Foresight can prevent trouble in ending child support

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/06/2012 (4842 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alf was thinking a lot about June 30. A big red circle marked the spot on his calendar when Alf’s daughter, Cynthia, was going to graduate from high school. When Alf looked at that circle, he got a warm, sunny feeling, because his little girl was graduating. But even more pleasing was the thought that on June 30 he could stop paying child support.

Now Alf is a good and proud father. He was always supportive of his daughter during her high school years. He had been paying child support regularly to Cynthia’s mother for 12 years. Never missed a payment. Always paid on time. But in June — 149 child support payments later — he planned to stop.

There are many hundreds of people like Alf in Manitoba and across the country, who look forward to the end of June for the same reason. If a child is 18 and no longer attending high school or university full time, then the general rule is child support stops. In this case, Cynthia had plans to work and then travel to Europe.

But Alf made a mistake. He tried to terminate child support too early. He approached a lawyer in June, the month of his daughter’s graduation, and asked for an application to court to terminate the support order. He assured his lawyer his daughter would not be going back to school and that in fact she had plans to work and travel.

But teenagers are sometimes fickle. Plans can change. A passion for travel can abruptly change into a passion for intro to art history. And there was something else Art had not counted on. Art’s former wife, Helen, wanted her daughter to get a good education. So when Helen received papers requesting a termination of the support order, she resolved to talk with her daughter.

Helen told Cynthia about the application. She told her the child support came in handy for covering expenses. Finally, Helen told Cynthia if she genuinely did not want to attend university, that was fine. But if she was just taking a year off to travel and “find herself,” she did not have that luxury. Cynthia was told, in short, to either register for university or get a job and start paying room and board.

This kind of conversation is not unique to Cynthia and her mother. They happen all the time when there is an application to stop child support. In this case, Cynthia elected to go back to university, starting in September.

So when Alf applied to terminate support in June, fully expecting the matter to breeze through the courts unopposed, he was surprised to hear Cynthia was now registered at the University of Winnipeg, with classes to commence in September. Child support was definitely going to continue a while longer.

Where did Alf go wrong? He had been a good, supportive parent. His daughter had told him she had no plans for university. He thought he had a straightforward case. But what Alf did not consider was a court application to stop child support almost always causes soul-searching in the other household. Often, that results in an abrupt change in plans.

Alf might have consulted Cynthia’s mother before going to court. Alf and Helen might have agreed to suspend child support for a year, while Cynthia travelled, and then resume it when Cynthia returned to school.

At the very least, Alf might have waited until the commencement of the new school year in September before making his application. If his daughter was not registered by September, then obviously she was not going to school that year and Alf’s application would likely have succeeded.

Alf and Helen and their situation are real. Names, details, and dates have been changed to protect the confidentiality of this family.

 

Peter J. Bruckshaw is a lawyer with Inkster, Christie, Hughes LLP. Contact him at 942-1799 or pbruckshaw@inksterchristie.ca .