The CRA Punishes Two-Household Families

by | Sep 14, 2026 | Advocacy, Divorce and Separation

The CRA Punishes Two-Household Families

I originally wrote this piece in 2018 and have advocated for change ever since.

When I wrote this, I was a part-time single mom and a self-employed Chartered Professional Accountant. For years, I’d worked in the Collaborative Practice as a financial neutral, supporting families as they navigated separation and divorce, and much of that time went to helping recently separated clients navigate the Canadian tax system. What I found was an unfair, unnecessary burden placed specifically on two-household families, one that has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with which words a lawyer happened to use in their separation agreement.

Here’s the specific mechanism, and it applies specifically to families with two or more children in a shared parenting arrangement: single parents can claim the eligible dependant credit for one child, worth roughly $3,100 (in British Columbia, it varies by province) today, but only if they don’t have a legal obligation to pay child support. Canadian and provincial family law require every parent who parents less than 60 percent of the time to contribute financial support based on their income. When two parents in a shared arrangement earn different amounts, the higher earner typically owes the lower earner more. Lawyers often simplify this in the separation agreement by netting the two obligations into a single “offset” or “set-off” payment, partly because most family lawyers aren’t fluent in the fine print of Canadian tax law, and partly because it’s simpler for families. Coordinating two separate payments between parents takes trust- trust that the higher earner will actually pay, when a lower-income parent often can’t front their own share and hope it comes back.

That single wording choice determines everything. If the agreement uses offset language, the CRA treats the higher-earning parent as the only one with a legal child support obligation, and denies them the credit outright. If the agreement instead states that each parent pays the other separately, both parents qualify. Two families in the exact same financial and parenting arrangement can end up with completely different tax outcomes, purely because of how one lawyer phrased a clause differently than another.

My own family’s agreement used offset language. My co-parent and I have shared parenting since separating in 2013, and I was, and still am, the lower-earning spouse. When I filed my first post-separation return, I went through a one-time review to prove our separation and shared parenting. After that, I had no trouble at all getting the eligible dependant credit reflected on my own taxes, along with exactly half my Canada Child Benefit entitlement, correctly reflecting our shared arrangement.

My former spouse, the higher-earning parent, had a much harder time. The CRA automatically defaults a child’s tax record to the mother every time, and doesn’t cross-reference between spouses’ files. Even after I told them directly that we shared custody and proved it on my end, the CRA still required him to separately prove the children were his, a step that was both time-consuming and hard to navigate. Most families never get told this step exists, which likely means a lot of separated families are losing out on half their Canada Child Benefit without ever knowing why.

Then came the actual Eligible Dependent Credit fight. The CRA denied it for the 2015 tax year because of our agreement’s offset language. I responded to the review on his behalf, was denied again, then filed a formal notice of objection, and eventually won, after roughly ten hours of my own professional time. The following year, he was denied again, and the entire cycle restarted: a new review response, a new objection, another copy of our full separation agreement, over a hundred pages, sent to the CRA. That agreement has now been sent to them seven separate times. I don’t know where those seven copies went, or why they aren’t simply kept on file.

If it takes ten hours of dedicated professional expertise to win back roughly $3,100 for one family, an average family without that expertise can’t sustain the fight. Only families with real resources can pursue it, and those tend to be exactly the families who need the credit least. The families who need it most are the ones most likely to give up.

In 2022, I took the issue directly to the Minister of Finance’s office, and they forwarded it to a manager within the CRA’s Appeals Branch. She called me and later confirmed by email that she understood the problem precisely: that under a set-off agreement, only the lower-earning parent gets approved for the credit, while an agreement stating the same two amounts separately gets both parents approved, even though the actual legal child support obligation is identical either way. She asked for the full paper trail from our 2015 and 2016 fights, notices of reassessment, objections, and correspondence, and told me the CRA was actively working on it.

She also confirmed something I’d suspected but never had proof of: in 2016, my co-parent’s credit was approved only after I sent a letter informing the CRA that he had no legal obligation to provide child support to me. This wasn’t true. It turned out I hadn’t actually convinced the CRA that he lacked the sole obligation. What I’d really done was tell them I wasn’t holding him to it. I’d negated our child support agreement in writing, on my children’s behalf, something I wasn’t actually allowed to do. The CRA accepted it anyway, while acknowledging, separately and in writing, that the underlying issue remained unresolved for every other family in the same position.

I believed her when she said this would get fixed. When I followed up later, she had moved departments, and the issue seemed to have moved with her, forgotten rather than resolved.

None of this is about hardship in the dramatic sense. It’s about a family that made shared parenting work, splitting time and responsibility fairly, only to have the tax system quietly punish the specific wording a lawyer chose years ago, wording neither parent had any reason to think mattered at the time. And it’s a system that, even when someone inside it agrees the problem is real, still lets it disappear the moment the right person moves to a different desk.

Two-household families already navigate enough. The tax system shouldn’t be another hurdle they have to fight through, especially over a technicality nobody warned them about in the first place, and especially once the government’s own officials have confirmed, in writing, that the technicality is unjust.

Luck Shouldn’t Be Part of It

by | Sep 2, 2026 | Advocacy, Divorce and Separation

Luck Shouldn’t Be Part of It

When telling the story of my divorce, at some point I say: I was lucky that when my spouse and I separated, the news was spotlighting the Collaborative Process. A news article led us to find the lawyers who helped us transform our lives and get us back on track.

When I discovered my spouse had filed for divorce, I was in a terrible emotional state. I spent my days anxious. What would become of our children, and us? Where would we live? How would we survive? Some days I seriously wondered if I’d make it to the next one, half-convinced I might have a heart attack from the stress alone. Our seven-year-old and four-year-old sons picked up on it all. Our eldest broke out in cold sores and started isolating himself from the rest of us. Our youngest had frequent breakdowns, more screaming, more hitting than we’d ever seen from him.

After my first consultation with the lawyer who’d become my Collaborative lawyer, I actually considered hiring a bulldog instead. But everything I kept reading said the same thing: children suffer most when their parents have a high-conflict divorce.

Choosing a Collaborative lawyer was a hard call at the time because I genuinely believed I was right and that I’d win if I took my spouse to court. I didn’t understand yet that when one spouse wins, the children lose.

I also didn’t think a Collaborative lawyer could actually get my spouse to engage honestly and productively. What I didn’t understand was that the law here already has a strong default built in: the starting point for financial separation is fifty-fifty on assets and income. Policy and case law have built a family law process specifically designed to leave both spouses starting from roughly the same financial position afterward. A bulldog lawyer might have made my spouse look bad in front of a judge, but it wouldn’t have moved the financial outcome much at all. It would have cost me thousands more, and bought nothing but more conflict inside my own family.

Our lawyers helped us reach something we could both grudgingly live with, and helped keep our conflict away from our kids.

Today our children are sixteen and thirteen. We just celebrated our eldest’s birthday together: pitch and putt, dinner at his favourite restaurant.

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs there is, and juggling full-time parenting on a part-time basis has never been easy. My ex and I have navigated plenty of hard parenting decisions over the past nine years, but fortunately, we navigated them together, for our kids.

I’m grateful we found lawyers who understood that the real work of separating is keeping the family together while the finances come apart.

And I’m doing what I can to make sure luck stops being the deciding factor for families going through this. It shouldn’t come down to chance. The default family law system needs to put families and children first, as a baseline, not as something you happen to stumble into.

Evolution Vs. Change

Evolution Vs. Change

by | Feb 3, 2024 | Divorce and Separation

“Life is a journey, not a destination.” “Life is beautiful.”

I stare at both mantras daily as I eat dinner with my kids. They stare out at me from placemats my parents gave me for Christmas ten years ago.

I wholeheartedly agree with my placemats, but I haven’t lived my life like a journey, despite that agreement. Instead, I’m always packing my bags to get somewhere, still figuring out what to take with me. Every day I sort through my “stuff” and fret that I’ve forgotten something or packed incorrectly.

But something has shifted this past year.

Defining what has shifted is hard. It’s more of a feeling. What has changed? I can only identify it by noticing what is missing, and what is missing is anxiety, and anxiety’s friend, depression. It is ironic, but I had anxiety that my anxiety was missing for about six months. I felt oddly “flat,” and I wondered if I was depressed for a few more months. I’ve still had many moments of anger, grief, happiness, and boredom over the past few months, but they’ve felt different. The emotions lasted as long as they needed to, then they were gone. The anxiety, depression, and drive that pushed me onward, which usually took over from the first emotional trigger, had disappeared.

What happened?

For a while I kept trying to find an answer to why I felt different. Something clear and concrete must have suddenly caused me to change. The headaches I started to develop, most likely caused by perimenopause, were perhaps a sign of brain cancer, and maybe brain cancer was impacting my emotions  (one thought I had). Or maybe the transition from peri to post-menopause had caused a sudden shift.

I looked for one thing to explain the shift, and I minimized all the subtle changes I’d made over the past ten years. I did not acknowledge that the shift could relate to my work to live in alignment with my values, to slow down, to live in the present. I didn’t recognize the ten years of life experience and daily challenges I’d given myself through day-to-day living as a full-time single parent on a part-time basis, navigating new relationships, and building my own business. I forgot about the ten years of coaching and training, the mistakes I had to address and hold myself accountable for, and the successes that taught me what works and what doesn’t.

Instead, I assumed I had magically changed, or imagined something was wrong.

Our world celebrates social media-worthy, groundbreaking change with fireworks and celebration. Our world treats change like a destination we suddenly arrive at, not an evolution that took years.

Then, when we don’t change, and our world doesn’t change, we give up. We throw up our hands, say it’s impossible, and succumb to anxiety or depression. We carry on as we always have, feeling heavy, assuming nothing will ever change, living to survive and hoping that one day we’ll find that elusive life destination where we’re happy, where everything works as it should, where we’ll finally be done. Where we’ll have accomplished “life.”

Change takes time.

In life, we search for that defining moment, a single catalyst that transforms us into a new version of ourselves. But change isn’t a destination. It’s an evolution, and most of it happens while you’re too busy packing your bags to notice.

The Slowest Way (But Really, It’s Faster)

by | Dec 27, 2023 | Divorce and Separation

The Slow Way (But Really, It’s the Fastest)

There’s a version of my own separation agreement on page five that laid out my plan to get my old job back. It was there because everyone around me- lawyers, family, well-meaning friends- assumed that was obviously the right direction. I assumed it too, for a while. It took me years to notice that plan wasn’t actually mine. It was just the most well-worn path in sight, and I’d stepped onto it without really choosing it.

I think that’s how most people get stuck. Not because they lack options, but because the only paths they can see are the ones everyone else is already walking.

From what I’ve seen, people usually try one of three ways out.

The first is waiting to be rescued, waiting for something outside yourself- a partner, a job, a lucky break- to show up and fix what feels broken. This rarely works, mostly because you’re handing the change itself to something you don’t control. And even when it does work for a while- a new relationship, a new hobby, a fresh distraction- the lift is usually temporary. Eventually you’re back where you started, except now there’s one more person or pursuit tangled up in the mess too.

The second is fixing yourself to match somebody else’s picture of a good life. This was my path. I had a version of my future handed to me, mostly built from other people’s expectations, and I spent real effort trying to make myself fit it, rather than asking whether it fit me. This path can look like real progress from the outside: you’re working hard, achieving things, checking boxes, but it’s often just as unmoored as staying still, because none of it is actually pointed anywhere you chose. The particular cruelty of this path is that even when you reach the destination, you usually find out you’re still unhappy, and now you’ve spent years getting there.

The third is blowing it all up. Something dramatic, a sudden decision made out of built-up anger or exhaustion from the first two paths not working. It does get you moving. But you rarely get to choose what happens next, and the fallout from that kind of change can take years to clean up, sometimes longer than it would have taken to walk away from the wrong path more carefully in the first place.

There’s a fourth way, though it’s harder to spot, because from the outside it looks exactly like standing still. Mostly because it is, for long stretches. The difference is what’s happening underneath: one decision at a time, so gradual you can’t actually see the path forming until you’re already partway down it.

Standing still is uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel like progress, and everything in you wants to grab the next visible direction just to feel like you’re moving again. But trust the stillness long enough, and something shifts. You notice you’re already closer to your own path than you thought, not because you found it somewhere out there, but because you finally stopped long enough to see it was already forming underneath you.

I eventually got off my own version of path two. Not through any dramatic reckoning, just an ordinary Tuesday where I finally looked at the life I was building and realized none of it was mine. I hadn’t chosen the job, hadn’t chosen the version of “fine” I was aiming for, hadn’t chosen most of what I was working so hard to become. Once I saw that clearly, I couldn’t unsee it.

The other three paths feel faster. They rarely are. Path one costs you the time spent waiting, however long that turns out to be. Path two costs you years spent becoming someone you weren’t. Path three costs you however long it takes to clean up whatever the explosion left behind. None of them show you the bill upfront.

The slow way is the opposite. It feels like it’s taking forever precisely because you can feel it happening in real time. The cost is visible from the start instead of arriving later, all at once, disguised as something else.

Zip, Zero, Nada

by | Nov 20, 2023 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

Zip, Zero, Nada

Does salary level determine a job’s worth, or a person’s?

Most of us would say “no way,” including myself, yet actions and behaviour speak louder than words.

When I was earning a decent salary, some might have called it indecent for my age; people treated me differently. They seemed to respect me automatically, and I never felt I had to justify my actions. I was making a lot of money, so my work was worthy, and by default, so was I.

Then I became a stay-at-home mom, and we all know how much stay-at-home parents get paid. That amount is zip, zero, nada.

Nobody questioned my decision when I first decided to become a stay-at-home parent. I had some savings from work and was expecting my second child. I had worked enough to be guaranteed parental leave benefits when my second child was born.

Now that I think about it, it’s fascinating how many people had opinions on my new status.

Most people told me I was making a good decision. They said, “Your children are only young once; you’re lucky to spend time with them when they’re young.”

And I agree. I was fortunate to spend time with my kids when they were young.

But the other message I internalized from this comment was that I wasn’t genuinely working, or that I was working at a job that benefited anyone other than me.

As time went by and my kids got older, four and two, my justification for staying home became more and more of a topic of conversation, and I became more internally defensive. I started keeping a mental list of how I was contributing to our household, one I began obsessing over almost daily.

The first question out of my spouse’s mouth when he got home from work was, “What did you do today?” He probably wasn’t looking for proof I’d worked, but I had my list ready anyway, just in case, to show I hadn’t spent the day surfing the web. My husband never had to justify his actions. He brought home a paycheque every two weeks that did it for him.

To feel more justified in what I was doing, I decided I could live with less “fun” money than my husband. I cut my leisure spending to one-third of his.

It’s telling what that pay cut did to our family dynamic. I didn’t need the extra money, but in a sense I’d taken a notional pay cut, which further minimized my sense of worth. My relationship with my spouse became more unbalanced. We were no longer equal, not in my eyes, and not in his.

At that point, my husband and I had monetary proof that my job wasn’t as worthy as his.

This concept carried into our divorce process. We barely discussed how I’d contributed to the household. My contribution was glossed over, and the main conversation revolved around when I would start “work.” We didn’t discuss the fact that I had effectively lost my job, because being a stay-at-home parent is not recognized as a job. I’d been on a lark, apparently, and now I had to get down to business and find something worthy.

What was the difference between my job and my now-ex’s? His was paid. Mine wasn’t.

If you’re considering becoming a stay-at-home parent, I’d encourage you to set up your finances like this:

Take your spouse’s salary, divide it by two, and automatically transfer half into your own bank account every pay period. Then you and your spouse each pay half of the joint family expenses, and cover your personal spending from what’s left over.

If you’re about to become a stay-at-home parent, talk through a financial arrangement like this with your spouse before the baby is born. If your spouse doesn’t support a proposal like this, that’s worth talking through further before you give up a career for a job with no paycheque attached.

If your spouse does support it, you’ll know they consider the work a worthy endeavour, worthy enough that they’re willing to pay for it. Because, despite the saying, money does define the worthiness of jobs and people, at least in how we treat each other. Actions and behaviour speak louder than words.

Sustainable Decisions

by | Nov 21, 2021 | Divorce and Separation, Money

Sustainable Decisions

Recently, I spoke with a friend going through major life transitions. Like many of us, she and her family are stressed.

My friend is in her late 40s with two children under 11. Her husband, also in his late 40s, recently quit his job. He realized it wasn’t the right fit, and he knew his employers would soon start looking for someone who was. He wanted to take control of his life.

While he quit his job to maintain positive mental health, his search for a new job is ongoing, and he is having a hard time not getting discouraged. Their youngest child just started at a new school and needs more support. Their oldest daughter is gifted and attends an expensive private school.

My friend spent the last year training for a new profession, only to discover the expected job market isn’t there.

With all this happening, they have used up their emergency funds. Now they have to decide whether to take on more debt or start withdrawing from their retirement fund.

My friend started our conversation by stating her husband is sleeping a lot.

Oversleeping is a classic sign of depression.

It all sounds stressful

After getting rejected day after day by potential employers for jobs he’s convinced himself would be exciting, he’s now applying for jobs in other provinces. Adding a cross-country move into the mix will add even more stress to their lives. And what if the job didn’t work out?

Meanwhile, the family has been focused on getting through their days, with little thought to planning or aligning goals with values, because that is hard to do under the extreme pressure they’re under.

My friend asked what I thought.

I acknowledged that yes, they did indeed seem to have an unfair share of stress in their lives right now.

I asked her what she thought about making such life-changing decisions when they are suffering from stress.

She got quiet and said, “I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

I sat with my friend, and we pondered her rather bleak comment.

Was it only by hitting the proverbial wall that she and her husband would find the fortitude to push through to a way forward? What if crashing into that wall meant they couldn’t move forward at all?

I asked my friend if there was a way to get some breathing room into their lives so they could slow down their decision-making and find a more sustainable path forward.

She just looked at me and said,

“Well, we may be able to dip into retirement savings. That might buy us some time.”

I think she expected me to argue with her. Dip into retirement savings! What kind of financial planner would support that strategy?

Instead, I said, ” Let’s look at your big-picture financial situation. Maybe there is a way, after all.