Complex Issues Bring Us Back to Basics: The SSAG Year in Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In July 2008, Final Version of Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines (SSAG) was released by federal Department of Justice, after three years of intensive feedback from spouses, lawyers, mediators and judges across country. The B.C. SSAG cases in year since release of Final Version show courts struggling with many complex issues of spousal support law: use of SSAG on variation and review, impact of high property awards upon spousal support, competing theories of entitlement, spousal support in shared custody cases, cases involving payor incomes over $350,000, post-separation income increases for payors, effect of remarriage or repartnering by recipient, self-sufficiency, time limits. These issues require a sophisticated support analysis and are focus of this paper.The first part of paper reviews the basics of Advisory Guidelines, to ensure that mistakes are not made in typical cases and flags some common errors. We then review major spousal support decisions of B.C. Court of Appeal in past two years, focusing primarily on four of 17 decisions: Beninger, Chutter, Mann, and Shellito v. Bensimhon. In next two sections, we analyze in detail trial decision from past year, first those under without child support formula and then those under with child support formula. In concluding section, we offer some gratuitous advice, our own top ten list, of what to do, and what not to do, in using Advisory Guidelines in British Columbia in future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.042 | 0.121 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".