Not every case has such juicy facts like those in Jansen v. DiCecco, 2025 ONCJ 189, in which a father was ordered to pay $899,811 forthwith in back child support for 22 years.
In 2003, when the child was three years old, the mother obtained a child support order for $700 per month based on an imputed annual income to the father of $89,100.
Fast-forward to 2019.
The mother is 60 years old and unemployed. The child is 25 years old and in college. The child never had a relationship with the father. The father is a self-employed businessman operating a garden centre and has four children with other women who he has various other orders or agreements with.
Previously, the father threatened the mother that if she raised the issue of child support again, he would withhold support. The mother was living close to the poverty line at the time. She took out a line of credit on her home to pay her legal fees. The father evaded personal service of an earlier motion to change.
In one of his other family law cases, a business valuation report was filed stating that the father had annual revenues of $300,000, but to the Canada Revenue Agency, he reported incomes ranging from $74,468 to $162,406. In a mortgage application, the father listed ownership of three properties, valued at $2.6 million, $2.6 million and $1.2 million, a bank account with $819,728 and an investment account with $528,553, bringing his net worth to $7,676,631.
Parenthetically, the court was not pleased that he swore to a net worth of $890,000 in one financial statement and $2,622,000 in another.
When the mother asked the father to increase child support in 2009, he waved a $100 bill in front of her and said he would give her more child support for sexual favours.
It gets worse.
The mother was violently assaulted by three men in 2010 shortly after she started asking the father for more child support. She believes the father orchestrated the attack on her but could not prove it. After the assault, the mother’s mental health deteriorated and she was diagnosed with PTSD. She has not worked since.
The judge then embarked on a fairly detailed income analysis by examining the changes in the father’s net worth, as compared to his reported income, and arrived at an imputation of income for those years of $321,669 and $701,411. In the end, this father was ordered to pay $899,811 in retroactive child support for the previous 22 years.
How did this judge justify his order?
He wrote: “He [the father] has consistently misrepresented his income and assets to the mother and the court. He has hidden income and assets. He intimidated the mother to dissuade her from coming to court earlier. Once she came to court, he tried to use his financial advantage to dissuade her from continuing with the case. He has acted in bad faith. He has lived a luxurious lifestyle while impoverishing the mother and the son. He has accumulated his wealth, to some extent, by failing to pay fair child support.”
This article was recently published in LexisNexis LAW360 at: https://www.law360.ca/ca/family/articles/2346582/judge-blows-the-cap-on-retroactive-child-support
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