Child Support Arrears and Property Rights for Unmarried Partners: Two Ontario Cases Worth Knowing

Two questions come up again and again at the Law Office of Natalia Denchik, so it's worth talking through them here the way they'd come up in a consultation.

The first is some version of: "My ex stopped paying child support years ago, and now they're saying they don't owe all of it." The second is: "The house is only in my spouse's name; do I have any claim to it at all?"

Both come up more than people expect. So here's where the law actually stands on each.

On Child Support Arrears

In 2021, the Supreme Court of Canada released a decision called Colucci v. Colucci. The facts were pretty extreme: a father owed around $170,000 in arrears after having little to no contact with his children and making almost no voluntary payments for sixteen years. He came back and asked the court to retroactively lower his support obligation and forgive most of the debt, saying his income had dropped over the years.

The interesting part isn't really the outcome; it's the framework the Court laid out, which Ontario courts have applied since.

A few things stand out:

The Court drew a real line between two different kinds of requests. One is "my income genuinely dropped, so the court should recalculate the support amount for that period." The other is "I just can't pay what's owed right now." Those get treated very differently.

For the first kind, there's a presumption that any reduction only goes back to the date the paying parent actually gave "effective notice," meaning they clearly told the other parent about the change. They backed it up with documentation, not just a passing comment. And even then, it generally can't reach back more than three years before the court application itself.

For the second kind, just asking the court to wipe out arrears because you can't pay, the bar is much higher. The presumption runs against forgiving the debt at all. A payor generally needs to show, on a balance of probabilities, that they cannot pay now and won't be able to in the future, even with a reasonable payment plan.

In Mr. Colucci's own case, the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal and left the full arrears intact, not as a coin-flip outcome, but because he hadn't given effective notice of any income drop, hadn't disclosed his finances adequately, and hadn't shown he'd be unable to pay even with a flexible plan.

Since that decision came down, the Law Office of Natalia Denchik has handled four matters in the Ontario Court of Justice between 2022 and 2026 where this exact framework came into play, some involving payors trying to reduce arrears, some involving recipients trying to enforce them. This framework comes up constantly in this kind of file.

When One Spouse Holds Sole Title to the Home

The second question is a bit different, and it comes up a lot because so many people assume that if the house isn't in their name, they have no claim. That's not necessarily true; sole legal title doesn't automatically end the property analysis.

Natalia Denchik acted as counsel in a case that dealt with exactly this: Kofman v. Melfi, 2018 ONSC 3917. It's a reported decision, and she represented the applicant, Ms. Kofman, who was ultimately successful. It's worth being precise about the facts here: Ms. Kofman and Mr. Melfi were a married couple (cohabiting from 2005, married in 2010), and the case was decided under the equalization scheme that applies to married spouses under the Family Law Act, alongside a separate claim in unjust enrichment and constructive trust.

The short version: the matrimonial home was in Mr. Melfi's name only. Ms. Kofman never had access to his accounts, and they never had a joint account. When they moved in, the place was genuinely falling apart: holes in the roof, water damage, and a pest infestation. Over more than a decade, Ms. Kofman did an enormous amount of the actual work to make it livable and keep it that way, on top of helping with Mr. Melfi's business.

The key legal point isn't just that she contributed a lot; it's what that contribution meant once the numbers were run. By the time the marriage ended, the property was so heavily encumbered by tax liens and a bank judgment that the court found equalization would amount to essentially zero. A monetary award, in the court's own words, would have been an "empty gesture." Because a dollar-value remedy couldn't address the unfairness, the court turned to unjust enrichment and a constructive trust instead and, in this exceptional case, declared that Mr. Melfi held half the house in trust for Ms. Kofman.

That's an important qualifier: the court was clear that unjust enrichment doesn't automatically produce a constructive trust. It's a remedy reserved for cases where a monetary award genuinely wouldn't do the job, and Kofman is a good illustration of what that looks like in practice, and why documenting real contributions to a property matters regardless of whose name is on title.

Those are two situations that come up often, and if either one sounds familiar, it's worth talking it through.