Catching a Bad Income Year Before It Set Oakville Support Too Low

The situation

Tharshini and Liang separated after twenty-two years of marriage. They had built a settled, unremarkable life together in Oakville: a modest home with a small mortgage still owing, Liang on the road as a long-haul truck driver for a regional freight carrier, and Tharshini working part-time as a bookkeeper for a local accounting practice. Their children were grown and out of the house, so the separation, while difficult, did not involve custody or parenting schedules. Both wanted to settle things without a court fight.

Liang had already put a number on the table for monthly spousal support, worked out informally with help from his own lawyer. Tharshini brought the proposal to Treadstone Law before signing anything, mainly to have the agreement reviewed and to make sure the number was fair.

Neither of them was looking for a fight. They had already agreed, in principle, on how to divide the modest equity in the house and split the household belongings, and both wanted the support conversation handled the same way — quickly, without a lot of back-and-forth, and without a court date hanging over either of them. That cooperative starting point mattered later, because it meant the income question could be raised as a shared problem to solve rather than as one side accusing the other of trying to shortchange them.

What the review found

The proposed support figure was based on Liang's most recent tax return. On paper that seemed reasonable — support calculations for both spousal and child support in Ontario generally start from a payor's income as reported to the Canada Revenue Agency. But a long-haul trucker's income is rarely flat. It moves with freight volume, fuel surcharge structures, how many loads are available in a given season, and how much overtime driving comes up. A driver can have a strong year followed by a soft one without anything about their job actually changing.

Liang's most recent tax year had been a soft one. A slowdown in freight demand and a stretch of weeks with fewer available loads had pulled his income down noticeably compared to his usual pattern. Used on its own, that year understated what he could realistically expect to earn going forward — and support based on it would have understated what he could realistically afford to pay.

This is where a fine point in the support guidelines matters. Both the Federal Child Support Guidelines and the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines that lawyers use to estimate spousal support rely on a payor's income as the starting point for the calculation — but they do not require using only the most recent tax year in every case. Where a person's income fluctuates significantly from year to year, the guidelines allow for averaging income over a more recent multi-year period to arrive at a figure that better reflects real, ongoing earning capacity. It is a judgment call, not an automatic formula, and it only comes into play when someone actually asks the question.

Nobody had asked it yet. Liang's proposal used the low year because that was the return sitting on top of the file, not because anyone had deliberately chosen it over the alternative.

What we did

1. Requested three years of tax returns and Notices of Assessment, not just the latest one. A single year tells you what happened in that year. Three years tells you the pattern. Liang's returns showed a clear swing: a strong year, a middling year, and then the recent soft year the initial proposal had relied on.
2. Calculated the three-year average alongside the single-year figure. The average worked out to roughly $51,000 a year in guideline income, compared with about $39,000 for the soft year alone — a gap of around $12,000, or close to a third of the figure the original proposal was built on. Tharshini's own income as a part-time bookkeeper, around $23,000 a year, was stable enough that no averaging question arose on her side.
3. Raised the averaging approach with Liang's side directly, with the underlying numbers attached. Because the request came with three years of documentation rather than an argument, it was hard to dismiss as unreasonable. Liang's lawyer agreed the pattern supported using the average rather than the low outlier, and the negotiation moved from there.
4. Recalculated the support figure using the averaged guideline income. Applying the usual spousal support ranges to roughly $51,000 rather than $39,000 produced a monthly support amount of about $650, compared with roughly $480 under the original low-year proposal — a difference of about $170 a month, or close to $2,000 a year.
5. Built an annual income exchange into the agreement itself. Rather than leaving the figure fixed indefinitely or requiring a future court application to revisit it, the agreement obliges both parties to exchange tax returns each year and sets out how the support figure will be reconciled if Liang's average income moves meaningfully in either direction. That clause turns a future disagreement into a scheduled paperwork exercise instead of a legal proceeding.

The outcome

Tharshini and Liang signed the separation agreement with support set at roughly $650 a month, based on the three-year averaged income rather than the single soft year. The following tax year, as it turned out, Liang's income rebounded to somewhere around $63,000 — freight volumes picked back up and he picked up more mileage. Had the agreement locked in support based on his low year, that rebound would likely have prompted Tharshini to bring a motion to change, or a fresh negotiation, to correct a number that no longer reflected reality. That kind of application typically takes months, costs both sides money, and tends to sour whatever cooperative footing an amicable separation started on.

None of that happened here. Because the averaging question was raised and settled before either party signed, the agreement already accounted for the normal swing in Liang's income. The annual reconciliation clause means that if his income shifts again in a few years, the two of them exchange returns and adjust the figure using the formula already agreed to — no court, no new negotiation, no legal fees layered on top of an already difficult year. The problem that would ordinarily have surfaced eighteen months later, in the form of a support amount that no longer matched anyone's income, was caught and resolved before the ink dried.

Tharshini later said the part that surprised her most was how little friction the whole exchange actually involved. She had expected raising a question about Liang's income to feel like an accusation, something that would put him on the defensive after twenty-two years of an otherwise easy marriage. Instead, because the request was framed around a documented pattern rather than a suspicion, Liang's own lawyer treated it as a routine correction rather than a dispute to resist. For a couple trying to end a long marriage without turning it adversarial, that distinction — a fixable oversight instead of a fight — was worth as much as the extra $170 a month.

What you can learn from this