New Waterford office move hits maintenance enforcement

A political decision to close regional maintenance enforcement offices and open a new central office in New Waterford has hurt productivity, new numbers obtained by CBC News through Freedom of Information show.

The office enforces court-issued child and spousal support orders. A recent CBC News investigation found about 58 per cent of cases are in arrears for a combined total of nearly $65 million.

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One of the main tools enforcement officers use to make delinquent parents pay is garnisheeing wages. That happened 2810 times in 2011-12, according to statistics provided to CBC. The number for 2013-14 was 1954, a drop of 30 per cent.

There was a 48 per cent drop (109 to 57) during the same period for the number of motor vehicle licences suspended.

The number of liens on property were not tracked in 2011-12 and only partially tracked in 2012-13. Still, there were seven liens recorded in 2012-13 and three the following year.         

The number of denied hunting and fishing licences dropped from eight in 2011-12 to two in 2013-14.

The decline coincides with the former NDP government’s announcement in April 2012 that it was closing Maintenance Enforcement Program offices in Kentville, Amherst, New Glasgow, Sydney and Dartmouth, and opening a new regional office in New Waterford in June 2013.  

At the time, opposition members pointed out the new office was set up in the riding of then deputy premier Frank Corbett. Seventy per cent of the staff was new because most of the existing employees refused to move.

"I haven’t been able to talk to anybody that’s working actively on my file or can take ownership of the file since they’ve left the Dartmouth office," says Diane Webber, a mother of three children, whose ex-husband owes more than $65,000 in child support, according to maintenance enforcement records.

"They used to send me letters regularly. They used to call me. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing.

"It’s like a lost file in a huge building full of files and I’ve seen no indication of any action, nothing on my file, so it doesn’t surprise me that the numbers are low."

'Overall numbers are a concern'

Judy Crump, the director of maintenance enforcement at the Department of Justice, says the department was expecting the move to affect enforcement numbers.

"The overall numbers are a concern and we’re definitely working to bring those numbers back up to where they were before and to increase efforts," Crump says.

"The program has a very significant and steep learning curve. It's a very complex program to administer and the job of an enforcement officer or an enforcement assistant is very challenging work."

While Crump says the department has taken payers who are in default to court and incarcerated them in previous years, she says the department doesn’t have a system to track those numbers.

She says the department has the power to seize property, but has not done that.

Crump says the department is consulting with a group of clients to find ways to improve the program. A review committee that includes bureaucrats outside the program will also file a report next spring.

Webber says she’d like to see enforcement officers seize her ex-husband’s bank account, freeze his passport and conduct regular federal traces in case he is working in other provinces.