#50 What About Spousal Support?
With Joshua Wasylciw
Spousal Support is a legitimate concern that many have when considering divorce or separation. But Joshua Wasylciw is back today to give us an overview of what it is and how it is determined and managed.
Family lawyer, Joshua Wasylciw, of Resolve Legal Group, shares information to help you sort through some details of defining and calculating spousal support to give you a better understanding.
For more information, you can find Joshua online @ resolvelegalgroup.com
Phone: 403-229-2365
Facebook: Resolve Legal Group
Instagram: resolve.legal.group
LinkedIn: Resolve Legal Group
Watch the video of this interview on our YouTube channel.
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Transcript:
Joshua Wasylciw 0:00
Hi, I'm Joshua Wasylciw from Resolve Legal Group and you're listening to the Divorce Magazine Canada podcast.
Deena Kordt 0:07
Hey, are you or someone you care about considering dealing with, or been through a divorce or separation? Well, you're in the right place. You don't have to do this alone. There are people who care and want to help. Hi, I'm Deena Kordt, and author, blogger, publisher, and empowerment coach. Thanks for joining me on the divorce magazine Canada podcast. You are going to hear from our team of experts and professionals how to navigate this difficult transition in your life easier, more efficiently, and with better outcomes. Did you know we host online divorce resource groups that are free to attend, and everyone is welcome? Check out the links in our show notes. And be sure and join us. We love bringing experts to you, please refer to our terms of service available on our website, divorcemagazinecanada.com. And stay tuned at the end for the legal language. Ready? Here we go.
Hey, welcome. It is episode number 50. Technically, there's 52 episodes out, but there were a couple of bonuses that I didn't number. So welcome to episode number 50. I'm excited to bring back a guest that we had on episode number 42 about child support. Now that is a topic that can instill a lot of fear and concern, if you aren't sure how it's calculated or what it really is. Now, spousal support is our topic today. And Josh was going to tell us about how that's calculated what it is, and a little more about it so you know what you're getting in for. And then of course, if you have specific questions related to your own situation, then please reach out and get specific help and advice from legal sources that can talk to you specifically about what you're dealing with. So let's meet Joshua now and find out more about spousal support.
Welcome back, Joshua, I am really happy to have you sharing information about support. And if anyone's interested, please make sure to go back to episode number 42, where Joshua tells us more about child support, how that is calculated what it is what it means how it could have, you know, be something that affects you. And today he's back to give us some insight and information around spousal support. And from what I've understood from our conversations, it's not quite as black and white cut and dried and easily determined as child support. So welcome back. Please tell us about yourself. And, oh, this topic of spousal support. Let's jump in.
Joshua Wasylciw 3:02
Sounds good. So yeah, thanks for having me. Again, I'm glad to be back. I love giving these talks. If anybody hasn't listened to the previous podcast, I'll let them know that. I've been practicing family law now for about five and a half years all of it with Resolve Legal Group. And that since I was called to the bar, so what we primarily focus on is divorce and separation. Those are the two big things and family law. And whether you are formally married, or whether you are living in a partnership, which a lot of people call common law. But the law technically defines Alberta as an adult interdependent partnership. The approach to calculating support is essentially the same for married people, we of course, call it spousal support. And for non married partners, we call it partner support. But generally the approach to doing the calculations and what the law requires is essentially the same in both cases. So before we jump into the law, part of it, what I thought I'd mentioned to your listeners is, they're probably going to have this question while I'm talking for the next few minutes of Well, where do we get the information to calculate this? And I thought, well, I'll talk about the disclosure of financial information at the end of this. Just because I have talked about it in the child support podcast, so if people don't want to listen to me talk about that twice, that's fine. So um, spousal support partner support, I will likely just call it spousal support for the purposes of our chat today. It's also sometimes known as alimony that's not really a term that's used in Canada. It's more an American term, but interesting. It means essentially the same thing. So when you have left your spouse and you are now one year old, there isn't any automatic entitlement to receive spousal support. It's not like just because you left me or the lowering of income earning partner, the other partner needs to pay you a certain amount. There's a kind of three stages to determining spousal support. And the first hurdle that you have to get over is demonstrating that you have an entitlement and an entitlement can be demonstrated in three ways. The first way, which is quite rare is called contractual support. So if you had a prenup, or postnup, or a cohabitation agreement that you signed, prior to the separation, sometimes those will set out what type of support is payable in the event of a separation. Unfortunately, prenups and Pokestops are very seem to be quite rare. So this is not a very common way to receive an entitlement to support but if you have that, then that is going to govern what type of support you receive. The second way of receiving support is called non compensatory. I'm personally not a fan of that term, because I don't think it is terribly clear, I often refer to it as knee support. It's not the technical term, but I think it just helps people understand it more. So you
Deena Kordt 6:23
repeat that please the what support usually referred to as needs based, okay.
Joshua Wasylciw 6:30
Yeah. So if you've been in a relationship, and at some point in the relationship, you've developed an illness or you were in a bad accident, or for whatever reason, you just you're unable to provide income to meet your own needs. And then a separation happens. Generally what the case law and the Federal spousal support advisory guidelines say is two people previously made promises to each other to love and care for each other. And now that the separation has happened before the State steps in and provide social assistance to somebody in need, the former partner has somewhat of a duty to actually support the other partner to meet that need. So it's not a it's not an absolute, it's just that's the beef theory of needs based support, but the former partner should be providing it before the state provides it. Again, it's not terribly common. And what need means can vary. I mean, this is where sometimes you hear the phrase, the lifestyle I've become accustomed to. So if somebody was living in a very, very, very high income household, and suddenly they are now on their own, and they're working a minimum wage job, there may be a need, or maybe minimum wage isn't a good example, they're working a $60,000 a year job, that is likely enough to pay rent and buy groceries. But it might not be reasonable to expect a person who was living on $2 million a year to suddenly go to that overnight. The third way you can meet entitlement is the most common and it's called compensatory support. And it just like it sounds, the intention behind this is to compensate partner for some type of loss that they had during the course of the relationship. The most common way that this can be demonstrated is if the parties decided that they were going to have children. And then after the children were born, they made a decision that one of them was going to remove themselves from the workforce, to stay at home and look after the children. And now 10 years go by. And over that 10 years, the party who was in the workforce continued to work continue to advance their career continue to climb the corporate ladder, they've had 10 years of growth in their job and presumably a growth in their income as a result. The party that stayed at home for those 10 years, if they're now separated, has not had that opportunity. They're starting back where they were when they learned the workforce. So the idea behind compensatory support cares, we're going to compensate the party that stayed at home for the loss of the ability to grow in their career. So support can be paid for that reason. There's a lot of ways to demonstrate compensatory support. Another way might be if, you know, two people met and when they met one of them was living in Vancouver and one of them was living in Toronto, and they were well established and their families were in each of these cities and they decided that one of them will was going to pick up from Toronto and move to Vancouver to live there. There's an element of sacrifice there, you've given up your job in Toronto, you've given up your friends, your, maybe your home, your family links, and you're starting over noon. So there is an element that maybe there should be some compensation for the sacrifices that are made there. Sometimes parties might keep working, both might work. But one party might work a much lower earning jobs. So they are available to pick up and drop off the kids from school because they have less work hours and their work hours are more flexible. So they could have earned a lot more. But instead, they've decided to take a lower paying job. So there's a lot of ways to get at this element of compensatory support. Interestingly enough, most of the time, lawyers are pretty reasonable when it comes to the elements of entitlement. Not always. But usually, there's a pretty quick consensus among lawyers whether or not there is an entitlement, partially because a lot of times, it's just clear on the face of there is and other times it's because people say, Well, I think there is but I don't want to spend 1000s of dollars fighting over this in court to then just be told there is an entitlement, and then I have to pay support anyways. So after you've met the entitlement, then we move on to what's called Quantum or how much and the quantum is directly related to the income of the parties. So we'll talk about how to figure that out in a few minutes. But essentially, what we do is we put the, the two spouses incomes into a calculator, we then include the number of children that they have, we include things like if there's a special type of tax, it's such as rich, for disability, disability, things of that nature. So we get all the financial information, and we put it into this calculator. And the spousal support advisory guidelines have very complicated algorithms to determine what these are, but it will generally produce three numbers. One is low range, one is mid range, and one is high, high range. And there are three different numbers that give you an approximation of what support should be. What the calculator does, though, is a lot of people just look at the three numbers and say, Well, I'm going to go with the middle number, because that seems fair. If you look down below, in the report that's produced, there's something called the MIDI or the indie. And it stands for net disposable income or individual net disposable income. And what the calculator is doing is it's saying, Okay, we're going to lump the two incomes together to get a total. And then we're going to look at the man to Tory payments that each of these parties have and by mandatory I don't mean your mortgage or food. I mean, things like how much is going to CPP how much is going to income tax, how much is coming off for child support. So the legally required payments that have to be made. And then it says what is the net amount of income that is left over after after that for each party. And the goal generally, is to have the payor parent pay an amount to the payee parent, the recipient, so the recipient has about 40 to 45% of the total plot of the leftover income after all those deductions are made. And there's a few reasons for this. One of the reasons is we want to ensure that the payor is not having to pay too much based upon their legal legally required costs of living. The other reason is because especially if there's kids involved, we don't want there to be a wildly different standard of living at dad's house versus mom's house. Because if one of them has a much higher standard of living, there's a fairly good chance that the kids are suddenly going to want to spend a lot more time at the more comfortable house where there's more Xboxes and TVs and all that kind of stuff. And we don't want to have the children essentially picking favorites with mom and dad, just because one of them doesn't earn more or less than the other one. So we balance that with this nifty and that's an approximation of where we're at. Now, I should say the spousal support advisory guidelines are just that they're guidelines. They are not mandated by law. They are given a huge amount of deference by the courts. And it's rare that the courts are not accepting those. But there are other ways to approach the quantity of spousal support, we can look at each other's budgets and determine how much is actually needed for you to meet your needs. And the opposing party will pay you that much. And we're not going to look at the needy, or things like that. But more and more and more often, the courts are simply deferring to the spousal support advisory guidelines. A senior lawyer once told me that when you're negotiating, there's no point at starting with an extreme over here and an extreme over here, when it comes to positions, she told me, well, even if the other side starting way over here, start closer to where you think you should be, and then only move a little bit, because it's going to save time, and you're going to seem like a more reasonable lawyer, I thought that made a lot of sense. So when I'm looking at spousal support amounts, I tend to make recommendations that start pretty close to that mid range number.
And, honestly, in Alberta, that tends to be where the spousal support awards end up anyways, they can certainly be varied. And courts have a lot of discretion to move away from that based upon the Conduct of Parties. So I'm not talking about, you know, things like whether or not there was an affair, because we have no fault divorce in Canada. But I mean, if the other party has been refusing to agree to pay support for years, that might be a factor that weighs a little bit in the justices mind when they come up with this number. Or if somebody is refusing to go out and actually get a job, and they're just wanting to have support command. And Justice might say, well, I'm going to lower this a little bit, because they don't seem to be making any attempts to work towards self sufficiency. But generally, we come up with that, that mid range amount. And from there, we go on to the third part of the spousal support process, and that is duration. So how long, it's great, but I know I'm gonna get $1,500 a month. But how long. And there is a couple of different ways that the guidelines suggest that we look at this. One way is based upon the age of the youngest child. And this is not a terribly common way that lawyers look at this or even judges. But the guidelines and vision situations were primarily where the relationship has been of a short duration, and a child has been produced as a result. Or children. Sometimes it's less important to base the time support is paid off the relationship and more to focus on the needs of the child. So when it might, what the courts might do is to say, well pay your parent, you have to pay spousal support for 16 years, because you have a two year old child, so you have to pay support until they reach 18, even if your marriage was only a one year marriage, and that is quite rare. And that's why I'm starting with this first is because it's I want to let people know that this is an approach to it. But it's not uncommon. The much much, much more common way to look at how long is also support paid is the duration of the relationship test. And what the guidelines say is that support should be paid for approximately somewhere between one half of the length of the time that the parties lived together, up to one to one of the amount of time that parties lived together. So if there was a relationship, and it doesn't matter, if there was a marriage or or when the marriage was we looked at when did they move in together? When did they stop living together? And if that was 10 years, then we're looking at support being payable at somewhere between five years and somewhere between 10 years so one half of the cohabitation theory to the same amount of time as the cohabitation period. Alberta tends to be more conservative or our courts tend to be more conservative or when making these awards, and they tend to make a words that are closer to that one half of the cohabitation period. When it comes to the duration, not always I mean, every situation is unique. And the courts are always wanting to know what factors are influencing this and, you know, what is the need of the person? How long is it reasonable to expect that it will take them to get on their feet and become self sufficient? There's a lot of things that we have to consider when looking at this. However, there is one other caveat here and that's not everybody wants to wait for are, you know, if they've been together for 10 years, nobody wants to wait five years to out all of the payments that are coming to them. Or sometimes people are just in such a high level of conflict that even making that monthly payment can be problematic. So another way to do this is by making a lump sum payment. So instead of certain amount each month, we say, well, we're going to, we're going to get you to make just one big lump sum payment. So what we do is we say, okay, it's $1,500 a month, times, 12 months, times five years. And if I had thought ahead, I would have done this calculation beforehand, but I didn't. So let's say that that's roughly 15,000 a year times five years, that's, let's say, $75,000. In spousal support that is old if we do the calculation. So that can be done. But there's one more little catch here. And it's that the Income Tax Act throws a wrench into this whole thing. So the Income Tax Act says that if spousal support is being paid on a periodic basis, so that can be once a week, once a month, once every six months or even once a year, then the support that is paid is tax deductible in the hands of the payor, and taxable as income in the hands of the person receiving it. So, if we're making monthly payments, the payer is getting a big tax break. If we take the lump sum approach, though, the CRA says that is not tax deductible to the payer, and that's not income for the recipient. So the question is, well, why would the payor person ever want to pay the full $75,000 Because they pay more, they're not getting benefit. So generally, what we tend to do is we will then net that that $75,000 amount down by an approximate percentage that would be paid in taxes. So generally, it's about a third. So it's 75,000, we knock 25,000 off because that would have went to the government anyways, and then the payor, parents would pay the recipient $50,000 instead of the 75. And this has to be upsides. Number one, the payor parent keeps the $25,000 in their pocket, they don't send it to Ottawa, it doesn't go to the government. And in theory, hopefully some of that savings is going to trickle down to the children, if there are children, and they're going to benefit, the recipient doesn't have to wait five years to receive that full $75,000. And then they don't have to pay that 25 ish $1,000 to the government in taxes. So they get the benefit of receiving a great big pile of money up front, and then they can invest it or burns on it or whatever it might be. Now, this lump sum approach really only works though, if there's enough assets to do this. Of course, if you have a situation where the parties are underwater, or or there's not a lot of assets, of course, you know, somebody can't just magically make that 50,000 appear. So oftentimes, it's the case that that that isn't a practical option for the parties. But but it is something important to remember, that can be done. Before I get into disclosure, I'll just say the Divorce Act does give the court some guidance and instruction on what are we doing? Why are we giving spousal support? What Why is this a thing? And there's a few things that the act says that we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to be accounting for the costs of the breakdown of the marriage and the increased expenses. And we're supposed to be factoring in the increased costs of childcare as well. We're supposed to be thinking about things such as what were the rules that the parties played during the marriage? And is there a reason that somebody should be maybe compensated for a role that they played in the marriage, such as somebody who's a stay at home parent and performs very valuable work, but who isn't compensated for it. And the other thing that the act is very keen on is promoting self sufficiency of the spouse receiving the support within a reasonable amount of time. So what that is can vary greatly between people. So if somebody has a PhD, and they work through the marriage, and they're getting support, simply because they gave up a good job somewhere that move across the country will, they're already on their feet, in all likelihood, they're probably earning a good income. And even if the marriage was very long, they're not going to need a lot of time to become self sufficient. If somebody was working a minimum wage job prior to the marriage, and then they were married and didn't work for 15 years, they're probably going to need a little bit more time to get established and get on their feet and get some income coming in, and through no fault of their own. It's just, that's how the economy works. There's one more thing I wanted to say that I did forget about before going into disclosure, and that's the 20 year magic number. So when I talked about duration, I said, The awards are generally payable for one half of the cohabitation period to One to One for the cohabitation period. There's a big butt here. And that's relationships of 20 years or more. If you're in a relationship of that long, what the spousal support advisory guidelines indicate is that the duration is isn't going to be calculated at the time of the divorce or the separation support is going to be paid for an indeterminate period. Now, indeterminate does not mean forever. What indeterminate means is, it's going to be paid until there's a major change in circumstances of one of the parties. So for example, if there's a long relationship and then a separation, the payor does have the right to retire. So they might pay support. Maybe if the separation occurred at 60. They might pay for five years. And then at 65, they might say, well, I want to retire. And they do have the right to retire at a reasonable age. And then what we do is we will look at it again, we'll look we'll have a review, we'll see well, should support continued past 65 If it should, how much because the person's income has likely dramatically decreased as a result of their retirement. If the recipient spousal support is 40. So they were married for 22 years, and then separated at 40. And then one year goes by where the payer is paying support, and then suddenly that recipient remarries. Well, that too, is a major change in life circumstances. So again, we come back to the root view, and it doesn't reduce don't mean the and it or increase or decrease it, it just means we have to look at it again, we have to think about what's changed, and how does that reasonably affect the lives of the parties. So that's how duration works.
Deena Kordt 27:37
So Josh, this is this is really fascinating. And I'm so appreciative that you are spelling this out, and, and really describing because it's a mysterious, terrifying factor in divorce for people. And I'm also very happy that you brought up the 20 year factor, because I had a question around that because of course, in my mind, I'm going like, what, because I came I was in a 30 year marriage, and there was like, no support was six years. And I that's nowhere near half. And there isn't a you know, I don't really feel there was an a case for that retirement was really that soon. However, there's, you know, there's no contact. So I don't know. And at that point, didn't care. But it is interesting that there is allowance made for that because from I don't know if you can speak to the statistics on this, but Gray Divorce, or the the older population is seeing the greatest increase in the number of divorces of any of the age groups is the research that I've come across. And so this is a, this is a concern for them. And you address that.
Joshua Wasylciw 29:05
And I can't give you numbers. I don't know actual hard, fast statistics on this. But through my own practice, I have seen more and more of this happening over the last five and a half years. I saw my first older person who wanted to go through divorce in my first year of practice. And when I met that person, I thought that oh, this is a little bit unusual, like you've been together for a very long time. Why are you Why would you want to do this? Not that it is any of my business but these thoughts go through your head. And since then, it has seemed like this is more and more and more common. You know regarding your own situation with a six years following a 30 year separation, or a 30 year marriage battle. There's there's a lot of factors that could come in To play here, and one of the biggest factors to that I didn't specifically mention is that only child support. parties who are separating and divorcing, are free to do whatever they want, by agreement with spousal support. If you are in a one year marriage, and you guys agree that support is going to be paid for 20 years, there's nothing wrong with that if both the parties agree, and they've had legal advice, and they understand it, likewise, if parties have been in a 30 year marriage, and both say, Well, you know what, I don't want support, and the other one doesn't want to pay support, there's going to be no support. That's rare. But But spousal support is nice, because anything can be done by agreement. It's only where there's disagreement that we can look at the guidelines to say, Well, how do the guidelines treat this? What did the case law, or what does the case law say about this, and what's going to be a reasonable approach to, to this? Now, I kept on mentioning at the starts, and throughout that I was going to talk about disclosure, because throughout this whole thing, this has all been predicated upon, we know how much the parties are making, because we need to do that calculation, and the algorithm needs to tell us the percentages. So when you first see a family law lawyer, unless there's something pressing, like a safety concern, or the children are missing, or something like that, nine times out of 10, with a family law lawyer is going to do is start by doing financial disclosure exchanges. And what that means is your lawyer is going to say, well, I need a whole long list of items. But things like your last three years of income tax returns your last three years of notices of assessment or reassessment, your last three, pay stubs, your if you have a corporation, your financial statements from the corporation, we're going to need your bank account information, your credit card information, and and all these other things, these documents, and then we're going to send them over to your former partners lawyer and ask that they send the same thing back. And financial disclosure is not optional. If it's asked for you must do it. The Alberta Rules of Court and the Alberta Family Law Act both have provisions in in them that require the exchange of financial disclosure during the separation. And the reason for that is because that's the information we use to figure out how much did you make How much did I make, how much child support should be paid how much spousal support should be paid. Now, for people who listen to my talk on child support, I mentioned that for the vast majority of people, this is relatively easy to do. Normally, what we do is if somebody is employed in one job, and they get a paycheck every two weeks or every month and they have a boss and they work for a company, then they get a T for at the end of the year. And when they do their taxes, they indicate that as their income and maybe a little bit of other income for maybe some investment income or some tax credits or what you have, then we look at total income. So line 15,000, or until a few years ago, line 150. And that gives the total income of the party prior to taxes for the previous year. And then we use generally use that number and we put it into the calculator for both parties. So we get these results, it becomes a lot more difficult though, when people don't earn conventional employment income. If a party is self employed, or if they have a small privately held corporation, then things get a little bit more interesting because sometimes what people will do is they will try to write off a lot of expenses that are really work expenses or business expenses through the corporation. Or what they might do is they might leave a lot of money in the corporation and then just say, Well, I only took about $50,000 in employment income from my corporation last year or $50,000 in dividend income. So I'm only going to pay child and spousal support based on 50,000. Despite there being $500,000 in the corporate bank account, and the law has a good way of getting around this. And what the law does is it allows income that's being held in a corporation like that to be imputed back to to the person who claimed they only earned $50,000. It's a very fact specific exercise. But we look at what are the needs of the corporation for the upcoming year and what's a reasonable amount of income to leave in there. So if in my fictitious scenario where there's 500,000 in the bank, maybe $100,000 is reasonable to leave in the corporate bank account. And then what we're going to do is whether or not the money is pulled out of the account, we are on paper, we're going to take $400,000 out of that corporation, move it over to the personal income, where it's only claimed to be 50 and plunk it in there. And suddenly, we're going to do calculations based upon an income of $450,000. This does lead me into one additional area, which is, you cannot get out of pings. Also support by just quitting your job. There seems to be a prevailing idea out there that I do want to pay support. So I'm going to give up my $100,000 a year job, and I'm going to go work a minimum wage job at $31,000 a year, and I'm going to pay way less support, or I'm going to quit my $100,000 a year job, and I'm just not going to work and then I'm going to pay nothing. Unfortunately, life doesn't work like that. And neither does the law. If somebody has intentionally quit their job, we call that intentional unemployment. And if they left the 100,000, for the $30,000 a year job, we call that intentional underemployment. And in those situations, what the court can do is they can say, well payor, we understand you don't want to pay support, and we cannot force you to go and get a higher paying job. But what we're going to do is we're going to make a court order that order support be paid based upon deeming your income to be $100,000. And if you don't want to work or don't want to be at a higher paying job than $31,000, that's on you. But the support payments are going to be based on $100,000. So it does incentivize people to continue to work in a reasonable position, and for a reasonable income. Now, I should say, just to clarify, the courts aren't going to do that if you had a bonafide job loss through no fault of your own. Sometimes companies restructure, sometimes companies to wonder, and if you had an honest job, law costs your fault, you are not going to be treated in the same way as if you just quit, there is an expectation that you will find employment again within a reasonable amount of time. But that's very different than the court just saying, you quit your job yesterday, too bad you're paying today based on the $100,000 income
Deena Kordt 37:42
when it comes to owning your own company, and there might be a change. And I know we've I brought this up during the other episode concerning child support. Through the pandemic, there was a lot of chaos in the workplace and changes and pivots. And it was a struggle. So how, how is that addressed? When there are changes in your own business?
Joshua Wasylciw 38:09
Um, on a case by case basis, right? Um, you know, a lot of the a lot of this is dealt with by asking why, you know, why? Why was there a huge change in the cash flow of a business? Was it because you have an oil and gas company and the market fell out of oil and gas as it sometimes does Alberta? Well, that isn't up big, there's no fault on your hands. So we're likely going to then make an adjustment that could be one of those major changes in circumstances that do warrant a review and variation of the support order. The same thing with COVID. I don't think anybody in 2019 was expecting the 2020 that we have coming in order, through no fault of somebody's old. Now, if a business decides that they're going to simply cut their hours in half, because owner doesn't want to work as much. That is the same that will be treated in a similar fashion as intentional unemployment. If there's a business that decides, you know, hey, we're working in this very lucrative area that we're suddenly going to make a hard left turn, and we're going to go into this total different area that has high risk, and we have no experience in this, but maybe that wasn't a terribly prudent decision on the part of the business owner. So maybe there's going to be a little bit of a fault allocated there. But you're free to run your business in in a reasonable fashion, including taking reasonable risks. So in a case like somebody's suddenly going into a high risk area Well, we're gonna look at the lie in there too, you know, if somebody did that, because they thought there was a real bonafide opportunity to make a large amount of money, and it just turned out to be wrong. That's different than if the intention to do this was just because they were bored and wanted to change in scenery.
Deena Kordt 40:23
Thanks for clarifying that. I think the word reasonable is open for definition in the courts. Right? And that, that can be a tricky time. But yes, on an individual basis, a lot of this can even be determined. And, you know, there might be more information, requested more documentation, that type of thing to determine what is reasonable.
Joshua Wasylciw 40:45
You know, in my first year of law school, I remember talking in I think, every single class about what is reasonable. And you're right, at the end of the day, a lot of our law is based upon what is reasonable. And, you know, if people can't agree on what reasonable is, that's a big part of the job of our justices, it's to say, what's reasonable, what isn't. And I remember one class where we talked about reasonable is generally what the average person would believe. But in some cases, reasonable might be determined to be a belief or a position that nobody holds. When you're looking at things in a certain facts scenario, or in a certain way, if if, if an issue came up that nobody had really thought about before, maybe reasonable is something that nobody's thought of before. So it is a very gray area. And thankfully, we have some really, really great justices in our province, who, who do try very, very, very hard to craft orders and judgments that are reasonable and based on reasonableness that they don't want to have. The payor have child support or spousal support, you know, destitute and living under a bridge because they simply can't afford what the order requires. But they also don't want the recipient to be in a position of undue financial hardship. So they do try very hard to balance the competing interests here.
Deena Kordt 42:17
And there's factors as well, different generations different cultures that define, like, maybe not defined, but what reasonable fits in these in these different scenarios. So yes, it definitely does come down to individual cases.
Joshua Wasylciw 42:36
Absolutely, if you have somebody who was in a relationship where it was either for cultural reasons, or maybe personality disorder on the part of one of the spouses, where they were essentially required to stay in the home for the entire duration of the marriage, just due to homemaking, and they, they really had no experience paying bills or dealing with the government or the CRA, or those those types of life tasks will, what's reasonable for them, and the amount of support that they require, is going to be different than somebody who who shared in doing all those types of things. And we have files where, because of unfortunately, family violence, one of the spouses has has effectively withdrawn the other spouse from from the DDD world, they have no experience with paying bills with knowing how to set up a new mailbox by going to the post office or knowing how to register children in school by by calling the schools because they've been might not even drive, they might not even drive. That's a great example. And if you have somebody that's been in a relationship where they've been so controlled like that, because of domestic violence, that's a very, very different scenario than than a relationship where it has been a 5050 partnership doing those things.
Deena Kordt 44:08
Right. And technology comes to mind, too, they may not know how to use a cell phone or have have used a lot of technology. I mean, there's those extremes. Thank you so much, Josh, for the information that you've shared today. I think the pieces that come together, and especially now, you know, you've summed it up talking about disclosure, again, that, you know, people can start to draw a picture of what support they may consider is going to be part of their divorce and how it's determined and you know, it's, it's done as fairly as possible. That I think is what resonates the most with me is that the courts are there, you know, they they seem like this evil entity, but they're there to help make this as fair as possible with the information that you provide to them,
Joshua Wasylciw 45:01
they certainly are in the they do their absolute best to try to do that I have never seen a justice who has, you know, tried to be vindictive or or try to punish somebody by making these awards. That's Thankfully, it just doesn't happen here. We've got some we've worked great justices. We're trying hard to do what's fair.
Deena Kordt 45:25
That's fantastic. Thanks so much, Josh. I appreciate you being here.
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