Our Vancouver spousal support lawyers give clear and understandable advice about how spousal support will apply to your post separation life.
Spousal support is money one partner pays the other after separation, available to both married and qualifying common-law spouses in British Columbia. Whether it is owed depends on factors like the length of the relationship, the roles each person took, and their finances, and the amount and duration are usually guided by the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines rather than a fixed formula.
Whether you are being asked to pay spousal support (previously called alimony), or whether you need it to make ends meet after separation, there are few other issues that are more uncertain, challenging and stressful.
In many circumstances, there will be monthly payments to or from your separated spouse for an uncertain period of time. There is often no conclusive answer to when these payments will end. Many factors affect the period of time for which spousal support continues.
Vancouver Spousal Support Lawyers
Some of these factors include the length of the relationship, the differential between your incomes, the health and future earning ability of your former spouse, and many others.
Further, the amount is not easily determined. Each party’s income tax return is a good starting point to determine the resources available to set a figure, but the courts will not hesitate to look at all the circumstances to see whether the amount reported on a tax return is the fairest starting point for setting a monthly payment between former spouses.
If you or your partner derive your income from a business, you will enjoy the ability to keep your taxable income low and save taxes, but it is common for a different – and higher – “income” to apply for the purposes of determining support. This exercise is different in every case and it takes the skill and experience of a family lawyer, in consultation with other experts, to advise you about your monthly entitlement or obligation.
The lawyers at Onyx Law Group have extensive experience in working with the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines. They will give you clear and understandable advice about how spousal support will apply to your post separation life.
Entitlement comes before any number
No one is automatically owed spousal support. Before amount or duration is even discussed, the person asking has to establish entitlement, and BC law recognizes three routes to it. Compensatory support addresses the economic fallout of the relationship itself, the classic case being a spouse who stepped back from a career to raise children or to support the other’s advancement and now earns less for it; the Supreme Court of Canada set out this basis in Moge v. Moge, [1992] 3 SCR 813. Non-compensatory, or needs-based, support responds to hardship flowing from the breakdown even without a career sacrifice, recognized in Bracklow v. Bracklow, [1999] 1 SCR 420. Contractual support arises where the couple already agreed to it in a marriage or separation agreement. A single case can rest on more than one of these.
Which statute applies depends on marital status. Married spouses claim under section 15.2 of the federal Divorce Act; married and common-law spouses alike can claim under Part 7 of the Family Law Act. Section 15.2(4) of the Divorce Act and sections 161 and 162 of the Family Law Act point to similar considerations: the length of the relationship, the roles each person filled during it, any agreement between them, and the financial position each is left in at the end.
How amount and duration are worked out
Once entitlement is established, lawyers and judges turn to the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines (SSAG) to set amount and duration. The SSAG are advisory, not law, and they produce a range rather than a single figure. Which formula applies depends on whether child support is also being paid. The without-child-support formula ties the amount to the gross income difference between the spouses and the length of the relationship, with the range widening the longer the couple were together. The with-child-support formula works from net incomes after child support and taxes, because the children’s needs come first, and it generally yields a lower spousal figure. On duration, the without-child formula commonly runs from roughly half to one year of support for each year of the relationship, and relationships of 20 years or more, or those meeting the “rule of 65,” can produce indefinite (reviewable) support. Because the guidelines give a band and not an answer, where a case lands inside that band is where the real negotiation happens.
Review, variation, and self-sufficiency
A support order is not always fixed. Two mechanisms let it change, and they are not the same thing. A review is built into the original order for a future date or event, a return to court to reassess without having to prove anything changed, often used where a spouse is expected to retrain or re-enter the workforce. A variation requires a material change in circumstances since the order was made, under section 17 of the Divorce Act or section 167 of the Family Law Act, such as a job loss, a serious illness, or retirement. Running through both is the goal of self-sufficiency: section 15.2(6) of the Divorce Act lists promoting each spouse’s economic self-sufficiency, so far as practicable, among the objectives of a support order. It is an objective, not a deadline, and courts are clear that self-sufficiency is measured against the standard of living built during the relationship, not a bare ability to pay rent.
Onyx Law Group represents clients throughout British Columbia with family law, estate and trust litigation, estate planning and probate/estate administration matters. Consult with our experienced BC team at
(604) 330-9481