living without enough already in divorced families. Those who have look at these laws, and at the terrible and ignorant job of their implementation in the courts, will tell you that it is a disgraceful tragedy for all involved. Certainly, the Department of Justice has not found its way back to the definition of justice yet.

You can find a copy of the guidelines, in HTML format and Word format, as well as a copy of the provincial tables, in PDF format on the Department of Justice's website. You can find the guidelines and the tables themselves at:
http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/ps/sup/grl/glp.html

For those interested, there were a number of studies done on the Child Support Guidelines and their implications. These were generally ignored in the setting of the tables, which seemed to have been done in the Department of Finance by people who had no idea of equity or fairness (i.e. the tax people). A summary of these studies was available as:
Financial Implications of The Federal Child Support Guidelines Report - Executive Summary- Dept. of Justice