Papers and Reports on Family Law Subjects

Children Come First: A Report to Parliament Reviewing the Provisions and Operation of the Federal Child Support Guidelines (April 29, 2002) 
The Backgrounder     Press Release (Apr. 29/02)       The Full Report
This is it. The government had 5 years to release its report of how the Child Support Guidelines were working and they did it with a day to spare. To get the best overview, albeit from the government's perspective, including the list of recommendations, check out the Backgrounder. You have to scroll through quite a bit to get to the the 12 Recommendations (9 for things to change and 3 for things not to change) but that gives you the story in a nutshell.

The Press Release is really short and sets out reference to 3 recommendations: that there be a presumptive formula for support payments in shared custody arrangements, that the term "extraordinary expense" be defined to give the law more clarity, and that recipient of payments for children over the age of majority be obliged to disclose information to the payor about the child's ongoing eligibility for support.

But it's the Report itself which is really interesting. Volume 1 reviews various aspects of the Guidelines and recommends reforms and Volume 2 contains a section-by-section review setting out analysis of particular provisions of the Guidelines and the Divorce Act. The Report is chock full of interesting statistics and analysis of the shape of the Canadian family. It's 242 pages, so it's not a weekend read, but it's something we should know about. Much of the data comes from the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth. It sets out the clear, and dramatic trend that a rapidly increasing number of Canadian children are part of single parent families by the time their 10 years old and that there's a strong correlation between the reliability of timely child support payments and frequency with which fathers see their children.

Marital Transitions and Children's Adjustment
This study examines the effects on children of movement into or out of poverty, the magnitude of changes in family income, and sources of these income changes.

Beyond Conjugality
The report Beyond Conjugality "Recognizing and supporting close personal adult relationships" by the Law Commission of Canada invites us to rethink our approach to the legality of "marriage-like " relationships. As the Executive Summary says:

While the law has recently been expanding its recognition beyond marriage to include other marriage-like elationships, it continues to focus its attention on conjugality. The Law Commission believes that governments need to pursue a more comprehensive and principled approach to the legal recognition and support of the full range of close personal relationships among adults. This requires a fundamental rethinking of the way in which governments regulate relationships.