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LEGAL REPORT: FAMILY LAW to the concerns of people like Nakonechny. The guidelines, he notes, have a number of exceptions where the formulas don't apply. A spouse who gives up a career in order to move else- where with a partner who has transferred jobs, for example, is one situation where a short time limit on support due to a relatively short marriage would make the formulas impractical. Another exception, meanwhile, recogniz- es the need for higher or longer payments to a spouse who has a disability. "There has been to a surprising degree a tenden- cy not to look at the list of exceptions, so that what happens is people have focused on the formulas as being the guidelines. The result is they'll use the formulas in a disability case, and they'll [say], 'Those numbers don't make any sense. I'm not using those numbers.' Well, there's this big thing that says 'exception — illness and disability,'" says Thompson. Nevertheless, while observers like Na- based Fathers' Resources International. Besides his concerns over the amount and duration of pay- to come up with that kind of money every month, I don't know how I would do it." — KATHLEEN WALKER, VANCOUVER, B.C. konechny worry about what the guide- lines mean for the status of women, people like Danny Guspie argue they have entrenched a bias in the courts against men. "I think for a man it means certain ruin," says Guspie, a divorce- management consultant and executive director of Toronto- "I think they're too high. I think if I had ments mostly men have to make, Guspie accuses Parliament of having shirked its responsibility by turning to outside experts to create the advisory guidelines in the first place. "It's what a bunch of professors have said is now the law," he says, calling the whole project "politics at its worst." Thompson, though, emphasizes the guidelines are merely an advisory tool that reflect the current jurisprudence on spousal support. He adds that if Parliament wants more stringent or specific rules, the government is free to change the Divorce Act. But for now, he says, the guidelines are useful. "To some extent, I think the success of the guidelines reflects their advisory na- ture, which is that people don't feel hemmed in and bound by them. They use them most of the time because they work most of the time. When they don't work, they're not stuck with them." In the meantime, he expects they will evolve as judges and lawyers experiment with them. "What the advisory guidelines do is they take a whole range of typical cases and make them easier to resolve in a reasonable way. That's what I think we've seen three years later, and now we have to move onto the next stage and say what do we do with some of those areas of the law that aren't so clear." For her part, Edmonton family lawyer Marie Gordon says she's just grateful the guidelines have reduced what she calls the "chaos" that used to characterize spousal support rulings. "Pre- guideline jurisprudence was no picnic," she says. "It really was very discretionary [and] very judge-driven. So, on similar sets of facts, you might get very different outcomes." THE SPOUSAL SUPPORT ADVISORY GUIDELINES are available on Justice Canada's web site at www.justice.gc.ca/eng/pi/pad-rpad/res/spag/toc-tdm.html , CORRECTION www.divorcemate.com The article "Suing for equity's sake," Canadian Lawyer, Oc- tober 2008, contained two small errors. Diane LaCalamita earned her LLB at the University College London in the United Kingdom, not at the University of Western Ontar- io. The article also related that lawyer Mary Eberts sat on Bertha Wilson's task force on women in the legal profes- sion. In fact, Ms. Eberts was one of the co-chairs for the preparation of the CBA-Ontario's (as it was then known) contribution to the task force. Canadian Lawyer apologizes for the errors. 58 NO VEMBER / DECEMBER 2008 www. ntitled-1 1 mag.com 11/6/08 10:38:06 AM