In 2001, the federal government's Department of Justice struck an "advisory working group" to look into the feasability of developing uniform guidelines for the calculation of spousal support.

According to the Department of Justice, the panel is composed of judges, family law lawyers, law school faculty members and social workers. Professors Carol Rogerson and Rollie Thompson, both solid academics with a strong background in family law, are the key developers of the uniform guidelines, in consultation with the working group.

In January 2005, Professors Rogerson and Thompson released their paper, Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines: A Draft Proposal, for public comment and feedback. The authors expect to release another draft in 2007, which will incorporate changes and revisions made as a result of this public input.

The first draft of the Advisory Guidelines is available for download and review at:

www.justice.gc.ca/en/dept/pub/spousal/project/index.html

The complete Advisory Guidelines is also available in Adobe Acrobat .PDF format at that link; be careful about downloading the draft and hitting "print," however, as the paper is about 125 pages long.

Legal Status of the Advisory Guidelines

The Advisory Guidelines is not law, and people involved in a family law dispute are not bound by it. According to Professor Thompson, the Department of Justice has no plans to give the Advisory Guidelines the force of law, not now and not in the foreseeable future.

The point of the Advisory Guidelines, according to the draft proposal released in January 2005, is to give people involved in a family dispute involving spousal support another tool to help determine how much spousal support should be paid and how long spousal support should be paid for. The authors expect that the Advisory Guidelines will be adopted to a greater or lesser degree by Canada's different courts as time goes on as a matter of custom rather than formal requirement.

The Advisory Guidelines in a Nutshell

The draft proposed Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines are an attempt to capture how the majority of court decisions on spousal support have determined how much support should be paid and how long support should be paid for in a mathematical formula. It is not intended to change the law on spousal support, rather it is intended to normalize future decisions about spousal support based upon how the majority of court decisions have historically dealt with the issue.

The following is a summary of the key points set out in the Advisory Guidelines paper:

Advisory Status

The Advisory Guidelines is "advisory" only. It will not become law and is not legally binding on anyone involved in a family law dispute.

The Advisory Guidelines provides a formula for determining the amount of spousal support payable where an entitlement to support has been established. The results the formula produces can be used in court, in mediation and in negotiation, but the results will not have the force of law and will not be legally determinative of the issue.

Influence of Existing Law

The Advisory Guidelines attempts to reflect current practice under the existing legislation. The Advisory Guidelines is not based on any particular theory of spousal support; it attempts to reflect the results presently found in the case law on the subject.

Income Sharing

The essential concept underlying the Advisory Guidelines is the calculation of support based on the the total disposable income available to both parties, rather than looking at each party's needs and means separately. The formulae work with the total pot of money available to the couple.

Income sharing does not mean an equal division of income, however, and the range the Advisory Guidelines proposes is somewhere between 40% and 46% of the total disposable income available to both parties.

Entitlement to Support

The Advisory Guidelines does not deal with whether a spouse is entitled to receive support. Entitlement is, of course, the first question to be decided when dealing with an application for spousal support. The Advisory Guidelines will only be used when a spouse is found to be entitled to spousal support.

Amount of Support

Where the parties do not have children, the length of the marriage is central in determining both the amount of support payable and the duration for which support must be paid. The parties' gross incomes are used to determine spousal support.

Where the parties have children, the amount of support payable will be calculated taking into consideration the payment of child support and the different tax rules relating to spousal support and child support. The parties' net incomes are be used to determine spousal support.

Duration of Support

In most cases, the Advisory Guidelines sets out a range of years that support will be paid for; in certain cases, such as long marriages or where the dependent spouse is older, support will be paid for an indefinite period of time.

The key factor in determining the length of time for which support will paid is not the length of the marriage, but the length of the marriage plus any period of time the parties lived together before marriage.

Upper and Lower Income Limits

The Advisory Guidelines has both floors and ceilings: where a payor's income is below $20,000, no spousal support will be payable; and, where a payor's income exceeds $350,000, the payor will pay at the amount for incomes of $350,000. The payor's income above that figure will not be taken into account.

Exceptions to the Advisory Guidelines

To every rule there is an exception; the Advisory Guidelines is no different. The figures the Advisory Guidelines formulae produce aren't carved in stone. Factors such as advanced age, illness, debt load and so forth all allow the results the formulae produce to be adjusted.

The Advisory Guidelines also allows for the restructuring of a support award to pay more for a shorter time or to pay less for a longer time. Restructuring keeps the total amount paid within the results generated by the Advisory Guidelines formulae.

Married and Unmarried Couples

The Advisory Guidelines is written for married couples, because the federal government only has jursidiction to make rules spousal support for married couples. The Advisory Guidelines is based on the factors and tests set out in the Divorce Act.

That said, nothing at all will stop common-law couples from applying the Advisory Guidelines to their dispute since most provincial laws, including British Columbia's Family Relations Act, are very similiar to the Divorce Act on the subject of spousal support.

The Future of the Advisory Guidelines

In the short term, a whole lot of lawyers, mediators and judges are going to be going through this draft of the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines with a fine-toothed comb. Most family law lawyers will be aware of the existence of the draft, but, for the moment, do not expect that all of them will have a thorough working knowledge of the Advisory Guidelines. Frankly, certain aspects of the Advisory Guidelines are very, very complicated, and it's going to take awhile for everyone to get up to speed on the different formulae.

The Advisory Guidelines' authors are presently seeking the input of the profession and the public. In the long term, the authors will be digesting the feedback they get and tinkering with and refining the Advisory Guidelines for a new release in the summer of 2006.

The Author's View (Part I, February 2005)

The author, that is, the author of this website, has a few comments about the draft guidelines based on the draft released on January 2005 and a presentation given by Professor Thompson on 18 February 2005 on the guidelines to a group of Lower Mainland family law lawyers.

1. Despite the intention of the draft Advisory Guidelines to be "advisory" only and not have the force of law, the author fully expects that the Advisory Guidelines will, over the next few years, be adopted by the courts and by the legal profession as the primary means of determining spousal support. The Advisory Guidelines is, quite simply, too handy. They offer a tempting, easy way out to deal with a particularly tough issue.
2. On top of that, the Advisory Guidelines offers defined lists of exceptions and criteria for picking the upper amounts and lower amounts. The author expects that these exceptions and rules will be the subject of legal argument about what numbers should be picked, which will inevitably lead to case law on the correct interpretation of those exceptions and rules even though the Advisory Guidelines is not law.
3. Only the "without children" formula is easy to figure out. The "with children" formula is not. Professor Thompson said that a computer program will be required to figure out what support should be paid under that formula, and, guess what: the computer programs that figure this out are commercially available from private companies... at a price. In the author's view, it is a fundamental denial of fair and equal access to justice to require that a litigant purchase a computer program (and in some cases a computer to run it on) in order to calculate spousal support.
4. Further, the complexity of the "with children" formula makes the formula impossible for most people to figure out. It requires an understanding of the provincial and federal tax laws, an understanding of how the Child Tax Benefit works for different levels of income and numbers of children, an understanding of how the National Child Benefit Supplement works for different incomes and different numbers of children, and how spousal support is treated as a deduction for the payor and taxable income for the recipient. This means that the numbers the computer spits out are not intuitive; litigants will have to trust that the program has calculated things correctly without understanding the whys and wherefores of the numbers. This too is a denial of justice. Justice must be transparent and easily understood; the determination of spousal support should not be like drawing numbers out of a black box.
5. The Advisory Guidelines has the potential to reduce an extraordinarily complex issue to a normative series of calculations that may not reflect a couple's individual needs and the circumstances of their relationship. It is too easy to simply punch in a bunch of numbers and say "see? this is what you should get," when in reality the issues is so much more complicated.
6. While the Advisory Guidelines expressly does not apply to determining an entitlement to receive support, people will turn to the formula, receive a number, and assume that they should get spousal support in that amount, regardless of whether they are entitled to support or not. This will inevitably increase the amount of money people spend arguing about spousal support.

These are the author's concerns only. Frankly, the Advisory Guidelines has the potential to save people a lot of money on lawyers' fees and court costs, and offers the opportunity to finally bring awards of spousal support made in Newfoundland in line with those made in Ontario or British Columbia, and vice versa. Fundamentally, spousal support guidelines are a good idea, but these concerns — especially those which touch on public access to justice — must be addressed in a meaningful, substantive manner.

Finally, someone, hopefully the federal government, must make an accurate set of support calculators available to the public for free. It is ludicrous to think that someone should have to spend $600 or $900 on a program to figure out his or her potential entitlement or exposure to a spousal support claim. This, above all, is unjust and unfair.

The Author's View (Part II, January 2007)

The Advisory Guidelines has been a part of family law culture for two years now, and many of Professor Thompson's predictions have come to pass. He was right to expect that lawyers and the courts would come to rely on the Advisory Guidelines by custom. Frankly, the Advisory Guidelines is a seductively easy solution to a difficult problem.

The author's views on the Advisory Guidelines have mellowed with time, and while many of my basic concerns remain, they have assumed a lesser significance.

Arbitrariness is good, I have concluded. After all, the Child Support Guidelines are essentially arbitrary and so are many other principles of family law. Take the shared custody exception in child support. Why 40%? Why not 38.5 or 41.3%? The answer to that question is, I think, "why not?"

The point of the arbitrariness of the Child Support Guidelines is to reduce conflict by setting out a fixed sum that must be paid depending on nothing more than the payor's income and the number of children. The same principle applies to the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines, although the formulae are a bit more complicated. If an arbitrary set of numbers reduces conflict and saves money, as long as those arbitrary numbers are reasonable, I'm all for it.

I still, however, have a very profound concern about the public accessibility of calculators for the Advisory Guidelines' formulae, and no one seems prepared to make calculator widely available to the public for free. The DivorceMate people haven't done this, the ChildView people haven't done this, and the federal Department of Justice is sitting on its hands.

This, friends, is wrong. These programs cost $600 to $900 to buy, and no one should have to fork out that kind of cash to find out what their liability or entitlement to spousal support might be. This is a simple matter of access to justice, and access to justice is a right enshrined in our Constitution. If the courts are going to use the Advisory Guidelines, even as a matter of custom rather than law, a means of performing the calculations prescribed by the Advisory Guidelines must be made available to the public.

The responsibility for this lies on the shoulders of the Minister of Justice, currently Robert Nicholson Q.C. from Ontario. If you agree with me, please write to the Minister and demand change. Mr. Nicholson can be reached by email at Nicholson.R@parl.gc.ca, or you might try writing to him care of:

House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

or at his constituency office:

11-2895 St. Paul Avenue
Niagara Falls, Ontario
L2J 2L3

What happened to your calculators?

Regular users of this site will notice that a couple of spousal support calculators I had posted are no longer available. That isn't quite true; a link to the "without children" calculator is available below in the segment which discusses the mechanics of the Advisory Guidelines formulae. What isn't available is the "with children" calculator.

The problem with the "with children" calculator is that I couldn't get it quite right. The error rate was relatively small for lower-earning couples, but increased significantly for higher-earning couples. The language I was using to program the formula, javascript, really isn't meant for mathematical applications, and I really don't have the technical expertise to fix those problems or to teach myself another computer language and rebuild the calculator from scratch.

After much soul-searching, particularly after learning that a few lawyers have been relying my faulty calculations in court, I have come to the conclusion that it is irresponsible of me to keep a program that I know is flawed available for public use.

Unfortunately, substitutes for my program are not necessarily accessible or affordable. One software producer, DivorceMate, has a pay-per-use version of its calculator for sale. Also, I've learned that some provincial court Family Justice Centres have the DivorceMate software available and will run spousal support calculations for free. I do not, however, know which provincial court registries offer this service. If you cannot otherwise access the software, you probably have no choice but to contact a lawyer and likely pay for the calculation.

I am sorry for the inconvenience I know this will cause. I will post a link to any free (but accurate) online calculator the moment I come across it; if you know of such a calculator, please contact me through the Feedback chapter.

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On 4 July 2005, the British Columbia Supreme Court released its first judgment considering the Advisory Guidelines, W. v. W. In that case, Madam Justice Martinson said that the Advisory Guidelines "provide a crosscheck against the assessment made under existing law," and that the formulae provided in the Advisory Guidelines is "consistent with the law in British Columbia." She then made an Order for spousal support using the Advisory Guidelines as "a check," without expressly applying the Advisory Guidelines to determine the issue. The Advisory Guidelines, she held, is not law, and is not intended to become law.

On 19 July 2005, the Court released its second judgment on the Advisory Guidelines, M.S. v. W.S. In this case, Mr. Justice Romilly held, rather emphatically, that the court is not bound by the Advisory Guidelines in determining spousal support and that "equitable distribution can be achieved in a variety of ways and need not be calculated according to a strict formula."

Mr. Justice Romilly's view was somewhat put to rest later in 2005 by the Court of Appeal in the case of Yemchuk v. Yemchuk, 2005 BCCA 406. In that case, the Court of Appeal held that the Advisory Guidelines reflects the general results seen in the case law on spousal support. While the court stopped well short of saying that the Advisory Guidelines must be used to determine spousal support, it did consider the Advisory Guidelines as "a useful tool" and "a factor" to be considered in making an order for spousal support, and made an order for support that was within a hairsbreadth of the numbers the Advisory Guidelines' formula produced.

The Law in British Columbia

As a result of Yemchuk, the present law in British Columbia is that the Advisory Guidelines is a factor to be taken into account in fixing the amount and duration of an order for spousal support, but they are no more than a factor. Yemchuk did not give the Advisory Guidelines any higher status, nor does the case say that the Advisory Guidelines must be applied to determine spousal support in every case where an entitlement to support is found.

In a case from the summer of 2006, Redpath v. Redpath, 2006 BCCA 338, things changed a bit. The Court of Appeal held that it is an appealable error for a judge not to consider the results produced by the Advisory Guidelines. This moves things well beyond Yemchuk, as now a trial judge must consider the Advisory Guidelines' results in making a decision on spousal support.

The Law in Other Provinces

Other courts in Canada's other provinces have talked about the Advisory Guidelines in much the same way as our courts have, although with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Here is a small sampling:

Woodall v. Woodall, Ontario Court of Justice, 2005:

"Although the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines may be of some assistance to the court on an initial application for spousal support, it must be noted that they are advisory only and are not binding on the court. More importantly, the authors of the guidelines make it very clear in the Executive Summary ... that the advisory guidelines do not deal with the effect of a prior agreement on spousal support and that this issues, like entitlement, is outside the scope of the advisory guidelines and would continue to be dealt with under the evolving law guided by the Supreme Court of Canada's recent decision in Miglin v. Miglin."

Puddifant v. Puddifant, Nova Scotia Supreme Court, 2005:

"Counsel urged the court to consider the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines. These are not law."

Modry v. Modry, Alberta Court of Queen's Bench, 2005:

"These Guidelines are not mandatory and are only a suggestion. There has been very little judicial analysis of the Guidelines as they are new."

"I suggest that courts will likely use these Guidelines as a bench mark to see what the support amount would be if the Guidelines were applies. Thus it will serve as another method of calculation, which when coincidentally echoing judicial discretion, will become referenced with approval. In other cases where the courts are either astonished by the payment proposition, that is that the math creates a number that is perceived to be too high or inadequate, the courts will shy away from its application."

And, finally, the author's personal favourite:

V.S. v. A.K., Alberta Court of Queen's Bench, 2005:

"The provisions of the Divorce Act as interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada are the law in this country with respect to spousal support. The Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines are the work of two university professors, Carol Rogerson and Rollie Thompson, assisted by a small committee. Those with strong views to the contrary were not involved, nor was there widespread discussion of the guidelines prior to their publication. They have not been enacted by the Parliament of Canada or any Provincial Legislature nor are they the subject of any governmental regulation.

"The Guidelines are a cause for concern. There is no doubt that they are useful for a judge who does not wish to make a thorough and careful analysis of each case and wants a quick answer. However, it is not the role of judges to opt out for an easy answer. Rather judges are bound by the Divorce Act and the case law which require judges to do individual justice in each case and not look for a 'cookie cutter' answer.

"As well, the Guidelines are stated to be experimental. It is not the function of courts to experiment on the citizens of this country.

"The authors of the Guidelines state that the Guidelines do not change the law. However, in my view, they attempt to do so. For example, they advocate income sharing which has rarely been accepted in this country except for exceptionally long term marriages. It will not be long before someone will argue that disparity in income equals entitlement. As indicated by Chouinard, J. in Messier v. Delage, a person does not acquire a lifetime pension as a result of marriage. Likewise, marriage is not an insurance policy.

The Guidelines also ignore the distribution of matrimonial property which the Supreme Court of Canada in Boston v. Boston, said was relevant. They ignore the goal of self-sufficiency as set out in the Divorce Act. Also they fail to take into account the growing trend, at least in Alberta, towards shared parenting.

"The Guidelines purport not to deal with entitlement. Under the Divorce Act there are degrees of entitlement based on a multitude of factors. However, the ranges set out in the Guidelines are not sufficient to cover the many possible degrees of entitlement.

"The Guidelines set an arbitrary and presumptive range for both amount and duration. The onus is reversed requiring the payor to justify an exception to the Guidelines. The presumptive nature of the Guidelines does away with a claim based on evidence.

"The stated purpose of the Guidelines is to bring more certainty and predictability to the determination of spousal support. As a result individual justice is sacrificed for consistency. Every case is different on its facts. There are often many variables. Flexibility and discretion are needed for individual circumstances.

"Judges should exercise extreme caution in using the Guidelines. The Divorce Act and the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada call on judges to undertake a thorough analysis in each case. Not to do so is to disregard the views of the highest court in this country and to make a mockery of stare decisis."

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The Advisory Guidelines presents two primary formulae: one for when there are no children (the "Without Children Formula"); and, one for when there are dependent children (the "With Children Formula"). Both are very different from each other.

Other formulae apply when one or more children live with the payor or if all of the children live with the payor and the recipient is required to pay child support while benefitting from spousal support.

The Without Children Formula

The Without Children Formula is fairly straightforward:

The amount of support is 1.5 to 2 percent of the difference between the parties' gross incomes for each year of marriage.

For example, say a relationship is 10 years long, and Party A has a gross income of $50,000 and Party B has an income of $20,000. The difference between the parties' incomes is $30,000. Party B would have share in the difference of 15 to 20 percent (1.5 times 10 and 2 times 10), or between $4,500 and $6,000 per year. On a monthly basis, support would be paid at $375 to $500.

The length of time support will be paid is .5 to 1 year for each year of the relationship. If a couple have been together for more than 20 years, or if the age of the dependant party plus the number of years of the relationship equals 65, support will be paid indefinitely.

Using the same example, support would be payable for 5 to 10 years (.5 times 10 and 1 times 10). If, however, the dependent party was 55 at the time of separation, support would be paid indefinitely (55 years of age plus 10 years equals 65).

The factors this forumula uses are:

1. the payor's gross income;
2. the recipient's gross income;
3. the length of time the parties lived together and/or were married; and,
4. the recipient's age.

Click here to use a calculator for the without children formula.

The With Children Formula

This formula is a lot more complex. In this formula, child support is taken out of the payor's gross income and the recipient's income, taxes are taken into account, and government benefits are added to the recipient's income. The reason why child support is deducted from the recipient's income is to reflect the costs that parent bears in raising the children.

The amount of support is 40 to 46% of the parties total net annual income. The parties net annual income is the payor's individual net disposable income plus the recipient's net disposable income.

The payor's net disposable income is his or her gross income, minus taxes and minus his or her child support obligation.

The recipient's net disposable income is his or her gross income, minus taxs and minus his or her notional child support obligation, plus any government benefits he or she receives.

Say the parties have an 8 year old child, the payor has a gross income of $50,000 and the recipient has an income of $20,000. The payor's net disposable income is $26,710 ($50,000 minus taxes of $15,570, minus annual child support of $5,112, minus EI deductions of $772, minus CPP deductions of $1,831). The recipient's net disposable income is $15,045 ($20,000 minus taxes of $4,410, minus notional child support of $2,052, minus EI deductions of $396, minus CPP deductions of $816, plus child tax benefit of $1,208, plus national child benefit of $1,511).

The family's net disposable income is $41,755 ($26,710 plus $15,045). 40 percent of the net disposable income is $16,702; 46 percent of the income is $19,207. After deducting the recipient's net disposable income, the difference between the recipient's income and 40 percent of the family's disposable income is $1,657 per year, and $4,162 for 46 percent.

On a monthly basis, spousal support would be between $138 and $346. The total the payor would pay each month would be spousal support plus $426 in child support.

The length of time for which support will be paid depends on whether the marriage was short (up to 5 years), medium (5 to 19 years) or long (20 years and more), and on how young the children are.

I told you it was complex. If that weren't enough, the support payments this formula produces must be recalculated over and over to take into effect the tax the dependent spouse pays on the support and the deduction the payor gets as a result of the payments, and rejigged until the magic 40% and 46% numbers balance out after taxes are taken into account. To quote Professor Thompson, "this is not a calculation you can do on the back of an envelope, you will need a computer program."

The factors this forumula uses are:

1. the payor's gross income;
2. the recipient's gross income;
3. the length of time the parties lived together and/or were married;
4. the recipient's age;
5. the number of children under the age of seven; and,
6. the number of children seven or older.

Other Formulae

The Advisory Guidelines discuss two other formulae:

1. one to be used where the children live mostly with the person paying spousal support; and,
2. another to be used where the one or more children live with each parent, that is, where custody of the children is "split" between the parents.

The formula where the children live with the person paying support is very similar to the "without children" formula, except that the payor's income adjusted to deduct the amount of child support paid to the recipient plus any of the children's expenses that the payor contributes to on top of the basic amount of child support. The amount of child support deducted is the annual total of the payor's payments plus an additional amount to reflect the tax that the payor would have paid on that sum if it were income.

The formula for split custody is very similar to the "with children" formula, except that the child support obligation of each parent is deducted from each party's income, plus a notional amount of child support for the children that are actually in each parent's care.

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The authors of the Advisory Guidelines have included a few ways to preserve the integrity of the results the formulae produce while accommodating circumstances that might make it unfair to pay the amounts within the range for the periods of time within the range. The Advisory Guidelines requires that the parties first attempt to use the ranges to solve the problem, but allow for the formulae results to be "restructed" if the ranges don't solve the problem.

There are three ways the formulae results can be restructured:

1. pay more support each month, but for a shorter period of time;
2. pay less each month, but pay for a longer period of time; or,
3. pay the total amount payable over the period of the award in a single lump sum.

The point of each option is that the total amount payable under the formulae stays the same. The total amount is just paid sooner or later than the results of the formulae require.

Judicial Consideration

At present, the courts are still grappling with the idea of using the Advisory Guidelines at all. No court in Canada has said affirmatively: "I fix support at the mid-range of results produced by the With Children Formula," for example. The courts are still saying: "The Advisory Guidelines are interesting and helpful, and I fix support at _____, having thought about the results of the With Children Formula."

As a result, as of April 2006, no court in Canada has been able to explore the Advisory Guidelines' provisions for restructuring. In the author's view, the courts are unlikely to get to considering restructuring until they have gotten to expressly endorsing and applying the Advisory Guidelines and the results its formula produce.

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If adjusting support within the ranges doesn't work and if restructuring support doesn't work, only then does the Advisory Guidelines allow parties to depart from the numbers produced by the formulae to accommodate the parties' unusual circumstances. The authors of the Advisory Guidelines are clear that these exceptions are to be treated as a last resort.

A Greater Need for Compensation

In shorter marriages, the results produced by the formulae might not reflect a recipient's right to be compensated for a sacrifice made in the course of the marriage. Circumstances that might fall into this exception would include: giving up a job to be with the payor; or, moving across the country to be with the payor and losing a job or a business.

Under this exception, the results produced by the formulae for amount and duration will not apply.

Illness

The length of time the formulae require support to be paid may not be adequate for a recipient who is ill or disabled, or otherwise unable to become self-sufficient.

Under this exception, the results produced by the formulae for duration will not apply.

Payment of Family Debts

A payor who winds up being responsible to pay for debts incurred during the marriage may not be able to meet the payments required by the formulae. This will particular be the case for families whose debts exceed their assets.

Under this exception, the results produced by the formulae for amount will not apply.

Other Support Obligations

In cases where a payor has an obligation to provide support to other people, such as prior spouses or children from previous relationships, the payor may not be able to pay spousal support at the amount required by the formulae.

Under this exception, the payor's income is adjusted to deduct the amount of support paid as a result of the previous relationship before calculating the amount spousal support to be paid for the present relationship.

Judicial Consideration

At present, the courts are still grappling with the idea of using the Advisory Guidelines at all. No court in Canada has said affirmatively: "I fix support the mid-range of results produced by the With Children Formula," for example. The courts are still saying: "The Advisory Guidelines are interesting and helpful, and I fix support at _____, having thought about the results of the With Children Formula."

As a result, as of April 2006, no court in Canada has been able to explore the exceptions to Advisory Guidelines forumulae. In the author's view, the courts are unlikely to get to considering these exceptions until they have gotten to expressly endorsing and applying the Advisory Guidelines and the results its formula produce.

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