The Court of Appeal for Ontario cut a man’s past due spousal and child support obligations to avoid him possibly going to jail for unpaid support, after he lost almost $400,000 that was supposed to be held in trust for him.
Following a trial, in 2025, the court ordered Michael Christopher Wolf to pay almost $1 million in past due child and spousal support, equalization and costs, along with ongoing monthly child and spousal support payments.
Wolf appealed that decision based, in part, on the fact that the trial judge failed to account for the fact that his share from the sale of several properties owned by the couple has apparently been lost. While his ex-wife received her share of the sale proceeds, his share was being held in trust by their lawyer, pending the outcome of the trial.
However, the lawyer, who has since died, apparently “failed to properly manage his trust accounts, and that there is a significant shortfall in the amounts he was supposed to be holding in trust for his clients,” the court noted. Those clients included Wolf, who has been unable to recover $375,860 of the money that was being held in trust as his share of the property sales.
On appeal, Wolf argued that the trial judge erred by not taking the shortfall into account — and that the judge should have factored in his apparent loss either by reducing the past due support obligations, or the equalization payment, on the basis that equalization “would be unconscionable in the circumstances.”
The appeal court noted that Wolf faces possible jail time if he is unable to pay the amounts ordered by the court, and that his ex-wife acknowledged that the loss of the trust funds should have been considered by the trial judge.
According to the court, she proposed that Wolf’s past due support obligations should be reduced to reflect the trust account loss, so that he wouldn’t face the prospect of going to jail for failing to pay, and that any compensation paid by the legal industry’s contingency fund for the trust account shortfall should be paid to her.
The court said that Wolf agreed that this solution would address the trust account issue, but he also argued that the trial judge’s decision should be set aside entirely, and that a new trial is required.
The appeal court found that the trial judge erred by not considering the trust account issue, but didn’t think that a new trial was warranted, saying, “… we are not satisfied that the trial judge made any other errors that require our intervention.”
As a result, the court adopted the ex-wife’s proposed solution — reducing the past due spousal support from $325,544 to zero, and cutting the past due child support from $231,817 to $181,501, and ordering that any payments from the Law Society of Ontario’s Compensation Fund to remedy the trust account shortfall should now be paid to the ex-wife.