“The mother filed a Government of Canada “Explore Careers – Wage Report” for lawyers. That report discloses “wages” for lawyers, broken down by region, including Regina, Saskatchewan where the father currently lives and practises law.
According to that report, the low, median and high annual wagesfor lawyers in Regina are $55,182, $116,172 and $221,058, respectively.
Based on this report, the mother asks the court to impute income to the father in the amount of $50,000, being approximately the low end of that wage report, in recognition that this is father’s first year of practising as a lawyer.
In Caine v. Ferguson, 2012 ONCJ 139 (CanLII), Justice Stanley B. Sherr addressed the weight to be given to such survey reports. At paragraph 32 of Justice Sherr’s reasons, he stated [my emphasis]:
In Rodrigues v. De Sousa, 2008 ONCJ 807 (CanLII), 69 R.F.L. (6th) 449, [2008] O.J. No. 4541, 2009 CarswellOnt 8979 (Ont. C.J.), I relied on the case of Scholes v. Scholes, 2003 CanLII 2349 (ON SC), 2003 CanLII 2349, 125 A.C.W.S. (3d) 313, [2003] O.J. No. 3432, 2003 CarswellOnt 3299 (Ont. S.C.) and permitted the introduction of reports from Ontario Job Futures and Statistics Canada as evidence of income levels for a payor in the insurance industry. In these cases, the reports came directly from provincial and federal governments and had some indicia of reliability. However, citing Isakhani v. Al-Saggaf, 2007 ONCA 539 (CanLII), 226 O.A.C. 184, 40 R.F.L. (6th) 284, [2007] O.J. No. 2922, 2007 CarswellOnt 4805 (Ont. C.A.), I expressed the need to exercise considerable caution in how much weight the court could attach to such documents as they were unsworn third-party statements that could not be tested by cross-examination. In the specific circumstances of the payor in Rodrigues v. De Sousa, I did not apply the wage range set out in the government publications.”