I have been separated since 2011, divorced since 2018, and leading a court-supervised existence since the separation. As a 54 year old male and support payer, who is sober and physically healthy, I’m finding it incredibly hard to lead any kind of normal life given the current policy on support payment enforcement. I’ve had my drivers license cancelled, my passport suspended, detained, deported from another country, and left completely and totally penniless. All at the hands of a provincial enforcement agency that is corrupt and completely incompetent.

At the end of my divorce proceedings the judge issued an order.

  • Pay X for child support, no end date, no annual review of income or living arrangements.

  • Pay Y for spousal support, with an end date, but no review of income or living arrangements.

As life happens, things change. A global pandemic, as an example, destroyed my business. But the enforcement kept coming. I tried to vary the support order myself — in Canada about 60% of litigants in family court are self represented — but the process proved too complex for me to manage myself and professionally help was out of reach when income was disrupted. The enforcement escalated. They took away my passport while I was overseas. I was effectively stranded for 3 years until I was eventually deported. The stress of the situation literally caused me to think about suicide.

There are 4 critical flaws that urgently need to be addressed:

1) Courts need to stop issuing orders that do not reflect the potential for changes in the future. Change is a basic fact of life. Living arrangements of families and incomes all change throughout a person's life. Issuing orders that do not proactively accommodate changes only increases the cost of administering justice while harming the economic prosperity and quality of life of families.

2) A system with the power to destroy lives must have an effective intake mechanism for crucial, time-sensitive information, such as "I have lost my job" or "You have taken all of my money." Without such a mechanism, the system operates in a dangerous information vacuum, where automated processes proceed without vital context, and human beings are caught in the gears of a machine that is structurally deaf to their pleas.

3) The system is highly conflicted. The legislation (in Canada) delegates the entire determination process—the assessment of "inability to pay" and "reasonableness"—to the provincial enforcement service. This is a major conflict of interest. The provincial enforcement agency's entire mandate and its internal performance metrics are based on maximizing enforcement and collection rates. Asking an agency whose organizational success is defined by collections to also be the sole, unaccountable arbiter of an 'inability to pay' claim is a fundamentally flawed process. It's asking the enforcer to rule against its own primary function, creating an inherent and inescapable bias against the payor. The enforcement agency typically kicks the can down the street and says to the payer to get the order changed… which leads to my final point:

4) The Motion to Refrain / Motion to Change Support Order - the legal framework creates a profound paradox. To get relief from the severe financial consequences of having no money, one must successfully initiate and navigate a complex and extremely costly legal process that effectively requires money for legal fees, document preparation, and court filing fees. The system's designated "solution" is procedurally and financially inaccessible to its target demographic at the precise moment of their greatest need. It is a locked door where the key is hidden inside the room.

I live in Canada. Curious how other jurisdictions handle this or if the problems are consistent in America and other jurisdictions.

I wrote a report on this topic and sent it to my Minister of Justice and a few other related parties. Just DM me if you want a copy for yourself. People are literally killing themselves as a result of this system.