The Supreme Court of Canada defined the limited situations when a BC spousal support review can be ordered on BC spousal support awards in the Leskun. The British Columbia spousal support review order is still used as a tool to encourage a reluctant spouse to take steps to move in part or in whole towards self- sufficiency.
The recent decision of Reggelsen v. Reggelsen, 2009 BCSC 1790 – 2009/12/29 follows a line of cases that uses BC spousal support reviews to encourage a spouse to work toward self sufficiency when the spouse is hesitant or refuses to do so without the court nudging them towards this goal by way of reducing a BC spousal support award at the review on the basis of the spouses’s lack of effort to reenter the workforce.
The cases can specify the terms of review and can place the onus on one spouse to show they have made reasonable efforts to reenter the workforce. The problem remains however in setting the income level a spouse who has refused to enter the workforce can earn. The court must look at the education, work skills and work history as well as evidence of existing jobs the spouse could get and then attribute and income to them pursuant to section 19 of the Child Support Guidelines (they apply to spousal support too!).
Although the Supreme Court of Canada established that reviews should rarely be ordered, the courts in BC have continued to use reviews as a useful tool to allow a court to deal with future issues related to spousal support at a time when the actual living arrangements and income and expenses of the parties will be able to be correctly determined. It is often difficult to predict a career path for a spouse who is reentering the work force after a long period of time or who has health issues that impact on their ability to work or how a payor’s career might be impaired by a poor economy or changes in the marketplace. The case of Reggelsen applied the review principals to reduce spousal support by a few hundred dollars a month but the court refused to terminate support as the husband requested.
We provide the key case extracts below:
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