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→Calculating the amount of child support
<blockquote>Say that Parent A's obligation to Parent B for the support of the children is $1,000 per month, and that Parent B's obligation to Parent A for the support of the children is $250 per month. Parent A would pay $750 per month in child support, the difference between Parent A's obligation and Parent B's obligation, and Parent B would pay nothing.</blockquote>
However, the court is also required to look at the increased costs associated with a shared parenting arrangement, and may conclude that the simple set-off approach is unfair. In a 2005 case from the Supreme Court of Canada, [http://canlii.ca/t/1lxpf Contino v. Leonelli-Contino], the court talked about increased costs and said that courts shouldn't just apply the off-set but carefully examine the parents' budgets and actual spending on their children to decide whether shared parenting time has resulted in increased costs to a parent. The court said that these increased expenses should then be divided between the parents in proportion to their respective incomes.
Finally, the court is also required to look at the "conditions, means, needs, and other circumstances" of each parent and the children. This gives the court a broad discretion to consider the resources and needs of the parents and the children. This might result in the income of a parent’s new partner being taken into account as part of the "means" of that parent, whether the parent is the payor or the recipient.
Although the court has developed a number of different formulas to calculate the amount of child support payable in shared parenting situations, in general, the set-off approach is used. Use of the It's straightforward and easy to calculate, and makes sense to most people. The set-off was approved by the Court of Appeal in the 2016 case of [http://canlii.ca/t/gsp1w B.P.E. v. A.E.], which deferred to the set-off approach in a shared parenting situation.
=== Income tax and child tax benefits===