Spousal Support Eh? Sorry, Not Your American Alimony
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I tried to pack as many "Canadianisms" into that title as possible, not just the ubiquitous "eh?", but also our cultural tendency to apologise, even if we are not at fault. Canadian spousal support is itself a reflection of our distinctive family law culture and history. We no longer use the terms "alimony" or "maintenance." In this short article, I will spell out some of the distinctive characteristics of our spousal support law, which I can summarise in a series of propositions here:\n...\nBefore digging in to these specific support issues, it is important to sketch out the Canadian constitutional backdrop and the general structure of family law in Canada. I promise it will be brief, but not necessarily painless.\nIn Canada, divorce is a matter confided legislatively to the federal government under our constitution. 1 Thus, Canada has a national DivorceAct that addresses parenting/custody, child sup- port and spousal support for divorcing married couples. 2 Apart from divorce, all other family law matters fall under provincial legislation, including the division of family property. 3 This means that the provinces have also enacted legislation affecting spousal support, for those married couples who separate but do not seek a divorce or for common-law spouses. 4 In all the English Canadian provinces and territories, common-law spouses or partners can seek spousal support after cohabiting for two or three years, or where they have a child in a relationship of some permanence. 5 The one province that does not recognise spousal support rights for common-law couples is Quebec, despite its world-record rates of unmarried cohabitation. 6 As we shall see, despite some differences in statutory provisions amongst these federal and provincial statutes, the fundamentals of spousal support analysis are the same.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 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".