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Bill 15 - Family Law Amendment Act, 2008

October 21, 2008 - Third Reading

Ms Blakeman: Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker. Again, my pleasure to rise and speak in third reading to the Family Law Amendment Act, 2008, a second justice bill I didn’t get to speak to in second reading or committee. This is an important bill to me because I worked on a lot of changes to the Maintenance Enforcement Act and to the implementation of it with the Member for Edmonton-Whitemud when he was the Minister of Justice. This is an issue I started working on when I was with the Advisory Council on Women’s Issues. Interestingly, when it first started, it was identified very much as a women’s issue because it tended to be women who were the custodial parents of children. Actually, when the maintenance enforcement program was started, this act was called the income recovery program, I think, or something close to that, because essentially women were so poor after a divorce that they often ended up on social assistance. The government was trying to recoup the money they were paying to these single mothers caring for their children. So there was a requirement that they would have to say who the fathers were, and then they would chase the fathers down and get the back payments from them and repay the government for the money that they’d paid out in the social assistance to the mother and to the children.

The program has come an awfully long way from there. I think that is a very positive reflection of our understanding and of our value of children. One of the things that I had to keep saying to people who would get caught up in this is that this was about maintenance for children. This is not about an argument between the parents; this is about maintenance for kids. This is about kids’ ability to eat decent food and live in a decent place and be able to participate in the rest of society like their friends that were coming from families that weren’t looking at that same kind of breakup.

We’ve moved that program forward in certain, sort of, major increments as we moved forward. The first series of changes were really about how we chased down and got money out of chronic nonpayers. The legislation got adjusted a number of times and I think is working quite well now.

Then, interestingly, not that the tide turned, but I think we advanced enough in our society and in our understanding of the issues that it became more balanced. I used to feel sometimes that when the program actually found a paying father, they would turn him upside down and shake him until every penny fell out of his pocket. They actually had a guy who was co-operating, and they were going to get everything they could get out of him because there were a number of others who were involved in the program that you couldn’t get anything out of. They hid their incomes. They quit their good jobs so that they could drive cab and not have a verifiable income. I mean, you could not believe that human beings would do this to avoid providing money for their children. That was the horror of what was going on.

I think we have managed to create a system in which it has become more fair. We have been able to figure out how to get at those chronic nonpayers through a number of ways, through income tax and GST reimbursement cheques but also through things like revoking drivers’ licences. I was really interested to see how many people managed to come up with tens of thousands of dollars that they had not had and couldn’t possibly get, but their driver’s licence was taken away, and they produced that money. That was money their kids had been going without. For a long time they’d been going without.

We did make the program fairer. Both custodial and noncustodial parents can voluntarily register in the program now. There are bank deposits and withdrawals for the payment and the collection of the payment. We really did work on this system, and it has become a lot better. I even ended up working with the minister to try and get enough office space for the staff to work in and a computer system that actually would be able to track how much money was outstanding because for the longest time we actually couldn’t tell you how much money was still owed to custodial parents and, more importantly, to the children. They could tell me how many files were active, but if somebody had paid a penny, the file was active. Well, that doesn’t tell us how much money was outstanding and was owed to children. So a very long way around to say that I am happy to see what’s being brought forward in this.

The most important part of this bill, to me, is that the changes, the recalculation of child support orders, which we would call maintenance support orders, can be done through an administrative process and registered, and you don’t have to go to court. That makes a huge difference, and it still makes a huge difference primarily for women who are the custodial parent of the child. Women still have less resource to money. Women still tend to be working in jobs that have less flexibility for them, so for women to have to take off work to go down to the court to answer a change in an order that has been brought forward by the noncustodial parent, usually the father, is often a financial hardship or, at the very least, has financial implications that that mother will have to deal with.

Likely she’s working in an hourly wage job and will not get paid for the time, and she will have to pay her own transportation down there. She may well have to arrange for child care or after school care that she’s going to have to pay out of pocket if she’s not out of the court system fast enough.

This was a very real hardship for a number of women, so being able to recalculate the support orders and the assessments on that without going to court is really important. It doesn’t sound like very much to people in here, who, you know, can work some flexibility into their schedules if they need to, but for many, many, many people in Alberta this was critical. I am very pleased that they do not have to appear before the courts for these issues. Interestingly, we’re catching up to Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba, and P.E.I., so isn’t that great? We’ve caught up to them. I’m so proud of us.

It’s more than about justice; it’s about the way we value our children, I think. It’s definitely a streamlined system that helps us administer MEP payments. It places less demand on court resources to deal with family support awards and the issues therein. We know that it works in other jurisdictions because, as I said, now we’re catching up to P.E.I. Isn’t that exciting? I’m so proud of us.

Thank you for allowing me to sort of do that little – what does the Speaker call it? – historical vignette about what has happened to our maintenance program in Alberta. Just based on the number of phone calls I’m not getting from all corners of Alberta, I think we have done a good job in trying to get a handle on this, the whole concept behind maintenance payments and how we cope with chronic nonpayers and how we have streamlined the system overall by doing things like direct withdrawals and direct payments and allowing the other party to register the maintenance order or even an internal agreement that they have between them, to register that with the program. I’m quite proud of the work that we have done, and I’m proud of my role in pushing, cajoling, berating, and various other mechanisms I’ve used to move us forward over the many, many years I’ve worked on this file.

Thank you very much. My congratulations to the minister.