Difference between revisions of "Child Support Guidelines"

The basic amount of child support a parent pays is presumed to cover a very wide scope of common day-to-day expenses associated with raising children: the child's share of lodging, utilities, shoes, groceries, diapers, clothes, toothpaste, school field trip fees, entertainment, haircuts, and so forth. The basic amount of support is not always presumed to include certain other kinds of expenses that are infrequent but expensive, such as the cost of daycare or orthodontic work. In addition to the basic amount of support payable, a payor may also be required to cover a portion of these other expenses, so long as they qualify as ''special and/or extraordinary expenses'' under the Guidelines.

If an expense if found to qualify as a special and/or extraordinary expense under the s. 7(1) and (1.1) definitions, the court may make an order that both parties pay additional amounts, on top of the usual Guidelines basic amount of support, to cover all or a portion of the cost of the expense.

When the court is asked to consider a particular expense, it should first decide whether the expense is reasonable according to the parties' means. For lower income parents not many things are going to be considered reasonable:

*Orthodontics, providing they are medically necessary.

*Daycare, providing the daycare is required to enable a parent to work outside the home.

For parents with more money, more expenses will qualify as special expenses:

*Dance, music and art classes, and summer day camps.

A driver training course, for example, is unlikely to qualify as a special expense under the heading of necessity, since you can learn to drive and obtain a driver's licence without it, as was decided in a 2011 Supreme Court case, ''[http://canlii.ca/t/2fzs4 M.S.J. v. J.M.J.]'', 2011 BCSC 245. On the other hand, if a semester with Sylvan Learning Centre will mean the difference between passing or failing a grade, the tutoring would be considered a necessity.

Under s. 7(2) of the Guidelines, expenses that qualify as special and/or extraordinary expenses are shared by the parties in proportion to their incomes, after deducting any contribution to those costs made by the child or the government, through things like grants or tax deductions. The idea here is to look at the total pot of money available to the child — the income of the payor plus the income of the recipient — and to figure how much each party's share of that pot is, and then pay the child's special expenses according to each parent's share.

The cost that is being shared is the ''net cost'' of an expense, in other words, the amount that is actually being paid after any third-party contributions have been applied to reduce the expense. Daycare costs, for example, are usually partly subsidized by the government with certain tax deductions. If $1,000 is spent on daycare, but the government chips in a $200 tax benefit, the amount of the expense shared between the parents would be $800, not the full $1,000.

Note that the income of a parent's new spouse or partner can be taken into consideration in determining a parent's "means" in sharing a special expense. In the 2000 Supreme Court case of ''[http://canlii.ca/t/1fm6b Baum v. Baum]'', 2000 BCSC 1835 the court held that the s. 7(1) consideration of the "means of the spouses" should be interpreted broadly as including all sources of income available to the paying parent, including the income of a parent's new partner.