Paying ‘That Bitch’

“Most women who have been in an abusive relationship have also been a victim of Economic Abuse.”(Canadian Centre for Women’s Empowerment) and yet it’s rarely talked about. I have been witness to a lot of financial abuse through the course of doing my work – particularly right after a relationship breakdown. I have heard about it from the victims who have had their credit destroyed, or their bills ran up, or who have been bullied out of their homes. I am regularly hearing about unpaid child support and child support battles. I have heard from five women this week alone who were afraid to even ask for child support because they knew their temperamental exes would react badly. I have also heard directly from many abusers who brag about the ways they purposely and maliciously destroy their ex’s finances.

I knew how to protect myself from the most common means of inflicting post-separation financial abuse (post on that here) and I knew exactly the process to get what I was legally entitled to for support. I thought that was enough. Nothing could prepare me for just how useless the court system was for dealing with financial abuse though, or the lengths my ex would go to hurt me financially – including hurting his own children, risking jail time, and bankrupting himself.

Financial abuse is defined on the justice.gc.ca website as a form of family violence. More specifically “Financial abuse happens when someone uses money or property to control or exploit someone else and includes withholding or limiting money to control someone.” Economic abuse encompasses financial abuse, but also includes the impact an abuser has on their victim’s ability to earn.

This type of abuse is a very large topic and I am actually writing a whole book about it. This post is focused on child support though as child support is a monumental issue and one that is usually missing from the conversation on gender-based violence. Before anyone wants to rebut that claim that unpaid child support is often a form of gender-based violence – let me tell you that in 2014, there was $23 million in outstanding support payments in NL alone, and that 97% of those payers were men. Canada-wide, that number was $3.7 billion – yes, billion with a b. (read the full CBC article here) With numbers that large, it is clear it’s not a personal issue. This is a systemic issue. One that is heavily gendered in its impacts.

Obviously, I understand that all men aren’t doing this and I also understand that all those unpaid amounts aren’t malicious in nature. I am not going to use either of those facts to negate the totality of those numbers though, because a significant portion of that amount is absolutely done with the intent to do harm and it’s almost always men who do it to women. I will use gendered terms since they absolutely fit. I also know that those unpaid child support figures don’t even include all the people who never get proper child support established at all or the very manipulative, traumatic, and illegal reasons why they don’t.

The support I don’t get from my ex is actually the least significant aspect of the economic abuse that came from his adamant refusal of child support. What my ex did to my kids because I asked for that support is the most overlooked and severe abuse of it. That and how the chronic and severe stress of trying to parent through their abuse, while dealing with the useless court system about it, destroyed my earning ability for years. Oh, and throw in the financial cost of that fruitless legal process. I’m afraid to add it up, but I know it is nothing short of $25,000 at this point. The issue of child support is so much bigger than just what he doesn’t pay. It’s all that it cost my children and I because I dared to ask him to pay.

Child support is law and there’s a standardized calculator that tells the amount. There’s nothing gray about this. The calculation is based on the custody arrangement, where there is either one primary parent, or a shared parenting arrangement. There’s nothing in between. If it’s one primary parent, the amount is based on the non-primary parent’s income alone. If it’s shared, the calculation is done with each person’s income, and the difference is what is paid to the lower income person. This is really important to understand. I wrote a full post about child support and how it’s determined, you can read it here. Special expenses are another consideration and they may be added on top of child support. This can be things like child care expenses, sports fees, and larger medical expenses.

The Justice.gc.ca website defines child support as ‘the money that one parent pays to another to support their children financially after a separation or divorce.’ Attitudes about people (primarily towards women) who seek child support are a large part of the problem actually, and I’m here to say that there’s nothing immoral about asking for something you are legally entitled to. NL family law website describes child support as being ‘the right of the child’. It isn’t about a greedy bitch taking his money. It is money intended to make sure that both parents are contributing proportionately to the financial cost of raising children. This is a good time to do a gut check and see where your biases are sitting around the topic and adjust accordingly.

When my ex and I first split in March 2020, he offered me $100 a month as child support, while I was caring for the kids 90% of the time (read: I was the primary parent for the child support calculation.) For reference, the government calculator said it should be about $1100 a month based on his income the last time he worked for an employer and the parenting arrangement he chose.

Unfortunately, our situation was made a little more complex because he started a business just before we separated, thus making that handy calculator not so black and white for us since he doesn’t report most of his income on his tax returns. That unreported income (or cash hobbles as he calls it) is called tax evasion and it is illegal. This type of tax evasion is especially rampant in the trades in NL, which is a huge part of why we have one of the highest provincial income tax rates and sales tax rates of all the provinces. Keep this in mind the next time you ask a contractor for a cash deal to save some sales tax and do your part and report it when you hear about it.

My ex thought he was being very generous with his $100 offer. He said to me, ‘sure kids don’t cost that much money.’ I laughed and told him our son’s meds were $138 a month, let alone everything else. He puffed up and went on about how his kids would never go without and that he would pay for everything they needed. Spoiler alert: that was bullshit.

The way he reacted to the idea of support, and the way I’d heard lots of other people talk about women who sought child support, meant that I did feel really guilty and shameful for pursuing it (then. I definitely don’t now.) Honestly, if he would have offered an amount that wasn’t so ridiculous, I probably would have taken it to avoid the fuss. There was nothing even remotely close to logical or fair about his offer though, so I said no, and later went about getting a fair amount via lawyers.

Not coincidentally, the day I asked for child support using my lawyer (five months after separating,) he suddenly wanted a week for week schedule with the kids, instead of the couple hours during the week and every other weekend that he previously wanted (read: he wanted a shared parenting arrangement instead of me being the primary parent… why? Because the amount of support would be far less.) Considering my children cried over having to spend a weekend with him, and he regularly went three full days without even getting them to brush their teeth or change their clothes, I said no to that and offered a 2-2-3 schedule instead.

My lawyer insisted that I had no option but to do a 50/50 schedule if he wanted it and that there wasn’t any reason to ‘prioritize the relationship with one parent over the other.’ It was years later before I learned that this advice was horribly wrong and that the neglect I described to her and the fact that he had never been involved with parenting them were perfect reasons to not do a 50/50 arrangement.

My ex was pissed that I didn’t agree with his week for week proposal and told everyone, including my children, that I was keeping his children from him. This is slandering and parental alienation, by the way. Parental alienation being a severely damaging form of mental abuse where one parent harms the child’s relationship with their other parent for no good reason. That ‘for no good reason’ part really matters. My ex making my kids hate and mistrust me, their primary source of consistency and support, simply because he was pissed at me for asking for child support, is abuse towards the kids in every sense of the word. He took their sense of safety from them and he did it during the time when it was most important they have it.

Nine full months after we separated, my lawyer sent him hard numbers based on my estimate of his income. That very day he was suddenly willing to give on the week for week thing to get equal parenting time. I won’t go into all the hairy details of why that was so traumatic for the kids and I. I will say that he has since lost access completely to both children due to his inability to parent in a non-abusive way.

That is the trauma that came as a direct result of the parenting arrangement aspect to the child support calculation. The other factor in that calculation is income and trying to deal with that part brought on its own set of traumas. We had our first court date in December 2021 and I got his 2020 tax returns just before that date. He claimed he made negative $22,000 for the year and that I should pay him child support. In reality, his income was at least three times what mine was, and had been since our children were born. When questioned about the number, he admitted to not reporting his cash earnings on his tax return (read: committing tax evasion) in court. Nothing was said about the fact that it is illegal to do that. He was asked to provide his cash earnings and we all went home.

By April 2022 (two years after separating) I finally got an order for him to pay half of the kids counseling costs and my son’s meds. I thought that was a huge win. It wasn’t. He ended up trying to cancel their counseling and get my son taken off his meds instead. He also still didn’t pay it and it turns out there was no recourse aside from asking him again and again to pay it, or taking him back to court, both of which cost me in lawyers fees to do. Support enforcement can collect on special expenses, but only if there is also an order for support. I didn’t have that yet.

Child support amounts still couldn’t be decided because he hadn’t provided his proper income yet. The process for getting proper child support when there’s a partner committing tax evasion is:

1. He needs to provide his income disclosures (his tax returns and cash earnings)
2. Once we have them, then I need to ask for a court date where I can show some sort of proof to a judge about why I think the income on those disclosures is nothing close to what he actually earned.
3. If the judge says yes, then we get a date for a settlement conference, which is a half day court appearance where we go through all the details of our case with a judge. It is at this point that a judge can assign him an income for support purposes and get the proper amounts calculated.

The real problem with the process is time. By the time I got his 2020 tax return and his written admission to his cash earnings for 2019 and 2020, it was 2022 and we needed his 2021 stuff to be able to book the settlement conference. It was November 2023 before we finally got that and surprise! There were bullshit income numbers on it too. By this point, he had physically abused my youngest and lost access to him. Child support fell to the backburner as we spent the next several court dates focused on custody.

Luckily, around November 2023, his lawyer strong-armed him into offering $400 a month in support on a consent order (based on him earning $28k year. His income is closer to $100k per year). Getting this child support in an order at least meant that I could register our orders with support enforcement. He still doesn’t pay it, but at least it comes with some repercussions for not paying it, and it’s someone else’s job to try and make him pay it. In my opinion, support enforcement is the single greatest thing the government has done to support victims of post-separation abuse, and for women in general.

He has since had federal garnishments, his credit has been impacted, he’s had his bank accounts attached, wages garnished (which doesn’t help since he is the employer) and he’s lost his drivers license. Does this really matter to him though? No, and I’m fairly certain he’s driving around without a license at the moment. If you know my ex and see him doing this, please call the police and report it.

Tax evasion is one reason that figure noted earlier from CBC is actually under-representing the problem. On paper my ex owes about $4000 in support. If it were based on what he actually earned it would be closer to $85,000 right now. That CBC report also doesn’t include the women who never ask, or who settle for ridiculous amounts because they don’t know how much they’re actually entitled to or they want to avoid the fight it is to actually get what they should. This is usually due to genuine fear of what they will do or because their ex’s made them feel like leeches. It is rarely ever because it is what both parents want and feel is fair. It really speaks to the inefficacy of the family court system in addressing abuse that so many victims would rather go without support at all than to navigate the court system that was presumably designed to help them.

I wish I could say my situation is unique, but it is so far from being unique. These custody grabs, and these guys who fight for shared parenting simply to save money, are the exact reason many women don’t go for child support at all. I have heard hundreds of stories where the guy doesn’t really want any of the parenting responsibilities (most of the time this was the reason for the relationship breakdown to start with.) That is until they realize that means they have to pay the associated support, then they go for 50/50 parenting time and usually get it. Their reasons for wanting it and their ability to actually do it seem to be irrelevant, but this is what is branded as gender equality and being ‘best for the children.’ Let me tell you, there is nothing positive for children who have to spend half their life with a parent who’s only motivation for spending time with them is saving money. There’s also nothing equal about giving equal financial benefits to each parent, when it actually further exacerbates the inequity in parenting work. The men who are doing this crap are the same men who don’t do doctor’s appointments or homework or any other real parenting. I can also tell you with certainty that parenting traumatized children is a whole other level of parenting that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. When I say parenting work. I mean work.

That shared parenting time also doesn’t always last, either because they weasel their way out of parenting time bit by bit, or because they fuck up so bad that they substantially lose access to the kid. The Department of Justice Canada reports that 47% of Canadian fathers see their children at least weekly or biweekly at the time of separation, but after five years, only 31% maintain that frequency of contact. Additionally, 24% of fathers were not in contact after five years, compared to 15% at the time of separation. These stats speak directly to the matter at hand. My ex is one of the 9% of father’s who is not in contact five years later, after ‘fighting’ for equal time early on. 9% of all separated fathers represents a huge amount of men.

The notes about that study are also completely fascinating. The men who were interviewed claim their ex’s interfering with access is the main reason for their non-involvement. My ex tells the same story, despite the social worker’s and judge’s who have told him he doesn’t have access because he abused his kid. Funny that. Oh and parental alienation… I was accused of that in court for stepping in and stopping his access after he abused my kid. In his mind, that wasn’t ‘a good reason’ to change the status quo.

The custody situation with all that brings and the traumatic experience that is trying to navigate the legal system to get proper child support calculated still doesn’t paint the full picture of abuse related to child support. There is also the matter of yearly re-calculations and getting them to pay the support once it’s ordered.

I had a guy call into my old tax office the first week in January to see if he could file a tax return with zero income on it ‘because he isn’t paying that bitch a cent.’ He quit his job rather than pay child support and was proud to tell a perfect stranger so. He is also nothing close to an outlier. I’ve heard the same sentiment from many men’s mouths. If a number was put to the cost of this, not just for the mothers who are directly impacted, but to the larger picture of what it is costing us as a province, there would be riots. As it sits the only people who seem to notice or care are the mothers, and we are too exhausted and traumatized from trying to parent in the face of this nonsense to do much about it.

As a tax specialist, I have to ask about child support, marital status, and who the children reside with as part of filling out the tax return. I have heard hundreds of stories from both the women who are doing without what they’re owed to pacify their vindictive ex, and the men who are proud of the ways they get out of it.

I have heard the phrase ‘paying that bitch’ almost as often as I’ve heard the phrase child support when talking to men actually. Again, I am well aware that there are lots of men who pay their support and who are great parents. I generally don’t hear a peep from them about it, although I wish they were more vocal about what it means to be a man who actually provides for his children’s well-being. It is the abusive brand of men who I hear this sleezy, illegal stuff from and they aren’t at all quiet about it. These are just some of the ‘brilliant’ schemes I have heard directly from the men themselves:

• Quit working for an employer. Can’t apply the nice and easy child support calculator tool if there is no clear income value. Also, can’t garnish wages if you don’t have an employer.
• Work only for cash and/ or go on social assistance – think about the tax dollars spent supporting this abuse of the system.
• Start a business to hide cash income – tax evasion is a favorite of deadbeat dads. Again, think of the increase in tax rates for everyone to compensate for this.
• ‘Hire’ other people to reduce the business’s net income and therefore the amount you pay child support on. Works especially well if they’ve got a skeety new girlfriend to play along. Works until mistrust happens with the new girlfriend, I should say. Then she becomes a new target for his hate. I’ve heard this story almost as often as the strategy to hire fake employees in the first place. Note: you can ask for a copy of the business’s T4’s to see who they’re paying.
• Run personal expenses through the business to lower net income. Again, you can ask for a detailed account of what the business expenses are and contest any you don’t agree with.
• Incorporate the business – muddy the lines between personal income and business income (ps. It’s all still income.) This doesn’t work but costs them thousands a year in accounting fees.
• Move a lot/ change jobs a lot/ change bank accounts a lot to avoid support enforcements finding them.

These are the strategies they use. I’m not saying they work. A judge does have the ability to impute an income if the person is not being forthcoming about what they earn and the yearly re-calculation of support can be voided if written in the legal agreement too. Even though these schemes don’t necessarily work, they do significantly slow the whole process down and they do cause a lot of unnecessary court dates that often span several years. It takes an immense amount of persistence to get to a fair amount and the cost of getting there is nothing close to fair. They can also be reported to CRA or to social assistance and face penalties from those places too. The problem again is that it takes so much time and money to prove these things and there is no reimbursement of cost. Depending on how knowledgeable the victim and their lawyer is about these schemes, they may not even be able to prove these things at all. I am glad to know what to be on the lookout for and how to read his personal and corporate income tax returns. Until I can get a settlement conference to have it heard by a judge, what I know doesn’t really matter though. This is the problem with the system as it is.

It’s been five years now and I still don’t have a proper child support amount calculated. Even if I did, he isn’t going to pay it willingly and the measures available to support enforcement aren’t making him do it the way they should. I don’t know what repercussions there are from family court for his delays and unwillingness to follow court orders, but I can tell you he hasn’t been met with one yet.

This type of behaviour affects everyone too, by the way. Just consider the extra child tax benefit the person may be getting, GST they’re getting, social assistance they may be getting, income tax they aren’t paying. Then factor in all the women who are left turning to government housing, or income support, or food banks, etc. Then throw in all the government money spent on judge’s salaries, social worker salaries, legal aid salaries, etc. to deal with this stuff – the issue of these men trying to get away from child support is affecting everyone’s finances in the form of high provincial income tax rates and sales tax rates. Everyone should be pissed about this, and we should be letting them know what deadbeats they are when they start bragging about it. We need to be a whole lot more discerning when men talk about their ‘crazy ex’s’ too. More often than not crazy is code word for abused and quit taking it silently.

Another type of abuse that often folds into this child support issue is litigation abuse. This happens when an abusive person uses the court system to continue to punish or control their victim and often has significant financial and emotional costs to victims. It includes things like threatening legal action if the victim doesn’t do what they want, delaying court processes, filing baseless claims, providing fraudulent information, appealing decisions, etc. The whole process of getting support established for me has been a textbook example of litigation abuse actually. But it doesn’t end there. Even when custody is settled and their income is settled, getting them to actually pay what’s ordered is a whole other thing.

In April 2024, my ex had $1200 taken by support enforcement because he hadn’t paid a cent of what he offered on consent order yet. The very same day that amount was taken, he applied to take me back to court, seeking 50/50 custody again. Custody he lost in October 2022 for abusing my son and that he was already given a clear plan to correct by a judge that he hadn’t even begun to satisfy. The bill from my lawyer for the month of our hearing was more than the $1200 I got in child support, which of course was the whole point.

The ridiculous part is that it cost him far more than it cost me. He hired a new lawyer who charges $600 per hour to go to court and argue about things that were already ruled on. That is what he chose to do rather than paying the $400 a month in support. The sad part is that when I told my lawyer that he was doing it because of the support payment, she completely dismissed me. She couldn’t wrap her mind around why he would do something so financially stupid. Anyone who knows anything about abuse understands exactly why he did it.

Nothing changed in regards to custody because he hadn’t done what was ordered by the judge for it to change. In fact, his lawyer, knowing that he hadn’t done what was in the court order to change custody, should never have booked the court date to start with. It really hurts my heart to know just how many lawyers are active participants in making victims’ lives hell, when they are precisely the people we have to turn to for help. I really wonder how much ignorance exists among lawyers about litigation abuse, or if they even care how much they are complicit in. Mine definitely shouldn’t have been ignorant to it, because I told her clearly what the motivation was for him to book the court date and I constantly reminded her about all the other delays and non-compliance too.

I can’t tell you how many women are still at the mercy of their vindictive ex’s because of child support. Men will use the money as a means of coercive control to keep them from speaking up about issues with the children and they’ll use it as punishment or just plain entertainment too. A client of mine bought a car and her ex decided to stop paying his child support for three months to try and make her default on the loan and lose it. He clearly told her this was his intent. Her only recourse was to tell her lawyer, who would tell his lawyer who would tell him and then wait 6 months for a court date. He paid up before that date to avoid consequence and indeed, there were none. Another client told me a similar story about when she booked a vacation. He made sure not to pay her support for the months leading up to the trip to try and force her to cancel it or to at least ruin her time while there.

A 2022 Stats Canada survey reported that 40% of support cases were paid in full each month of the year for that year, which is the highest it has been since they started keeping track in 2012. That means 60% of single parents can’t actually rely on child support coming even with a court order and support enforcement to help them collect on it. Let that sink in. Remember these numbers only represent the people who actually have a registered court order about support. It doesn’t include all those who are stuck in court limbo trying to get one or who are rightfully fearful to even try to get one.

Seeking support from someone who is hellbent on not paying their dues is a battle. There are so many women who never get what they are legally entitled to and many who wind up living next to poverty over this. Our legal system is really failing in this department. Bitter, vindictive men are getting off scot-free and over-burdened mothers are going without the financial help that these support laws were put in place to provide. Even more, children are being forced to spend time with parents who don’t want them, who use them as pawns, and who aren’t capable of looking after them. All this while we have lawyers and judges that view 50/50 parenting time as the gold standard for parenting arrangements and glossing over abusive and manipulative behaviours. Then there is the apathy towards this whole dynamic from legal professionals who are the people we have to rely on for help. It is so far from ok.

I knew my ex was going to commit tax evasion; I knew he’d delay the court process by not doing his taxes on time; I knew he’d never willingly pay anything; and I knew he wasn’t capable of parenting the kids half the time without causing harm to them. The part I didn’t expect was for the court system to be so completely useless in stopping or preventing any of it and for my lawyers to give me such horrific advice in how best to manage it. I don’t view myself as a victim, but this whole process has brought me to a hopeless and depressed state more than once. There’s no way for it not to.

I have quit pursuing proper support. Court dates and lawyers meetings have been so completely triggering and traumatizing that I had to take it off the table to maintain my sanity and my faith in the world. There has been no benefit to the process, and significant costs.

These statistics and the real life trauma and inequity they represent, are awful. None of this is static though, and there is a lot the court system and government can do to change these awful statistics:

• I don’t know of any other creditor/ debtor relationship that doesn’t include interest and penalties. Support enforcement should be adding this to unpaid accounts. There is next to no cost to government for doing this, and huge benefits for victims.
• There needs to be more staff at the support enforcement office. The collections officers are great at what they do, but right now it’s a ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’ sort of situation. More staff means that each case gets more attention and that leads to higher compliance.
• I believe that if child support goes unpaid for 6 consecutive months with no attempt to work with support enforcement to become compliant – charges should be laid. Refusing to help feed your children or keep a roof over their heads is neglect. If the person who is actually caring for the children quit buying food or clothes, there would be legal intervention. Purposely avoiding paying child support is no different.
• I also believe that the support enforcement program should be expanded to include all monies owed between ex-partners that are written in an order. Right now it is only child support and spousal support and special expenses for children if you have a support order. Orders without any way to enforce them are nothing but a suggestions – ones that are too often not followed.
• It needs to be easier and more cost effective for women to fight back against this. Legal aid is great, but the process of getting approved is extremely lengthy and invasive. Even if you do get approved, the level of service is not the same as if you hired a lawyer privately. Their caseloads are just too high.
• All family lawyers should have to do mandatory training on how to recognize and intervene in abuse. Some lessons on trauma-informed communications would go a long way too. The amount of gaslighting, minimizing, and victim blaming I have heard from these legal professionals, who deal with relational abuse daily, is utterly disgusting.
• When tax evasion is suspected by judges, by lawyers, or by support enforcement – there needs to be a duty to report this to the CRA. It should not fall to victims to report and it absolutely should not be brushed off as normal the way it is. I can’t understand why it is acceptable for my ex to admit to committing tax evasion in a courtroom and for nothing to happen from that.
• When child abuse is proven in family court, criminal charges should happen as well. As it sits now it is an entirely separate court process that doesn’t even happen unless the victim pursues it. Justice that requires victims to be so emotionally and financially impacted is not justice.
• I believe there needs to be criminal charges for committing financial abuse and litigation abuse (purposely delaying proceedings, filing motions that are baseless, not showing to court, etc.) and they should be imposed by family court judges with no need for a separate court process.

• Lawyers should be fined as well for not responding to correspondence, ignoring demands to disclose, not showing to court, etc. It would only take a couple sanctions before lawyers would quit allowing their clients to use delays as a negotiation tactic (read: abuse tactic.)
• Lawyers need to stop pushing 50/50 parenting time and recognize that stability for the child is what is best. Stability means a continuation of care splitting, not changing it for the financial benefit of the parent who chose not to participate in parenting until there was a price tag during separation. Actually, I believe that there should be child abuse charges laid when this can be proven to be the case.

• There needs to be real and severe recourse for not following court orders. Court orders without any recourse for not following them – are nothing but a piece of paper, honestly.

It isn’t all on the government though. We each have a role:

• Everyone need to call this out when we hear it and we need to report tax evasion, and court order violations to the proper authorities.
• Good men and good dads need to speak up. The sad reality is that one man calling this out will do more to create change than any woman saying it.
• Most of all we need to deal with the pervasive sexism and entitlement that underlies all this behaviour. Judging women who receive or seek support is part of this.

There is work for each of us and it benefits everyone (except abusers) to do it.