Thank you for your question. I guess the premise of your question is that, in your riding and in ridings across the country, Canadian families are incredibly different. Individuals find themselves in difficult situations. As I said in my opening remarks, individuals' first and possibly only interaction with the courts is through the breakdown of a marriage: separation and divorce.
What we're seeking to do, based on advocacy over many decades, is to ensure that where there's a child of a marriage, we put the best interests of that child first in terms of parental orders. We also, for the first time ever, in Bill C-78 seek to amend the Divorce Act to account for particular circumstances where there is family violence and to put a definition of family violence into the Divorce Act, as well as factors that will determine and assist in determining the severity of the family violence to which we know many women are subject. That needs to be taken into account, especially in terms of the relationship with the children.
To the affordability question, in terms of efficiencies and in terms of access to justice, we're trying to encourage alternative dispute resolution processes, as we talked about earlier, that take us out of the courts and are, for the most part, lower cost for individuals who seek to find parenting arrangements in a less combative environment but also a less costly one.
We do know—as I said in my remarks—that there is a feminization of poverty. Some 96% of the unpaid family support orders are for women. They don't receive those orders. We need to make sure we can do everything to provide the necessary tools to gain access to the financial information of a parent who owes those support orders and to make the correct determinations for what those orders should be, as well as additional tools like being able to garnish a parent's wages, to be able to comply and reduce as much as we can the billions of dollars of outstanding child support payments.
