THE provincial government has introduced two Attorney General bills to better serve British Columbians by improving access to services and making it easier to handle cross-border child support matters.
Bill 8 and Bill 9 were introduced in the legislature on Wednesday, March 2. If passed by the legislature, the amendments will affect the following provincial statutes:
Legal Profession Act and Notaries Act
The Law Foundation of BC and Notary Foundation of British Columbia earn their revenues primarily through interest earned on lawyers’ and notaries’ pooled trust accounts. These revenues are used to support important programs and services in the areas of legal education, legal research, legal aid, law reform and for law libraries.
Based on similar successful amendments in Ontario, changes to the Legal Profession Act and the Notaries Act would provide the boards of governors of the Law Foundation of BC and Notary Foundation of British Columbia the respective authority to approve the interest rates and service charges on these pooled accounts.
The proposed amendments would assist in enabling the foundations to protect their revenue stream over time and allow them to continue to fund law-related good works as required by their mandates.
Civil Resolution Tribunal Act
Amendments to the Civil Resolution Tribunal Act would advance two changes relating to the Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT).
The amendments would replace the current judicial oversight mechanism for small claims disputes, which can lead to a complete rehearing of the dispute in Provincial Court. This process would be replaced with judicial review in the BC Supreme Court, which is the same process used for all other areas of the CRT’s jurisdiction. This will create a more consistent experience for British Columbians with small claims disputes.
The amendments would also give the CRT authority to resolve disputes about ICBC decisions that assign responsibility for vehicle accidents when an applicant is not also making a claim for benefits or damages. This change will create new access to an independent, efficient and inexpensive forum for these disputes.
Hague Convention on Child and Family Support
Proposed amendments to the Interjurisdictional Support Orders Act would implement the 2007 Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance (2007 Hague Child Support Convention) in B.C. The 2007 Hague Child Support Convention is an international treaty that applies to setting, changing and enforcing child support duties when parents or guardians live in different countries.
Implementation of the convention will benefit British Columbians in several ways. It will increase the number of jurisdictions that B.C. can work with regarding cross-border child support matters, making it easier to enforce and collect child support payments.
It will also streamline and add certainty to the processing of international child support cases by standardizing processes, forms and timelines, and using public central authorities that help people navigate the system. Every convention country designates central authorities that work with authorities in other countries within the same framework to facilitate document processing and support fund collection and transfers.
The Interjurisdictional Support Orders Act currently operates similarly to the convention for matters where people live in different Canadian provinces or territories, or some international countries, and therefore only minor changes to the act are needed to allow it to handle convention matters.
Family Law Act
Minor changes will also be made to the Family Law Act that will facilitate the expansion of the Child Support Recalculation Service (CSRS). These changes will increase British Columbian’s access to CSRS from one location to provincewide.
