Statistics Canada
www.statcan.gc.ca
Common menu bar links
Child and Spousal Support: Maintenance Enforcement Survey Statistics, 2006/2007
Archived Content
Information identified as archived is provided for reference, research or recordkeeping purposes. It is not subject to the Government of Canada Web Standards and has not been altered or updated since it was archived. Please "contact us" to request a format other than those available.
By Chantal Martin and Paul Robinson, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada
Content note: At this moment, full content is available in PDF only.
To access the PDF publication, please use the "Full content in PDF" link on the sidebar (on the left-hand side of this page).
During the 1980s and 1990s, all provincial and territorial governments created Maintenance Enforcement Programs (MEPs) to provide administrative support to payors and recipients of child and spousal support, and to improve compliance with support payments. Through both provincial/territorial and federal legislation, the programs were given a number of administrative enforcement powers to secure payments before resorting to the courts.
MEPs play an important role in the area of spousal and child support in Canada. Between 2001 and 2006, there were two million cases of divorce or separation in the ten provinces (General Social Survey, 2006). While not all of these cases end up with a support order that is registered with a MEP, many will.
This report provides an analysis of the characteristics of cases that are registered with the MEPs and highlights changes that have occurred over the five-year period covered by the report.1 The results discussed in this report comprise child and spousal support data for 10 provinces and territories, representing 95% of Canada’s population. Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia provide data through the Maintenance Enforcement Survey (MES), while Nova Scotia, Alberta, Yukon and the Northwest Territories report to the newer, more detailed Survey of Maintenance Enforcement Programs (SMEP).2 Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba and Nunavut currently do not report. Some charts and data tables do not include all jurisdictions from the MES because the data are not available.
Notes
- Readers should be cautious in using the survey data to evaluate specific Maintenance Enforcement Programs or to generalize the results to all support orders in Canada. The MEPs across Canada differ in a number of important aspects because of different local needs and policies. These differences include client profile, enforcement powers in legislation, enforcement practices, the enrolment process, how payments are handled and registered, the responsibilities of clients, and how cases are closed.
- For more information about the differences between the two surveys, refer to Section 4.1 Background on the MES and SMEP. Prince Edward Island provided data for the SMEP for reference month March 2007 and this is included in some of the analysis.
