HANSARD

Printed and Published by Nova Scotia Hansard Reporting Services

Ms. Maureen MacDonald (Chair)

Mr. James DeWolfe (Vice-Chairman)

Mr. Mark Parent

Mr. Peter Christie

Mr. Graham Steele

Mr. David Wilson (Sackville-Cobequid)

Mr. Keith Colwell

Mr. Michel Samson

Mr. Wayne Gaudet

In Attendance:

Ms. Mora Stevens

Legislative Committee Clerk

Mr. Jacques Lapointe

Auditor General

Mr. Claude Carter

Deputy Auditor General

HALIFAX, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 2006

STANDING COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC ACCOUNTS

9:00 A.M.

CHAIR

Ms. Maureen MacDonald

VICE-CHAIRMAN

Mr. James DeWolfe

MR. CHAIRMAN (Mr. James DeWolfe): Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to call this meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts to order on this, the 19^th day of April. I would like to welcome representatives from the Department of Justice. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We will have proper introductions from that department in a moment. We will start with introducing our members of the committee. I have to apologize because a couple of our members are caught up in snow, believe it or not. I didn't think I would be saying this on the 19^th day of April, but apparently there's a snowstorm down in the Valley. Like many of us, we have had our Winter tires removed, so they have to drive very cautiously. We will start with Maureen.

[The committee members introduced themselves.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: I will now turn the floor over to Mr. Doug Keefe, Deputy Minister of the Department of Justice, for your introductions and opening remarks, sir.

MR. DOUGLAS KEEFE: Thank you very much. I am Doug Keefe. I've been the Deputy Minister of Justice since September 2000. I've been with the department since 1977. With me is Christine Mosher, who has been with the department almost as long, although she doesn't look like it. She is the Executive Director of Court Services. On my right is Judith McPhee, who is a Director in Court Services and has among her responsibilities the Family Division of the Supreme Court and Family Court, and Maintenance Enforcement.

I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to discuss this program. I'm told that it's a program that members hear about frequently from their constituents. Probably as much as any program and more than most, it's a program in the middle. It's in the middle of people who are going through some of the most stressful situations that human beings can go through. So it is a program that is often brought to your attention.

The difficulty with that, of course, is it's a bit like examining air travel in light of an air crash, you can learn a great deal from it, but it's not representative of all the safe journeys, and people do continually get on planes and have good experiences on airplanes.

The Maintenance Enforcement Program began in its present form in January 1996. It was intended to address the difficulties experienced by spouses and children who were not receiving court-ordered maintenance programs. My first involvement with this came actually in 1990, 1991. I was a member of the Court Structure Task Force, and among the many things we looked at was what was then a court-based maintenance system, and found that it was cumbersome and really not working very well. So we recommended, in that period, when basically much of the justice system was overhauled, that among those changes, maintenance enforcement should become an administrative-based program as opposed to a court-based program.

Responsibility came over in 1996 to the Department of Justice from the Family Court, which was of course under the responsibility of the Department of Community Services. Judith was present not only at the inception, but she was actually present prior to the conception, I think, because it seems to me she was one of the people working on this before it came over.

Now, a couple of things about the program. First of all, it's a mandatory program. Not all programs are mandatory. Mandatory simply means that every court order that's made, whatever its source, the Divorce Act or a maintenance order, is mandatorily registered, automatically registered with the program. Now, the benefit of that is - one of the arguments for that, and I recall being involved in this discussion - it takes out any discretion that might have been subject to perhaps unequal bargaining at a critical moment. So, unless both spouses come forward and ask to be delisted, you're in. There

are a number of ramifications for that when you draw comparisons between jurisdictions, because some jurisdictions are on an opt-in basis, we're on an opt-out basis.

The program's annual budget is about $2.2 million, and it has 48 staff members, not counting the director and her assistant. To put that in context, the Department of Justice is around $107 million, $108 million in the fiscal year we've just completed. It has about 1,340 employees. It goes up and down, of course, as it varies. It has seven offices throughout the province. They are Yarmouth, Kentville, metro Halifax, Truro, New Glasgow, Amherst and Sydney, where we just were the other day.

The program relies a lot on technology to communicate with its many clients, so it has a 24/7 info line, which gives clients personal information about their case, and payment and enforcement actions being undertaken. It also has a program called dial and deliver, which essentially gives all the clients a voice mailbox. So, the enforcement officers can leave a voice mail for the payees, and vice versa, the payees can call and leave a voice mail saying, what's going on, I heard my payer has moved back to the province, that sort of thing; it automates, but it allows a very effective form of communication, of survival information, if you want. So that's quite helpful to people.

Now it's important to recognize - I know one of the complaints you get is, I can never get anybody. Eventually you can, but if you want somebody quickly, you can't necessarily. To put that in the context of this program, they receive 35,000 calls a month, mostly from payees. So there is actually no possible way that they could get their enforcement officer when they want to speak to them. In fact, the technology is an excellent way to allow people to get the information or give the information they need to give at a time that's convenient for them.

Now, the payers - those are the people who are subject to the order and make the payment - do have the direct number of their enforcement officer. They're not necessarily close to our hearts, but they are close to our thoughts at all times and we want to know what's going on, and we want them to know that we're watching. So they actually do have direct access.

There's a lot of general information. I think you're aware that there is a video that explains the program, which is on-line, and of course there are brochures.

Currently the program has over 17,000 active cases. The vast majority of these are for children - I stand to be corrected, but I think it's about 94 per cent that involve children, and about 84 or 85 per cent involve solely children - although the adult who has care of the children may actually be the beneficiary of the order, in fact the beneficiaries are the children. Approximately half of these cases are fairly straightforward and do not really require enforcement action - that's because we're an opt-out province, but even in

those cases the program has a transactional job to do and also it can act as a buffer between the parties, which is often an important role for it to play.

When enforcement is required, we're able to take steps to enforce payments because we're an administrative program. Under the old court program, you had to go back to court and tell the judge and the judge may say that you should get a lawyer, grant an adjournment, and the judge may decide to vary the order or give time to pay and that sort of thing.

With an administrative enforcement program, it's very simple - there's a court order, and the job of the director and her staff is to enforce that order. If there's a problem with the order, then an application to vary the order is what should happen. Judges shouldn't be second- guessing the order and people shouldn't be going back to court every time they find it difficult to pay. The administrative program in fact was recommended to the Law Reform Commission, so it's not something we simply came up with.

If the director's enforcement means are not ultimately sufficient, then she can apply to court and does so. But these are the means that are currently available to the director: she can garnish wages, bank accounts, rental income, federal income - which includes income tax returns, employment insurance and GST rebates; she can place liens on real property and is about to be able to place them on personal property; she can issue demands for information, require payer examinations; she can order the collapse of pensions; and she can call for the revocation of driving privileges. So it's a fairly extensive set of powers. Some of these powers were recently added, effective April 1^st. We're always looking for ways to essentially sharpen the pencil of the program.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I'm going to have to ask you to try to wrap up your opening comments. I realize we did start a little late.

MR. KEEFE: Okay, I'll move very quickly through this.

We have reciprocal agreements in place with the rest of Canada, the United States, and many foreign countries. Last year we collected $53 million on behalf of clients. The total owed is $67 million - that's a rate of nearly 80 per cent, 78 per cent.

The last thing I would say is Ms. McPhee works very closely with the other jurisdictions in Canada. She plays national roles in these programs and, because we're a mobile population now, this is a very important aspect of her job.

Finally, I would simply say that the Maintenance Enforcement Program has a significant impact on the lives of Nova Scotians. We continue to look for ways to improve this program - comments and suggestions have always been helpful - and I hope

this information has provided at least a brief overview and I look forward to your questions.

[9:15 a.m.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. We'll start with 20-minute rounds, beginning with the NDP.

Ms. MacDonald.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Thank you very much. Good morning and welcome. I want to start by saying that I concur with your beginning point that we as MLAs sometimes tend to see the plane crash and maybe not all of the successful arrivals in terms of the way this program works.

I worked in the 1980s as a community legal worker at Dalhousie Legal Aid and I have to say that my perception, which I think is accurate, of the current system is that it's about a bazillion times better than what we had - there's no question about that.

My interest, and I think the interest of all members here today, is to look at the strengths of the program, but also where it is that we might be able to make improvements. There's probably always room to find ways to improve the system.

I want to draw your attention to a story that appeared on February 3, 2006, on the Internet, NovaNewsNet, that said Nova Scotia spouse and child support compliance is the lowest in the country. This was according to a report that came out of Statistics Canada, the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics back in 2004-05. It's a very interesting report. You'll be very aware of this report. It's interesting because it does speak to the fact that a significant percentage, I guess, of the orders in Nova Scotia were in arrears. So I want to start by asking you a few questions about this. What percentage of those 17,000 cases, that you say are active cases, are currently in arrears, absolute numbers and percentage, can you tell us that?

MR. KEEFE: Yes. First I would like to talk a little bit about the CCJS study. First off, I do know the study well. I'm the chairman of the liaison officers committee of the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. So I'm the deputy minister responsible for connecting the jurisdictions. So one of the things I know well, because I look at all the jurisdiction statistics, and I look at a number of these studies, is comparisons from province to province are, while useful, not iron rules, and in this study itself, it has a number of caveats which we should probably just have out so people can understand the study.

The first is that if you have orders that are due, where payment is due on the 15^th of the month, this study actually clicks in at the end of the month. So someone could be two weeks late and this study would show them as on time. If you have orders that are the end of the month and you're a day late, this study would show it as in default, in arrears. It's a binary and it's not a very textured approach to the thing. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is, I think there are a number of confounding variables, some of which they talk about here. For instance, the difficulty with maintenance enforcement is quite often not enforcement, but lack of money. So if you're in a province where there is, if we were bankers, we would say that there's an income, but it's a relatively low income and of low quality, by which I think bankers mean it's perhaps seasonal or sporadic, then enforcement is going to be difficult, because you can't get blood out of a turnip, frankly.

As the study notes, Nova Scotia has an extraordinarily high percentage of orders that are between $1 and $200 a month. Most provinces are divided about 50/50 between the $100 to $200 range and the $200 to $400 range and they note - not talking about Nova Scotia, but note in general - that tardiness or defaults are much higher on the under $200 percentage and they said it probably has to do with the quality of the income, the quality of the income stream - income is income, but the income stream. So Nova Scotia for whatever reason, probably external to the program, has that difficulty. Now, having said that, I guess as a contextual remark, I'm going to go over to Ms. Judith McPhee to answer your direct question, if I could.

MS. JUDITH MCPHEE: Of the 17,000-plus active cases, out of that we take out about 2,500 that would be considered pure in-pay. They're what we call the current accounts. Those 2,500 cases are the ones that are paying on their own voluntarily. There has probably been no enforcement action, or if there has been enforcement action, it has brought them back up to being in-pay and they have been in-pay for six months or more. So we'll take off that 2,500. That's going to leave us with somewhere in the vicinity of 15,000 cases that have some arrears or are in default in some way. That does not mean that of the 15,000 cases they're all non-compliant payers, what it means is of those 15,000 they have run into problems, for whatever reason, paying and we have had to take enforcement action on them. So that's why you're looking at caseloads for our enforcement officers of in the vicinity of 728 per enforcement officer, because they're handling those cases that needed some type of enforcement action, be it just a collection call or be it all the way up to the other end to revoke a driver's licence, but some medium of enforcement.

So to answer your question - and it's a moving target, too, I could tell you it's 15,000 today and six months from now it may be less and it may be more because payers, although their court orders may say it's due usually on the 1^st, the 15^th or the 30^th of the

month, don't necessarily make it on the day that it is due. But to round it out and answer your question, in the vicinity, we have 15,000 cases that are in some sort of default.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Out of the 17,000 . . .

MS. MCPHEE: Out of the 17,000-plus.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: . . . 15,000 are in some kind of default.

MS. MCPHEE: Some kind of default; in other words they're being actioned by enforcement officers.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Has the department set targets or goals in terms of what you would strive to achieve with the resources that you have in terms of bringing those default rates down and, if so, what are those targets and how close have you come to meeting them?

MS. MCPHEE: The two targets that we have set, one is around a collection rate, and we started off in 1996, because we took over a lot of the files from Family Court, so we started off somewhere with a collection rate around 62 per cent - we aimed for the low 70s and we are now up to 78 per cent. The other measure that we've brought in is our turnaround time on enrolling cases, how fast we can get the case in to start getting it actioned, if action needs to be taken. But as the deputy mentioned, the directors of maintenance enforcement across the country have set a five-year work plan, and we are working, across the country, on some common performance measures.

So when you read the CCJS report, you will see that we all report things just a tad differently, or we do business just a tad differently, so what we're trying to do across the country is come out with some baseline performance measures that we can all work toward and all report in the same way, and that is a work in progress.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: One of the things that I note in that report is that the statistical tables for all of the other provinces go back quite a bit further. Our statistical reporting looks like it's for 2005 alone, compared to Quebec that goes back to 2001; Ontario, 2001; Saskatchewan, 2001; Alberta, 2001; B.C., 2001; P.E.I., 2002. Why is that? Why do we not have a look-back ability in terms of this particular report?

MS. MCPHEE: When CCJS started the maintenance enforcement surveys there were two surveys, the first survey is the Maintenance Enforcement Survey, and those provinces that you mentioned that are reporting back to the early 2000s are the ones that were able to report - we were not able at that time to build the proper interface between our system and the CCJS in order for them to take the statistical information from our system. It's an automatic interface; it's nothing that we do.

CCJS has now changed their way of doing business. They've entered into the second Maintenance Enforcement Survey, and Nova Scotia was actually the first one to be able to report under the new way. They're looking at micro data. There are also still some provinces and territories that are not reporting at all, and they're coming in on the second Maintenance Enforcement Survey. That's why our stats only go back to 2004-05.

MR. KEEFE: Could I jump back in on one thing? Back to the CCJS study - one of the factors I meant to mention as well is a footnote under "Highlights", which points out that Nova Scotia is one of the two provinces that allows direct payments, where they take the cheques and forward them on - I should read it to you, ". . . since most of these direct payments are not reported until after the survey data are collected, a substantial number of payors are reported as not having paid, even though they actually have." So that tends to depress our number a little further.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I read that. I found that an odd comment, because I would think if the payments are coming into your office, the cheques are coming in and then you're sending them out. I would think that would be a feature of the information that you would keep and report. So I didn't quite understand that, but that is not that relevant, I suppose, in some ways. I am concerned about the very low numbers of people who are complying with the orders. The facts speak for themselves. If you say that 15,000 out of 17,000 orders are not in full compliance, then that is a concern, especially if 89 per cent of those orders are support payments for children alone, and in another 5 per cent that are for children and spouses, it is concerning.

I want to talk a bit about the audit that was done back in 1998, I believe, the evaluation that was done and the recommendations. There were 18 recommendations coming out of that particular evaluation, and the department's response to it was to accept all of the recommendations. Some of the recommendations, I note, had been completed, some were in progress, but the vast majority of them were accepted, but we have no information with respect to how many have actually been implemented since 1998. So I would like to ask you, of these recommendations, how many have been fully implemented? For example, there was a recommendation back at that time about developing outcome measures and targets for the purposes of public accountability, has that recommendation been achieved?

MS. MCPHEE: That's the one that I talked about earlier, with the government accountability, those two. There is a third around returning phone calls. So those are the only ones we've gotten to at this point.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Okay. They've been achieved, or they're still in progress?

MS. MCPHEE: Those two that I mentioned are done. We are reporting on those. The national work that we're doing is trying . . .

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: To develop . . .

MS. MCPHEE: . . . with the other outcome measures that all provinces and territories are going to be reporting on.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Okay. I note in the article that I cited earlier that the article talked about why is it that so many people in Nova Scotia are in default. I think you were interviewed around that. It would appear that there isn't any empirical research being done to determine this. I know one of the recommendations was that there should be some ongoing assessment and research partnerships with maybe universities or other groups to determine these things. Has that recommendation been implemented?

MS. MCPHEE: Nova Scotia has partnered with, along with other provinces and territories, the federal Department of Justice, and they have done some research. There was a project about two, maybe three, years ago to try to find out why payers were not paying. P.E.I. and Nova Scotia here in the Atlantic Provinces were the two provinces that did participate, and there is a study through the federal government they contracted.

[9:30 a.m.]

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Thank you. In your opening comments you talked about MLAs having concerns about this program through the contacts we get in our office. In reviewing the Hansard over probably a seven or eight year period, the thing that comes out most clearly for me is that there is a concern about the lack of workers to enforce maintenance orders in Nova Scotia, and it would appear that the number of maintenance enforcement officers has remained relatively constant. In fact, it may even have decreased. So how many maintenance enforcement officers do you have today, and what is their caseload; of that 17,000, what are their caseloads like?

MS. MCPHEE: We started in 1976 with 22 enforcement officers. We have retained that number up to and including last year, when we are just adding three additional enforcement officers - one for a general caseload and two who are going to our reciprocal unit that we're starting in Sydney, so we can handle the cases that are coming into the province and, more importantly, going out of the province through a central location. Our hope is, and certainly our belief is, that we're going to improve the client service for those cases that are going outside the province.

The caseload averages around 728. When I say that, understanding it's a mandatory program and understanding that all those 728 cases are in some fashion being enforced. It doesn't mean that 728 cases need addressing today, what it means is what

our enforcement officers do on a daily basis is their default list; those cases in default come up on their computer screen for them. We have asked them to work in such a way that they work on the most recent defaults and the most historic defaults, always trying to work toward the middle so hopefully no cases will get lost along the way.

Along with the fact that the enforcement officers take phone calls all day, every day, from recipients and/or payers that are looking for assistance with their cases, they are asked to work on six cold cases a day in addition to everything else they do during the day. Cold cases meaning they haven't gotten a phone call, they haven't gotten a letter, they're looking at the computer screen - these three have just gone into default most recently and these three have gone into default a long time ago, I'm going to work on those, plus I'm going to do everything else I'm supposed to do today.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I have to say that's a job I wouldn't want to have under those conditions. I can't imagine carrying that kind of a caseload, and I don't think it's possible to work effectively. This is not a criticism of the workers in your department, it's a criticism of the government for not providing enough resources to actually implement the legislation. All of a sudden it becomes clear to me why 15,000 of these orders would be in some form of arrears. I can't imagine trying to implement a program that has that many cases on one caseload. Even if somebody made 20 calls a day for every working day, they wouldn't come anywhere close to being able to manage that caseload.

You say that the objective is to try to have them make six calls a day on the cold cases, how many of your enforcement workers are actually able to do that?

MS. MCPHEE: Not make six calls necessarily, but review six cases and take some type of action. They're pretty good at doing it. I should say that we also have nine enforcement assistants in the province who do the administrative work for enforcement officers. For instance, if the enforcement officer is looking at a particular case and we know the income source and there's a garnishment to be issued, the enforcement officer doesn't actually do the garnishment, the enforcement assistant will do it. So, there is help.

There is no doubt the caseloads are high, but what is interesting is that we have very little turnover in our enforcement officers. Secondarily, we have very little sickness or absenteeism. They are a committed workforce and they have gotten the ability to deal with the caseload down to a very fine science, but it is high, and it is in the middle to high range when we look across the country in terms of what the other programs are facing.

MR. CHAIRMAN: The time has expired for the NDP.

Mr. Gaudet of the Liberal Party.

MR. WAYNE GAUDET: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to go back to the article that my colleague made reference to from the NovaNewsNet. I want to start off with the compliance. In the article it says that Nova Scotia has the lowest compliance with payments at approximately 55 per cent. I'm just wondering, is that true, is that correct? Are we higher? Are we lower? What's the compliance rate here in Nova Scotia?

MR. KEEFE: That's the compliance rate as determined by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. There are quite a number of caveats around that, which we've already explored. A more useful figure is the collection rate, because what people want is money, what they need is money, and our collection rate is 78 per cent, which compares reasonably well across the country as far as we know. So non-compliance includes technical non-compliance. We also indicate that because we are virtually unique in the country with the pay-through system, it shows them as non-compliant even though they are compliant. So that figure has to be taken - it's not a particularly useful figure to begin with and, secondly, by its own admission it's not actually a terribly accurate figure.

MR. GAUDET: So we're collecting 78 per cent?

MR. KEEFE: There's a difference between the compliance and non-compliance which is your order, are you $1 behind, $1 short and a day late, in which case Statistics Canada says non-compliance and you say, well, I'm only $1 behind. So the recipient would say, well, that's okay. It would have been good if it had been here yesterday, but at least it's here today. So there are two very different things being measured there.

MR. GAUDET: So if I asked how many are complying 100 per cent, do we have an answer to that?

MS. MCPHEE: Yes, I would say the current account caseload, which is about 2,500 cases. On a pure answer I would say the 2,500 cases are in what you would call full compliance. In other words, they're paying on time in full. That's the definition that CCJS uses - on time, in full - meaning that they pay within the month that it is due and they pay full. So the 55 per cent, CCJS says it and we would say it, that is low but, again, the payer may not be complying - in other words, not paying the full order - but we have managed to collect some of the order. So that's why the collection rate is important to us over how many payers are not complying. If $67 million was due and we collected 78 per cent of that, it really doesn't matter how many payers didn't pay. The fact is we were able to enforce on them and get that amount of money, which is the critical thing, going to the spouses and the children.

MR. KEEFE: Just to say this, if all the payers were federal or provincial civil servants, then we would have a 100 per cent collection rate and garnish their wages, so

that wouldn't be a reflection of the ability or capacity of enforcement. It's a reflection of the quality of the income stream and you attach that. If you have a high percentage of seasonal workers who are payers and self-employed, whatever - I don't want to pick on plumbers, drywallers, whatever people with little vans who basically are self-employed - then enforcement becomes really quite more of an art and less of a science. So those are the confounding variables that vary depending on the nature of the economy of a province, depending on the social fabric of a province, that sort of thing. So the collection rate is a better indication of the ability and capacity of the program, but even that, you have to recognize that it's also an indication of perhaps the state of the provincial economy or the workforce.

MS. MCPHEE: We could still have all the payers being federal or civil servants, we could still have them all garnished. We could have a 100 per cent collection rate and still have a 55 per cent compliance rate because the payers aren't paying; therefore, enforcement has had to take place.

MR. GAUDET: So now we know approximately 2,500 pay with no problem. So there are about 15,000 remaining. Out of the 15,000, how many of those cases do people pay, pay most or you have some difficulties with, I guess; and then my next question to that would be, how many out of the 15,000 you hear absolutely nothing from, you have extreme difficulties getting any money out of those individuals?

MS. MCPHEE: I don't have those figures. I can certainly get them, but I don't have them off the top of my head. My sense is - and I can't give you absolute numbers - by far the majority are those who are paying something. It's a very small number - and small is a relative number, is it 1,000, is it 2,000, to the recipient it doesn't matter, it's their case, it's important - that are the payers who will do everything and anything to avoid payment including leaving the jurisdiction.

The majority of payers are those who have fallen on either economic hard times or have found themselves in second, third and even fourth relationships and the money isn't enough to go around, don't know what to do about it, and they're paying something, but certainly not enough and we've had to go in to enforce.

MR. GAUDET: Deputy, in your opening comments you indicated that Nova Scotia has some agreements with the rest of Canada, with the U.S. I'm just curious, do we have more difficulties in collecting from individuals who are living in the province, or who are living outside of Nova Scotia, or are the numbers pretty well the same?

MR. KEEFE: It never occurred to me to even ask that question. That's a good question. Judith, do you know?

MS. MCPHEE: The numbers are probably pretty well the same and the reason I say that is, when a payer moves to another jurisdiction, if it is a reciprocating jurisdiction, what we are able to do is send that file to the enforcement program in that jurisdiction. Let's just say they move next door in New Brunswick, we'll send the file to New Brunswick. Now New Brunswick has an altogether different way of doing business than we do. They are still court-based. So their ability to enforce on that payer is a lot less than we have the ability, so it may very well be that they're not going to get any money out of him or her either. Send them out to Alberta, where they're likely working because jobs and economics are such that they likely are, then probably we're going to get some money.

The downside to going to one of those larger jurisdictions like Alberta, Ontario or B.C., it's very easy for payers to get lost. So if our recipient, our payee, who is our best source of information, doesn't know where the payer has gone, just knows that he might have gone to Alberta, or he might have gone to Ontario, there is a lot of work to be done to try to trace down that payer before they even start enforcing. So I think the reason that the numbers probably stay relatively constant, in terms of non-compliance, is when they move to another jurisdiction, there is a whole other framework that comes into play and there is a whole other set of problems that you face. In Nova Scotia, we likely know where they are, we just can't find their income. In the other provinces, it may even be difficult to find out where they are to start with.

MR. GAUDET: How many outside-of-Nova Scotia cases do we have here that we're following, people who are living in Nova Scotia?

MS. MCPHEE: I think it's just a tad over 1,000, who have come into Nova Scotia. It's more going out of Nova Scotia, our payers will go out, rather than have payers come in.

MR. GAUDET: I want to move on to the enforcement officers. Probably as an MLA, the complaint that I hear - and it's not, I would say, large numbers, but I hear from constituents maybe once a month, maybe two cases a month - is from individuals, from constituents, from clients, that they have a hard time speaking to their client or their enforcement officer. Deputy, you indicated earlier, we have about 48 staff. I'm just curious, how many enforcement officers do we have in the province?

MR. KEEFE: I think it's 22 enforcement officers.

MS. MCPHEE: Plus three.

MR. KEEFE: That's right, we've added three just recently.

MR. GAUDET: So there are 26?

MR. KEEFE: And 35,000 calls a month.

[9:45 a.m.]

MR. GAUDET: When I receive a call from a constituent who has difficulties trying to reach their caseworker or their enforcement officer, I usually call Judith's office, or I call the enforcement office in Yarmouth and I have to say, deputy, I'm overwhelmed with the support that your department offers MLAs. I usually do follow up with these individuals to see if they have been contacted, and every time, someone has gotten back to them. Again, I'm looking at the fact that these individuals practically have impossible jobs. I certainly would not want to sign up for a caseload of over 700 clients. No wonder these people sometimes get frustrated, they have a hard time to reach someone, to speak with someone. Looking at the number, 26, and we have seven regional offices. How are these enforcement officers broken down throughout the province? How many would the Yarmouth regional office have?

MR. KEEFE: I think we'll go to Ms. McPhee for the breakdown.

MS. MCPHEE: Yarmouth originally, in 1996, when we started, there were three positions - two enforcement officers and one enforcement assistant. Since that time, two staff have gone on to other jobs and those two positions have gone into Kentville, which left one enforcement officer in Yarmouth. That person has now moved on to a better job. So we don't have an MEP presence in Yarmouth at the present time, but going on to the other offices, you just happened to pick a bad example with Yarmouth at the present time.

In Kentville there are four enforcement officers, two enforcement assistants, and the supervisor resident in Kentville who supervises Yarmouth. Truro, New Glasgow and Amherst each have two enforcement officers, one enforcement assistant and a supervisor/ resident in Amherst who looks after New Glasgow, Truro and Amherst. In Sydney we have five enforcement officers - that's where our new REMO unit is going to be and I hope I get a chance to speak to that - with two enforcement assistants and a supervisor. Metro Halifax or metro Dartmouth is our largest office with six enforcement officers, two enforcement assistants, and a supervisor. We also have our payment processing unit and our enrolment unit there, each of which have three folks, plus we have a front-desk person in two of our largest offices which are Halifax and Sydney.

Communication is and has been, since the program inception, both a problem and a concern for us. We have a program policy that calls are documented and tried to be returned within two business days. Realizing that clients don't sit around by the phone waiting for us to call, very often you'll hear, I called but nobody called me back. We may very well have but, understandably, they weren't by the phone. That's why we brought in the info line and that's why the deputy mentions that we get, on average, 35,000

recipient calls on the info line per month. That info line allows clients to get very basic information about their case - the last payment, where it is in the enrolment process, what enforcement actions may have been taken.

We also, about three years ago, added that dial and deliver feature, which allows you, as the client, to call into the info line and leave a voice mail message for the enforcement officer. One of the many things that the enforcement officer does during the day is listen to those messages that come up on their computer and they then can go in and leave a return message for the client. The info line will, three times over varying times through the week, call that client back, and when the phone is picked up it simply says there's a message waiting for you. When the client calls back into the info line, they are able to get that message.

We have tried very hard to address the communication issues with our clients. The recipient clients are important. They have a story to tell. They have information to give us. They have a right to know what's going on with their case. Unfortunately, we don't have the person power to be able to take those calls individually. If they're not getting an answer at our offices it's because the person who's answering the phone is on the phone. That's why we have the turnaround time for call-backs, that's why we introduced automation. On the other hand, as the deputy mentioned in his introductory remarks, the payers have the direct line of the enforcement officer, because it is the relationship with the payer that the enforcement officer is looking to foster and is looking to move along so we can negotiate the payment.

MR. GAUDET: Let's go back to Yarmouth. Is the department looking at advertising or appointing someone?

MS. MCPHEE: We have advertised for the positions, and we're right now in conversation with the minister from Yarmouth about having the business run from Kentville. There will not be a presence in Yarmouth. There may not be a presence in Yarmouth. It will be run from Kentville. It has, indeed, been that way since - finally, we started to close out in Yarmouth in 2001 and we made the final transition in January of this year.

MR. GAUDET: Wouldn't it be beneficial to have an office in Yarmouth to allow these clients to come in to speak with their enforcement officer?

MS. MCPHEE: There is not really very much on-site traffic for that type, it's mostly done on the telephone or through the computer. We do have the stats of the on-site traffic. What folks were coming into the office in Yarmouth for mostly, was to drop off their payments, and they have not been able to do that since January, and haven't received a complaint and they seem to have adapted to the new way.

MR. GAUDET: Deputy, I'm just curious, when I look at the average caseloads here in Nova Scotia, I'm just wondering in terms of the amount of officers here in Nova Scotia per capita compared to other provinces, are we average, low, high - where does Nova Scotia situate itself within the rest of Canada?

MR. KEEFE: Well, I don't know per capita, but per case we're in either the high-middle or the middle-high - we are at the higher end of the range. We are in also an automatic enrolment, so you would expect we would be higher than - sorry, we're an opt-out province as opposed to an opt-in province, you would expect to be a bit higher.

We are high, and that's why we've added five new people to the program in the last year, three of them being enforcement officers. So there is a recognition of that. I think we would like to continue to bring that number down. When I look out across the whole Justice Department, I talk to these people, I find that they are a very keen and highly motivated people. There's no question we depend on that entirely.

There are other divisions or other parts of that - the Court Services Division, where I think we're equally lean but not under, I don't think we're suffering here. I think we're lean, but there's a big difference. You can feel when a program starts a downward spiral because people are starting to shut down - and these people are not shutting down. They're keen, they look you right in the eye when you ask them how things are going and they say it's busy, but I like it. Sometimes it's the dead offices that are the unhappiest, curiously enough.

So that's not my scientific assessment. I don't know what the people are like, what the managers are like in other provinces, but I'll just tell you I've been to a number of these offices very recently and people are up and people are keen, so they're doing a good job with a heavy load, but it's one I think they manage - and adding five people all told has helped.

MR. GAUDET: Obviously, you weren't speaking with the staff working out of the Yarmouth office, because . . .

MR. KEEFE: No.

MR. GAUDET: . . . all is not fine over there, obviously.

MR. KEEFE: Actually, it's very quiet in the Yarmouth office.

MR. GAUDET: When I'm looking at an average caseload of 728 - and you admit it's relatively high - what would be an acceptable number for caseloads?

MR. KEEFE: I can yield to Ms. McPhee on this. I don't know whether we can actually say that or not, but go ahead.

MS. MCPHEE: It would very much depend on the complexion of the caseload. Of those 728, all of them, we're finding out, are not workable. Something we've been doing to try to bring it down to a realistic figure is over the last two years we've embarked on what's called our file review - we're going through the files and finding out how many of the files are real files. We brought on a number of historic files when we took over in 1996, a number of files where the whereabouts of the payer is unknown, the whereabouts of the recipient is unknown, the court order has now expired, the children are no longer eligible, and we've started to go through and cull those. That's one of the ways we've been able to manage the constant of 2,000 new cases in a year and still be able to maintain the caseloads at around the 700 level. If we weren't doing the file review, we wouldn't be able to do that.

We've also found that we're starting to close out a lot of files and hopefully we will bring that number down to a realistic file number, because hiring somebody new and saying here you go, you have 700 cases, is just totally overwhelming. What we know is those 700 cases are not real, workable cases.

I can't give you the magic number. It would very much depend on what the caseload was made up of.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. The time has expired and we can come back to this topic.

I turn to Mr. Parent from the PC caucus.

MR. MARK PARENT: Thank you very much. I have a few questions, but I'm going to leave them and turn it over to my colleague. Before I do that, I just want to reiterate what Mr. Gaudet said. The Kentville office, the co-operation that we get with the people in Kentville is superb. It's perhaps one of the best departments that we work with in terms of being able to work with us - we're not always successful and I have a few small concerns I will come back to, but I really do want to commend the people working in the Kentville office, and I hope that you will pass that on to them on my behalf.

I'll turn it over to my colleague, the member for Bedford.

MR. PETER CHRISTIE: Good morning, everybody. I think in my first series of questions I would like to pursue, deputy, the discussion you mentioned about your relationship with the other provinces. You mentioned two things - you were, I think, if I can quote you correctly, you said you were coordinating the provinces as they look at

the big vision in this. The other comment you made is that you were an opt-out province. I wonder if you could just clarify those two points for me.

MR. KEEFE: I'm the chairman of what's called the Liaison Officers Committee of the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. The Liaison Officers Committee represents all 13 jurisdictions, provinces and territories, plus the federal government and their major departments, and they are generally policy and statistics people. It also includes the senior staff from the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. That committee is always chaired by a deputy minister responsible for justice in Canada. I took over about two years ago. I've always operated on the principle, and encouraged my senior staff to operate on the principle, that we can either be 3 per cent of the population or the chairman of the committee, what's your best bet? We've always put our hands up for these committees.

This is a pretty important committee, because this Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics is essentially a division of Stats Canada, so it is always, for want of a better term, hard-core statistical information about the justice system and also shows social outcomes in our society touching on the justice system. We feed an enormous amount of data in, and then get information back to the centre. So that's one of the committees I'm on.

I'll yield the floor in a minute to Ms. McPhee to talk about her FPT involvement, as well, because I think that's probably the critical piece here. The other thing, as far as being an opt-out or opt-in province, in an opt-in province, when you get an order either for support or an order under a divorce decree, at an opt-in province, the payee has to decide that that person wants the enforcement program to enforce that order. In an opt-out province, the order is automatically enrolled no matter what, no matter its source, no matter what the parties think. That, again, was done to remove a potential for perhaps a party in an overly powerful position to leverage that power and put the financially weaker party in a difficult position. So it simply removed that lever. That's why it was done. You can still opt out.

Now, I'll yield to Ms. McPhee, who can elaborate on that. I would also like her to talk about her federal/provincial/territorial involvement.

MS. MCPHEE: I'll follow along with the opt-out, we'll get that one. When orders are first made by the court, the parties can agree, at that time, to opt out of the program. In other words, if both sign a piece of paper saying we don't want to be in the Maintenance Enforcement Program, no questions asked, they are out, with the caveat that either party can apply to come back in at any time.

The second way is, after the order has been registered for awhile and things are going along, again, either party can apply to withdraw. At that time, at the application for

withdrawal, the director has discretion as to whether or not to let the file out of the Maintenance Enforcement Program. One can imagine, if a payer is asking to withdraw, he probably is not paying. So it's very unlikely that we're going to allow a payer to withdraw.

[10:00 a.m.]

However, there may be recipients who have come to find out that the payer is going to pay, has been paying, and in fact all Maintenance Enforcement is doing is slowing it down, because we're the middle person, we're getting the payment and then sending it out, and that obviously delays it. We talk with the recipient, we want to be sure that there are no domestic violence issues, that there are no threats or intimidation or anything like that going on. We will look at the payment history and see that the file is, in fact, in pay, and have every reason to believe it will continue to be in pay. Given that, we may allow the recipient to withdraw, again with the caveat that either party can come back in at any time, and re-enrolment in a case that has already been enrolled is much faster than the first time around. So those are the two ways that you can actually opt out of a mandatory program.

In terms of involvement across the country, the directors of maintenance enforcement in the provinces and territories have monthly conference calls, and we have an annual in-person meeting. We have the five-year work plan, and we're working on a number of issues under that work plan.

The second connection is that there is a coordinating committee of senior officials, family law. There is one in criminal law and other areas, but with the family law, it's a federal/provincial/territorial committee which looks at both policy and program around family law. I am the current co-chairman of that senior coordinating committee of senior officials, along with a federal representative and a policy person from Manitoba. From that, CCSO, the senior officials group, there are a number of subcommittees, one of which is an enforcement subcommittee which has representatives from the various regions in the country, and I represent the Atlantic Provinces on that enforcement subcommittee. So there's a lot interconnectivity, a lot of partnership - federal, provincial, territorial - that would be working on issues such as maintenance enforcement.

MR. CHRISTIE: In terms of the opt-in and opt-out provinces, how is it split across the country? Are most people out or most people in, or do you have the statistics on that?

MS. MCPHEE: Without going through province by province, it's pretty well half and half right now - half opt in or voluntary; half opt out or mandatory. It's probably still more on the mandatory side because the balance is probably more mandatory, but more

and more provinces and territories are going toward voluntary just because of the volume, just because of the resources.

MR. CHRISTIE: Your decision to opt out was done - when was that decision taken to become an opt-out province?

MS. MCPHEE: To be the mandatory program? When we were putting the program together in 1995.

MR. CHRISTIE: Have you had any reason to consider that decision, to consider changing that decision at all, or are you comfortable with the decision that was made?

MS. MCPHEE: We have had reason to examine it again. There are arguments for it on both sides.

MR. CHRISTIE: I'm just kind of interested in this, you mentioned when people get a court order, some of them can then say we're not going to be part of the mandatory program. Is that a large number of court orders in the province or a small number?

MS. MCPHEE: No, a very small number. Most people don't want to take the chance. They want to get in the program and then see how it goes, and that's fair. Then there are those numbers that - relationship breakdown doesn't have to be negative, doesn't have to involve enforcement, and for those who feel they are quite able to handle their affairs without the third party, they will opt out, but the number is small. I think more it's around an educative thing, if we did more education around what's actually available and what you can and cannot do. They probably come in by default and then realize that they might be able to get out.

MR. CHRISTIE: Is your FPT committee, as you deliberate on these issues across the country, looking at attempting to have federal legislation brought in to kind of standardize it across the country? Is that one goal, or is that not working? How is your committee thinking on that?

MS. MCPHEE: Oh, I would love to have that but the constitution won't let me. Family law, unfortunately, is a provincial responsibility. What we are working toward, though, is harmonized legislation, if I may put it that way, so that each of our jurisdictions will have, if not the same, very similar legislation so that payers who think they can go to New Brunswick or out to B.C., or any points in between, are likely going to face the same thing as they would here in Nova Scotia.

MR. CHRISTIE: That's just something that's years off, is kind of a dream, but the intention of it coming to reality is not very high?

MS. MCPHEE: Well, the harmonized legislation is coming to reality. When we make legislative amendments in Nova Scotia with any other jurisdictions looking at legislative amendments, we're sharing those all the time back and forth. Newfoundland and Labrador is just now going through a series of legislative amendments, and they've taken a lot of our powers. So we are doing that now, trying to get legislation that's very similar.

MR. CHRISTIE: I would like to come back to something the deputy mentioned in his opening comments about the sources of money and so on. You mentioned that the court order can deal with a whole series of things. I'm just wondering, is the issue of pensions, either spouse having pensions, are there contentious issues in that regard in terms of the maintenance enforcement?

MS. MCPHEE: The pension involvement is usually looked after at the time when the matrimonial assets are split. At the time of the divorce, the pension entitlement is dealt with at that point in time. What the director of maintenance enforcement has the authority to do is collapse a pension of a payer who is in default. Now, that type of enforcement power is very intrusive, so there are a number of tests that the director of maintenance enforcement has to go through before he can invoke that authority, and, further, the payer has more than one opportunity along the way for that not to happen.

MR. CHRISTIE: So that's a process of, well, let's call it the final process in terms of trying to get the payments going. Is there a large number, do you know? Is that something that's a significant part of the enforcement process, the collapsing pensions? Is it a small number?

MS. MCPHEE: We've done three to date, but I've had two people call me up and ask me to do it, and I said no in both cases. These were both payers in their 40s who were looking at getting pensions sometime 20 years hence and didn't think it was going to make any difference - and it does make a difference in terms of what you're going to get when you do retire, in terms of tax consequences if I were to collapse it, plus we hadn't taken, in my opinion, all the enforcement actions that we could have taken. So I wasn't going to accept their offer to collapse their pension.

MR. CHRISTIE: I was kind of interested in some of the techniques and process improvements that you were mentioning, such as the info line, your dial-direct delivery system and so on. I'm presuming that in a lot of systems the purpose of all of this is to take less enforcement time and use equipment to do it - are those techniques proving successful?

MS. MCPHEE: Yes, we have a very advanced automated system, and we're able to do a number of things using that system. Things like the info line and dial deliver take off those 35,000 calls a month and that allows the enforcement officers with the

caseloads that they have to do the enforcement work that they need to do, and that is very often tracing payers, very often trying to find out where the income sources are - payers who are in default won't call us up and tell us, the federal or the provincial civil servants, so that we can attach their income, we have to "hunt and peck" for a lot of this stuff. So any automation that we can have certainly frees up the person-time to be able to actually do some of the tracing that we need to do.

MR. CHRISTIE: Are there any circumstances where you are not able to attach to the person's pay or garnish their wages? Are there any circumstances where that's not possible?

MS. MCPHEE: By definition, if they're on commission we can't attach to a commission, but the payers who have income sources, and we know they have income sources but we just can't find them, are the self-employed or they work under the table - and there are a fair number of those. We have a fair number who work for families or relatives and friends. We issue garnishments, and they may not respond to the garnishment because of the relationship with the payer. We have, though, authority within our Act to go after that employer or the family or the relative, and we're beginning to have some success in court doing that - we do have to go to court, of course. We are having some success, so we're hoping the word of mouth of that spreads, the case law spreads, and that we'll have less and less non-compliance with garnishments, but it does happen.

MR. CHRISTIE: The deputy mentioned a couple of occasions where seasonal situations were harder to work with. Is that really one of your major problems, seasonal work, where people fish, lobster and that, and they're not working for a period of time? I guess my question is how do you try to enforce that if you know somebody is a seasonal worker? What do you do? Do you just anticipate they won't have income for a part of the year? Is that how you come at it?

MS. MCPHEE: Some seasonal workers will, when their catch is bought or whatever the case may be, pay the whole shot at once, and that's fine. Many will not, but then they go on employment insurance and we can garnish employment insurance; some will cross over and go on some type of training, federal training, and we can garnish the federal training; we can garnish income tax returns; we can garnish GST rebates - any federal income, and a number of fisher persons have federal income along the way, so we are able to garnish that.

In the old days we used to have a number of variable orders, which meant that it would say while you're working it's this amount and when you're not working it's that amount. With the child support guidelines coming in in 1997 those variable orders are less and less and less. We get a quantum set of say $200 a month that goes over the 12 months, and the person is expected to pay that, but if it's a seasonal employee, if they

don't pay up front then we're left with trying to find the other sources of income that they're living on the rest of the year to be able to attach.

MR. CHRISTIE: I presume from your discussion you have some information exchange with the CCRA which allows you to know that certain information is available or if people are receiving certain things, is that a fair statement?

MS. MCPHEE: We go through the federal Department of Justice in Ottawa. We send our garnishments there and they then do the "spider vein"out to the other federal departments through their automated system that feeds in.

We are very much at the directors level and trying to work with CRA and be able to, I'm going to use the word "infiltrate" because that's what it feels like to us, some of the financial information that CRA has. It's quite a bastion to try to get over.

MR. CHRISTIE: The word is farming, going farming for information as you go through, I guess.

MS. MCPHEE: Farming, okay.

MR. CHRISTIE: Just as we come back, I'm interested in your comments about Yarmouth and Kentville and so on. Are you experiencing the population shift that most other departments and/or municipalities are? Are you getting into the population shift where there are more in one region than another now? Is that something you're starting to experience?

MS. MCPHEE: Our three largest offices are metro Halifax, Sydney, and a very close third is the Valley, our Kentville office. The Valley seems to be experiencing a little bit of population increase. The others are remaining relatively stable. The growth right now appears to be in the Valley.

MR. CHRISTIE: I guess the other thing I'm wondering is, you mentioned in 1998 you had the recommendations, are there certain pieces of legislation or legislative changes that you're looking to do now that would be more relevant for you? Are there legislative changes you're considering to assist you in this process?

MS. MCPHEE: We just went through a series of amendments that were proclaimed in April of this year. I'm always looking at different ways, and I'm looking across the country to see how other provinces and territories are handling it. There are still some things that we perhaps could do, yes.

MR. CHRISTIE: Okay. So those are part of the constant change. As you look at other jurisdictions that are close to you, is it your intent to try to get closer to them or

have them get closer to you in terms of process because of the movement back and forth across the borders?

MS. MCPHEE: We're pretty close in the Atlantic Provinces with our legislation now - well, I shouldn't say that. New Brunswick is going to get there, they're working on it now. Newfoundland and Labrador, P.E.I. and Nova Scotia are fairly similar. Some of the western provinces have some authorities that we may like to have here in Nova Scotia, but the ways of doing business perhaps out West are a little bit different than they are in Nova Scotia too, so you need to have the infrastructures they have to be able to have some of these enforcement actions. Really, payers who leave here don't normally go to the other Atlantic Provinces, they're either going to go to Ontario or all the way out West.

MR. CHRISTIE: Lastly, you mentioned people doing cold calls and that you were starting to review the files. I presume as a court order comes in and it's due for someone to pay until the children go to college or whatever the deal is, at some point in time a lot of those cases start to fall off. As you start to look at the 17,000 cases, is it a fair assessment that a number of those would have been completed or they've met their terms of conditions, is that something you would expect to find?

[10:15 a.m. Mr. Mark Parent took the Chair.]

MS. MCPHEE: As we age, that certainly is what we expect, because we've only been since 1996, so we're only at 10 years. The new orders that would start coming in in 1996, those children are still relatively young. However, those cases that we took in from the old system, and there were a fair number of those at the time, they have started to drop off and will continue to drop off.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, the time has expired. I will now go to 11-minute rounds, beginning with the NDP. Ms. MacDonald.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Thank you. Back in September 2004, there were some amendments to the Maintenance Enforcement Act. I just want to quote a little bit from the Minister of Justice, Honourable Michael Baker, at that time. When introducing the bill, he indicated that these changes would authorize the program to register a maintenance order against a payer's personal property, not just his land, and also proposing to make sure a payer can't hide assets within a corporate entity. He used the example if a person owns a truck and transfers that truck to a corporation while that person continues to drive that truck, he's still using it, but he's trying to hide it under a different ownership so it can't be sold to meet his legal obligations under a court order. So this would be changed.

Another change would be to give the power to bring a regulation around charging interest or other penalties on arrears to make sure that the recipients receive their money on time and that there is no financial advantage in not making payments. So I want to ask you, have those changes been implemented in regulation and/or in policy? Have you been doing those?

MS. MCPHEE: The amendments were just proclaimed on April 1^st. We are in the process - they are not the Department of Justice's regulations to allow us to register with the personal property registry, but Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations, they have the regulations drafted, we have been consulted on them, they are in the process of being passed for us to be able to register a maintenance obligation against the personal property registry. The others are in force now. We're starting to consult on the regulations for the interest.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: So in other words, no, they are not in force right now, today.

MS. MCPHEE: With the exception of being able to register against the personal property and the interest, the other amendments are in force today. Those two are waiting for regulatory amendment.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Can you be really specific in what is happening now, and what isn't happening now, in terms of enforcement?

MS. MCPHEE: Of the amendments from . . .

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Yes, 2004.

MS. MCPHEE: I may not get them all, but I will probably get the bulk of them. One of the problems we had, when we do revoke a driver's licence, either after we've revoked or when we're right at the place of revoking, a payer will come in and make a payment arrangement. We accept that payment arrangement and the payer later defaults on that payment arrangement. Prior to this last round of amendments, when that happened we had to go back through the cycle again and give the payer the 21-day notice and go through the series of steps that we have to go through to do the motor vehicle revocation. The latest round of amendments, we do not have to do that. If we've done the process the first time and the payer defaults on the payment arrangement that he or she has made, we can go right to revocation again, without going through the notice period. That is in force now.

[10:18 a.m. Mr. James DeWolfe resumed the Chair.]

We increased our ability to demand information from third parties that may know something about the payers assets, employment, whereabouts. That is in force now. There were a number of housekeeping ones that obviously are in force. So I guess the backhanded way to answer you, of all the number of amendments, the only two that we are not operating today are the two requiring the regulatory amendment, which is the registration of the personal property registry and the interest, and the personal property registry regulations are there now waiting for approval. It is the regulations for the interest that we're just starting to think about.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Well, that is certainly disappointing, because the minister made a great to-do about getting tough on deadbeats. The areas that have been cited - people who are self-employed being able to hide their assets and their income in a corporate entity, and if you think about 13,500 orders not being paid in full or on time, to have that added stick, that interest is going to accrue when you don't pay in full and on time.

I was sitting here thinking as my colleagues questioned, back to this idea, I think it's very laudable that you are able to collect 78 per cent of what is ordered, but I continue to feel frustrated that people are not paying on time or in full. If employers in this province decided they weren't going to pay their wages in full and on time, we would have revolution in the streets. There would be a huge outcry. You can't manage your family, your household budgeting if your income that you are fully entitled to, to put groceries on the table and pay the rent, doesn't come on time and in full.

So it seems to me that there is still a significant problem if you have so many people not paying on time and in full. I don't think we can minimize that. I'm wondering if your department or if the government has ever considered a specialty unit of maybe two or three enforcement people who just deal specifically, exclusively, with the hard-core deadbeats who are clearly doing things to avoid their responsibilities, primarily to their children.

MS. MCPHEE: Before I answer that, I want to say that you reminded me of two of the amendments that are in force now. One is around a garnishee who does not comply with the garnishment. The amendment now is that we could hold that person personally liable; so, in other words, an employer who doesn't honour a garnishment - and we have those - we can now hold them personally liable. That's in force now, and we have a case that we're working on. The second one is the so-called piercing of the corporate veil, where we have payers who have divested themselves of their assets into a subsequent relationship or within the family, or whatever. That's in force now, and we have a case that we're looking at.

Getting to your point about having an enforcement group looking at those really hard-to-find cases, yes, we have done that. We were lucky enough to be able to find

somebody who came on board for a period of time to try to clean out a number of those cases. It certainly had some good results and it's something that we would look at again in the future.

MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I'm wanting to ask a few questions about another matter, and that is around the report in January that a member of your staff had been terminated and the concern that there was the misappropriation of perhaps up to $200,000. I don't want to get into the facts of that case, but I do want to talk about what it is that you have done to ensure that the public resources given to you in your office are secure and protected from misappropriation. So, first of all, how did this happen, what have you learned, and what have you done to ensure that there isn't misappropriation of public funds in the future?

MR. KEEFE: I'll answer that if I might; and I may ask Judith to come in at the end for some of the more detailed bits which I don't fully understand myself. First of all, the genesis of this - the last time this program was audited was in March 2001. We had an internal audit group in the Department of Justice. As I think people know, the internal audit was centralized and certainly, from a government-wide perspective, that was a sound decision because it allowed a corporate view to be taken, where internal audit ought to take place. So it makes sense and there is no real quibble with that decision at all. What's the saying - " He who defends everything, defends nothing." ? - so naturally you would put your auditors where the big bucks are.

It did leave the Department of Justice in a situation - we have a fairly large number of offices, over 70, I think, province- wide, many of which take small cash payments or small cheques, that sort of thing, so we do have a vulnerability in that field.

We were unable to re-establish our internal audit section until we've had a couple years of relative, frankly, budget stability in the last couple of years, and so I made the decision really over the Summer of 2005 that we would re-establish internal audit, and in discussions with my executive director of finance and administration about how we would re-establish that, I asked him should we be hiring outsiders to do some internal audits or should we be asking the internal audit section of Finance to do something in the meantime, because it takes a long time to establish positions. He suggested that maintenance enforcement would be a good one - and not because he thought there was any dishonesty there, but he said it's a high volume, it's a large amount of money, high volume, small amounts of money, and in any situation like that some things will be paid twice, some things will be credited to the wrong account and you find out about it later, that sort of thing.

So we had no reason to be suspicious per se of any malfeasance, but we had reason to believe that there would be mistakes. So we, working through internal audit with the Department of Finance, retained a firm whose name escapes me at the moment,

but, anyway, an audit firm, and having announced there would be an audit, this person came forward and indicated this person had taken a sum of money in the approximate amount of $200,000.

Consequently we notified the Halifax Regional Police, we also commissioned a forensic audit in addition to the regular audit. The forensic audit is still underway and that's a complete and very thorough examination. We terminated that person and we were able to re-hire, on a temporary basis, a former incumbent who had retired.

We know how the - I'll say $200,000, I don't want to be pinned down to a number because the forensic audit isn't done yet and so far we only have the word of a dishonest person - we know how that person said the money was taken and it was by utilizing - as I understand it and I ask Ms. McPhee to correct me if I'm wrong - a feature of the automated system we had been told was "Read Only". That person found a way to alter it. This is in the administrative section, so the problem in the administrative section is, nobody is out money except the taxpayers who won't know about it whereas a payee will notice they didn't get paid and our records would say, yes, you did or not.

The person who did this was able to exploit that relatively small stream of money, but still a large significant amount of money in our terms, basically fooling the software in a way that curiously enough even our internal audit done in 2001 had indicated the checks and balances were in place. The forensic auditor has indicated since, look, some employees steal and they will find a way around everything, you just live with it.

That is how we believe it has been done. The forensic audit of course will be turned over to the police.

MR. CHAIRMAN: We will now turn to the Liberal caucus. Mr. Gaudet.

MR. GAUDET: I want to return to the caseloads of our enforcement officers. In the first round we heard that we have approximately 25 enforcement officers - three were hired last year, so we have approximately 25 enforcement officers. Deputy, are you looking at expanding the number of enforcement officers in our province?

MR. KEEFE: Not currently. We've just recently added the five and we're bringing on stream the new enforcement measures, so we'll absorb that and then we'll see where we are.

MR. GAUDET: My next question, I would like to know, how much time on average does a case receive from an officer in a given year?

MR. KEEFE: I'll refer that question to Ms. McPhee.

MS. MCPHEE: I don't know that I can answer it with any certainty. It very much depends on the case. Let's say I'm looking at my default list today and the payer has an income source, it takes less than 15 minutes for me - sorry, less than 5 minutes - to issue the garnishment to be able to attach to that payer's income source.

[10:30 a.m.]

If, however, I have a case in default and I don't know if the payer has an income source, I don't know if the payer's working, or even worse, I don't even know where the payer is, that's going to take a lot of energy and a lot of time. It very much depends on what type of case we're looking at and what information I have about that case, what information that recipient has about that case. There are very many cases where the recipients don't have the information about the non-custodial parent to be able to help us find the income source. So I really can't answer with any degree of certainty.

MR. GAUDET: The reason I was asking, we've been hearing some reports from individuals who are currently in the program, especially from mothers, who are fed up with the program because unfortunately the payer is not providing any payment to the spouse or children. When I look at the number, again, of the average caseloads these enforcement officers have, and at the same time how much time would they be spending on caseloads or on an individual case here in Nova Scotia or from outside Nova Scotia and, at the same time, how much work would be involved? If it's just five minutes to issue a court order or to garnish the wages and, at the same time, how much work is involved with trying to track someone down that's outside Nova Scotia, to me, it's obvious the need for more enforcement officers to try to support these families. When I heard the deputy say there's probably no consideration right now given to hire additional enforcement officers, at the same time we have somewhere around 15,000 cases where people aren't fully paying their payment, there's definitely a need for more people to help out families here in Nova Scotia.

I'm just trying to understand, deputy, on one side there's probably no need for more resources, but, in reality, I strongly believe, after hearing some of the information that has been given here this morning, there probably is a real need to hire additional people. I'm having a hard time understanding, again, why there's probably no need to hire additional enforcement officers.

MR. KEEFE: I was answering your question, are there any plans to add additional officers, and I said there are no plans to add additional officers at this time. We've pursued a number of strategies, and adding additional officers is one of them. Adding enforcement power is another, and adding enforcement power says the benefit of when you can get to assets or garnish other streams of income and discover them, then it's a

lot less work for enforcement officers to track people. Also, we've pursued automation very aggressively.

I don't take issue with what you are saying. What I'm saying is that we have parameters and we've pursued all avenues to make the program as effective as it can be, and its effectiveness has steadily increased, and I fully anticipate its effectiveness in collecting money will increase - April 1^st the vast majority of these new powers have come on stream, so I'm hoping to see a continued improvement. Any part of my department could use more people. Right now I'm trying to get an internal audit section re-established.

MR. GAUDET: I understand. Deputy, in your opening comments you listed different measures we have in place to recoup payments. I noticed in the media recently, in Alberta, they were making changes in their program to allow for more restrictions to be placed on fishing licences, hunting licences, on lottery winnings . I'm wondering, is this something that we have in place in our province?

MR. KEEFE: We have lottery winnings by administrative arrangement.

MS. MCPHEE: The difference with the hunting and fishing, if I may, in Alberta, before you get your hunting or fishing licence you get this thing called a blue card or a white card, and that's how you get to have your fishing or hunting licence. We don't have that in Nova Scotia. When I was responding to Mr. Christie earlier, I was talking about different infrastructures. As you know, our fishing and hunting licences, you can get them from corner stores, so we don't have the centralized database that Alberta has to be able to attach to. We did bring that forth in 1996 when we were introducing the legislation as a potential licence restriction, but because our infrastructure is not such that we have the central registry that we can say all these people are lining up a central database and we're not going to allow them to have licences, we haven't been able to effect that yet. That's the difference between us and Alberta.

MR. GAUDET: In Nova Scotia, are we looking at introducing new measures or new powers to help recoup payments? Are we looking at considering something, introducing something else to try to increase, I guess, our percentage of people who are paying their court orders?

MS. MCPHEE: Well, we just went through this latest round of legislative amendments that have come into force as of April. I, as the director, am always looking across the country to see what they're doing, to see what other jurisdictions are doing, to see what the States are doing in terms of enforcement, and any time I see something that I think might be effective or might be interesting, certainly we're going to bring it forward and we're always looking for other things, but Nova Scotia's legislation is pretty powerful.

MR. GAUDET: So comparing Nova Scotia's legislation with the rest of the country, where do we fit? Are we high, are we in the middle of the pack?

MS. MCPHEE: Oh, we're up there and we came in at a time in 1996 when programs were already established. So we were able to pick the cherries from those programs and we were able to establish our own and now, as I say, it's other programs that are taking from our legislation, such as Newfoundland and Labrador. Even Ontario made a series of legislative amendments and they took from us. New Brunswick is modelling their program that they're introducing on ours. So I mean we're fairly there in terms of our authorities.

MR. GAUDET: I want to shift back to people who aren't paying fully. We've heard earlier of approximately 15,000 cases that don't comply fully to their maintenance agreements and also we've heard that in Nova Scotia almost 95 per cent of the cases involve children. So, obviously, this means that there is much-needed funding that's not getting to our children in this province and to the parents who need the assistance to properly raise the child in a good environment. I guess my first question is, I'm trying to understand, why don't people pay in this province? Is that a reflection of our program? You know, I'm trying to understand why there are 15,000 people here who aren't paying fully what they're supposed to be paying.

MR. CHAIRMAN: The time has expired for the Liberals, so I would ask for a fairly quick answer, thank you.

MS. MCPHEE: From the payers whom I've talked to personally and that my staff have talked with, there are a number of reasons. The most obvious one is the change in economic circumstance, but the more emotional reasons are that their relationship breakdown was so acrimonious that they think they're paying the recipients. They're not realizing that it's going to the children. So emotion comes into it. They're just simply not going to pay because they have these feelings against the person with whom they have broken the relationship.

There are cases where payers enter into second, third, fourth families and there is just simply not enough money to go around. There are cases when they have VISA payments at 18 per cent or 21 per cent interest on top of that, they're going to pay that first and then they're going to pay the child support. Child access, they're not getting access to the child and, therefore, they're not going to pay support. Those are some of the reasons that I've been given as to why they may not pay.

MR. CHAIRMAN: We'll now turn to the PC caucus. Mr. Parent.

MR. PARENT: Thank you very much and, as I mentioned, we have an excellent relationship with the people in Kentville and I commend them. In our office we have

similar sorts of complaints that have arisen here. One of the ones that's typical from those who are having trouble getting maintenance enforcement is that they know that their ex-spouse is working under the table, but because they're working under the table it's hard to garnish any wages. There is a fair underground economy in Nova Scotia that I've discovered. Are there any ways in which we can get access at that money or is that really a black hole that we can't really access?

MS. MCPHEE: It is very much a black hole and those who are working under the table, of course, you know, income tax isn't being deducted and so we don't have the access to the federal income that we may have in other employers. That's one thing that we're working with other directors across the country to see how we can address the problem, but it is a significant problem for us and one which we haven't solved yet.

MR. PARENT: Now, supposing someone falls into that, we'll take a wife whose ex-husband is working under the table. We can't access maintenance enforcement. Do you have some sort of relationship with Community Services that would help, that you work closely with Community Services to help support that person in the interim?

MS. MCPHEE: Community Services has an Assignment of Maintenance Program which means that if the custodial parent, usually the mother, does qualify for family benefits, they assign their child support rights to Community Services. Community Services make up the cheque so that the custodial parent is receiving the money and then when maintenance enforcement collects the money from the rightful obliger, who is the payer, we return that money to Community Services.

MR. PARENT: How about if they're not on Community Services though, but because they are not getting money from maintenance enforcement now really do qualify for it?

MS. MCPHEE: If they qualify for family benefits, Community Services certainly are going to give them family benefits, but to be perfectly honest with you, there is probably a huge strata of folks who are just not qualified for family benefits, for single parents who don't qualify for family benefits and who are on a single income, and certainly need the maintenance money and there is nothing to help them in between.

MR. PARENT: So there is a gap there as well. Do other provinces have any way of helping those people?

MS. MCPHEE: Other than the Assignment of Maintenance Program, the only province that I'm aware of is Quebec, and they have a whole different way of doing maintenance enforcement, but if they are sure that they are going to be able to recoup the money from the payer, they have a system where they will advance three months' worth

of maintenance to the recipient, but they're the only province that I know that has such a program.

MR. PARENT: How long has Quebec had the plan like that?

MS. MCPHEE: Oh, gosh, off the top of my head, I don't know, but it has been years.

MR. PARENT: But no other province has adopted it? There is a gap there as well. Flipping over to the other side, a payer, someone who is paying. I've had one incident where the person was one day late with their cheque and felt that they were then, with the letters coming from the department, treated almost like a criminal. They were quite upset. They wanted to care for their children. They weren't a deadbeat father in any sense. They wrote a series of letters which I think they wrote to you, deputy. Do people know their cases well enough that there is a different approach taken to someone who maybe is late for some procedural matter or some reason that makes some sense, versus those who are trying to avoid payment?

MS. MCPHEE: Yes, the normal way, cases that are current accounts - and that case sounds like it may have been a current account - what normally would happen would be they would get a phone call saying, your payment isn't in, you're normally a good payer, is there a problem here? We've had cases where they've gone to Florida and forgot to send their payments and that type of thing. Certainly, we look at the payment history, to figure out what we're going to do. If it has been in pay we would make a phone call. We would send a letter normally before we would take an enforcement action. So, yes, to answer your question, we do look at the case and the circumstances around the case, and depending what that looks like would govern what action we may take.

MR. PARENT: One of the other problems, and I think my colleague from the NDP mentioned it, that we run into a fair amount is that the person will pay but they will not pay on the same time each month and it is a problem when someone is trying to create a budget for a household, many times they're living right on the margins. When they might not get any payments for three months and then get a whole bunch in a row, it is very difficult. What is the solution to that? I know it is a difficult sort of thing, particularly with seasonal work, but it is, for the person on the other end, very difficult to manage their money properly.

[10:45 a.m.]

MS. MCPHEE: What we try to do if it is a payer who is staggering out their payments, we try to educate the payer to tell them that very thing, how important it is that their children can rely on that money on a consistent basis, on a consistent date, each

month. Similarly, if it is an employer - and this is where we run into problems with employers - they have someone doing payroll for them in another province or their payroll deduction is such a time where they can't necessarily get there on the day the order is due, but they should be able to get there at a consistent time of the month. We do the same thing, we try to educate them, how important it is that this money gets there.

With the payer who is consistently late or the time is all over the map in terms of when they're going to submit their money, we quite frankly will threaten them that we are going to do the garnishment. You know, you're not paying when you should be paying and there doesn't appear to be any reason, so we're going to do it for you. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't then we will do the wage garnishment. The unfortunate thing when you do the wage garnishment, you're then somewhat tied into the payroll of the employer. So where the payer may have been paying on the 15^th of the month, you're now in a situation where you're only going to get money once a month or twice a month, or whatever, and again we have to do the educative thing with the recipient, with the custodial parent, to let them know that things have changed.

MR. PARENT: And that's a problem I've faced. Sometimes a payer, I suspect, and I have no way of proving this, that the technique of not paying on a consistent basis is a tool they use to punish the other person and, unfortunately, the people being punished are the children from the marriage. When we enforce maintenance orders from other jurisdictions, or when they enforce ours - and this may seem like a silly question, but a non-lawyer is asking it - if we enforce, say, Alberta, somebody moved from Alberta to here, or more typically from here to out there, what system do they fall under in terms of the maintenance enforcement, the province that they left?

MS. MCPHEE: The province where the payer is, the law of the province where the payer is.

MR. PARENT: So if a payer is out in Alberta, they're following the Alberta system versus our system?

MS. MCPHEE: That's right.

MR. PARENT: What sort of problems does that cause, or does it?

MS. MCPHEE: Not in terms of the law - the enforcement powers are what they are in other jurisdictions. As I spoke to earlier, not all of us are the same. Where it becomes a problem - and this gives me an opportunity to talk about our reciprocal unit - is when payers go to the larger jurisdictions like Ontario, Alberta and B.C., they then become a number in a caseload of 200,000 or 300,000 as the case may be. It takes time to get the court order registered to start with so that they have jurisdiction and then,

secondarily, it takes time for them to perhaps find the payer, find an income source, and so on and so forth.

Our enforcement officers right now in Nova Scotia have these reciprocal cases sprinkled in their caseload. In other words, the 2,000 who have moved outside of Nova Scotia into a reciprocating jurisdiction are sprinkled amongst those, right now, 22 enforcement officers who are handling caseloads.

With our reciprocal unit that we're introducing in Sydney with two enforcement officers and an enforcement assistant, we are going to bring all those files into that particular unit so that staff of three will develop an expertise and be able to set up communication with the other provinces and territories so that we will be able to streamline the information that we're able to get. We will be able to streamline who we send information to so that we're hoping to compress the time that it takes for them to enforce but, more importantly, compress the time that it takes for us to get information that we can give back to the custodial parent to let them know what's going on with their case.

That's a big complaint that you will hear about cases that have gone outside of Nova Scotia, we can't find anything out about them. Well, my staff have difficulty finding out about them in some cases. So we've centralized that function. We've just got the staff. We're building the policy and procedure now, and hopefully we're going to improve on our service on the reciprocal cases.

MR. PARENT: And typically what is the lag time if someone moves to another province before that other province's system kicks in?

MS. MCPHEE: Well, in Ontario, for instance, it can take anywhere between six months and a year to even get the order registered in a court and that's just the bureaucracy and the volume in Ontario, in the population in Ontario. Whereas here in Nova Scotia, if an order is coming the other way, you know, we can have it registered in 24 to 48 hours, I mean a significant difference in the registration. Once it's registered then it goes to the enforcement program and, again, it can be anywhere, depending on their caseload and depending on the information. Now, remember that most payers who leave Nova Scotia don't leave forwarding addresses and information. So, again, it takes a lot more time and effort to try to find something that you can enforce against once they're in your jurisdiction.

MR. PARENT: Let's hope this new pilot works well because that's a problem as well. Thank you, I've run out of time I believe.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I want to thank Mr. Keefe and his staff, Ms. Mosher and Ms. McPhee, for providing us with a great deal of information today. I also want to thank our

Auditor General and Deputy Auditor General for their indulgence and our clerk, Ms. Stevens. In the remaining time you could provide us with closing comments. Mr. Keefe.

MR. KEEFE: Thank you very much. I think I can be very brief. First of all, one thing that we should note, much has been made of the fact the number of cases per enforcement officer is 728. The creation of the REMO unit, or ISO unit, depending on which acronym you use, will actually take 10 per cent off the top of that caseload, once it's up and running. My arithmetic is not very good, but I think that would work out to about 660 or 650, somewhere in that notion. So there's an almost instant improvement there. That's some consolation, I think, to the member's point about that caseload.

There was one question about the Yarmouth office. I think it's important to be clear, the Yarmouth office is currently vacant, not closed. There's nobody in it but it is not closed. No final decision has been taken on that, but currently maintenance cases from Yarmouth are being handled from Kentville. We actually haven't had any complaints about that, because it is a telephone system by and large. That's an important point.

The final point I wanted to make in talking about the loss from the program, I've made a point to get to the office where the loss took place. In fact, three of us were there and had a chance to sit down and have coffee with the people there. These are really good people, and they were very shocked by this, frankly. It has been a bit of a tough thing for them. I think it speaks very well for them, and I simply want it put on the record that we have really top-notch people, and this is not an indication - I said to them that day, I do not take this as an indication of anything but the behaviour of one person acting in isolation. We are not yet to the bottom of that. We will be at the bottom of that. I would be simply and absolutely shocked and amazed if we found that it extended any further in this program at all, in fact I'm quite sure it didn't. We haven't had any indication thus far that it did. I have a lot of confidence in those people, and I simply wanted to put that on the record.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. The committee will be meeting here in the Chamber next Wednesday with representatives from the Department of Education as we look into issues concerning special education and school user fees. The subcommittee is going to attempt to meet, I believe, Tuesday next, and the Chair will be reporting, at the Wednesday meeting, the results of that meeting.

Having said that, the committee stands adjourned.

[The committee adjourned at 10:54 a.m.]