Court Finds Husband Just “Going Through the Motions” on His Job Search
One of the basic principles underpinning Ontario family law, is that the parties must behave with good faith towards each other in when participating in the separation and divorce process. And courts are wary – and frequently critical – of spouses who do not behave this way.
This is illustrated in the decision in Cammaroto v. Cammaroto. There, the couple had married in 2000 after a 2-year long distance relationship, with the 48-year-old husband moving from New York to be with the wife in Ontario. He had expected to easily find work in the retail travel industry, but this never panned out, and he began to drink heavily. Meanwhile the wife, aged 44, was working 12-hour shifts in her job as a nurse.
By 2008, the relationship deteriorated to the point where the husband communicated with the wife mainly by giving her notes and list. Still, the couple continued to live together under the same roof for several more years.
As part of their divorce proceedings, the court had to decide whether the husband should be entitled to spousal support from the wife, who had been supporting him for the entirety of their marriage.
To make this determination, the court had to consider the couple’s overall relationship. In the husband’s favour was the fact that he had moved from New York and left behind a secure job. But by 2006, which was 6 years into the marriage, he had made virtually no genuine effort to find work and the wife had clearly run out of patience. The court concluded that the husband’s failure had been “a very significant cause of the marriage break-down”, and that his alcohol consumption also contributed to it.
The court itemized the husband’s so-called efforts to find work in this manner:
Exhibit 29 records [the husband’s] attempts to find employment. It illustrates a wide ranging attempt at looking into potential jobs, even low level employment such as flyer deliveries, gas bar employment and entry level sales positions. It records a range of dozens of small local employers as well as large chains such as Walmart, Staples, Rogers, Canadian Tie, Home Depot, the LCBO, several hotel chains, Zellers and Leons.
The most impressive aspect of [the husband’s] attempts to find employment are the personalized and well-written cover letters that he sent with resumes or job applications. Superficially, the documentation of [the husband’s] employment search over the years 2000 – 2006 is impressive. However, on closer examination it is apparent that [the husband] was “going through the motions”, documenting many contacts from ads for jobs that he must have known he could not do or would not accept even if he could get a job interview. Some of the content of Exhibit 29 is clearly an attempt to “pad” his efforts to find employment. For example, it is rather silly to include employment as a flight attendant, a short-order cook, a store manager, etcetera. The actual number of job interviews he got over the years was few.
In 2001, [the husband] applied for 17 jobs in total, never more than three in any given month. He agreed on cross-examination that it was not a “diligent” job search that year. In 2002, he made one job application and in 2003, 31. He admitted on cross-examination that many of the “applications” were for jobs he could not do anyway. …
It is also hard to escape the inference that Mr. Cammaroto deliberately sabotaged the only successes he had.
He obtained a job in the travel industry in 2003 but quit the job after taking the initiative with U.S. authorities to check if he could be “in trouble” as a U.S. citizen selling trips to Cuba. He blew the whistle on himself. Then, when told it was not a problem to work for a travel agency selling trips to Cuba so long as he didn’t do so personally, he quit the job anyway.
He was hired as a security guard in December 2005 or January 2006 but quit that job before his first shift to take another travel agency job that lasted only a few weeks.
In April 2006 he was hired at Stock Transportation to drive autistic children in a van but quit during the training session because the children were “wild and noisy” and he was afraid he would crash the vehicle.
There are other examples of how he thwarted actual employment opportunities himself or wasted his time on obviously fruitless pursuits. It is hard to know whether he was genuinely interested in working or just kidding himself. He turned looking for a job and the documentation of his efforts into a job itself. By 2006 he had given up any real effort. Perhaps even before that.
The court also noted that by 2010, when he and the wife were still living together, he was actively looking for other relationships on Match.com under what he called his “contingency plan”. It ultimately concluded that the husband’s lack of genuine job-hunting had been deliberate:
[The husband] admitted that as early as 2008 he was aware of the “rule of 65” in the spousal support advisory guidelines, referencing the principle that if a dependent spouse’s age plus years of marriage equals or exceeds 65 then recommended spousal support should be for an “indefinite” duration.
It is clear from all the evidence that [the husband] was determined to delay the inevitable separation as long as possible to maximize his entitlement to support and not because there was any realistic hope, even in his own mind, that a true marital relationship would ever resume.
Still, the court observed that at the time of the trial, the husband had been out of the workforce for 15 years, and had depression, anxiety, and some other mental health issues that clearly pre-dated the marriage. In these circumstances, he was entitled to some time-limited support from the wife, who had the ability to pay from her $90,000 income as a nurse.
For the full text of the decision, see:
Cammaroto v. Cammaroto, 2015 ONSC 3968
