Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address the government with respect to the response to COVID-19.
As a matter of introduction, I'm a family law lawyer in Vancouver, B.C. I own the firm called Guardian Law. I've been practising family law for 12 years. I'm concerned about the impact on families that depend on child and spousal support for the purpose of meeting their day-to-day needs and about what is happening, because there is no federal program in order to fill that gap of income.
In my practice, nearly all of my files end up in some sort of child or spousal support. As you may know, child support arises from and is prescribed by the federal child support guidelines. Spousal support is determined, in almost all cases, under the federal spousal support advisory guidelines. Under paragraph 11(1)(b) of the Divorce Act, the court actually cannot grant a divorce if there isn't child support in place and being paid.
As a matter of public policy, spousal and child support are critical tools to ensure equality between households and ensure that the household bearing greater responsibility for the care of children, which in most cases is the household where there's a woman, has a stable income and is compensated for the limits that parenting places on the parent's ability to engage in the workforce. Spousal and child support are widely accepted by society as necessary in ensuring fairness of income distribution.
Due to COVID-19, many employees have been furloughed, or people having businesses have suffered significant reductions in their incomes due to business closures. As a result, payers are in a position where they are significantly reducing or terminating spousal support and child support altogether. Unfortunately, clients have been coming to me, and they are completely desperate. There is no help available to them, because with CERB, the definition of income does not include child support or spousal support.
As well, the wage subsidy doesn't consider the payment of child support or spousal support to be any sort of wage—