GN weighs deadbeat parent options

JOHN THOMPSON

Will you be paying child support with cash, carvings or country food?

Those options were suggested during public consultations on how the Government of Nunavut should update its Maintenance Enforcement Act, which sets the rules for how child support may be collected.

Right now, $2.7 million in arrears is owed to children and families in 260 cases registered with Nunavut’s maintenance enforcement program.

Nunavut’s maintenance enforcement officers can’t ask deadbeats for their social insurance number, home phone number, email address, or other questions that their counterparts in other jurisdictions use to help collect arrears.

Arrears are especially difficult to collect in Nunavut. Other jurisdictions allow their enforcement programs to garnish salaries for arrears, but not Nunavut, where only a monthly amount ordered by the court may be taken from salaries.

One suggestion made during the Nunavut consultations is that residents owing child support, who may be unemployed, should be recognized for helping their children by providing country food to eat.

Another suggestion was to allow deadbeats to pay child support with carvings, rather than money.

But that “just shifts the responsibility of who needs to sell the carving,” said Jessica Lott, who oversaw the public consultations for the GN, during a public meeting in Iqaluit on Feb. 15.

“Obviously, kids can’t eat carvings,” she said.

“They would perhaps welcome them as gifts, but they would like cash to pay rent, or buy food at the Northern store.”

Elsewhere, Ontario has successfully dealt with stubborn deadbeats in the last decade by seizing drivers’ licenses until support payments are made.

Simply sending out a first warning letter led to the successful collection of $415 million, followed by an additional $84.6 million after a second letter, after the policy began in the province in 1997.

While far fewer residents in Nunavut own cars than in Ontario, a similar policy could be a strong deterrent to anyone who plans to move south, Lott said at the Iqaluit meeting.

Some Nunavut residents told Lott they would like to see a less confrontational style of collecting payments, to avoid creating anger between separated spouses.

She suggested that could be realized by offering more chances for mediation between parents in the revised law.

A report on the public consultations is expected to be finished by the end of March.