by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

My favourite outrages are like those kiddie Transformer toys that you bend and fold and - presto - turn into another type of toy. Take an injustice of headshaking dimensions, flip it around and you've got a fabulous make-work project for those wondrously immoral sleazoids who like to manipulate the system.

Outrageously upsetting news isn't hard to come by here. In fact, it's as easy as finding a massage parlour in Rosemount. For example, did you know that, due to provincial decree, a two-four of yer regular five per cent alcohol beer can't be sold in Quebec for less than $20.27? Here's another: the bearded guy in the Canadian Tire ads has dared to procreate - he has a TV child now - and they golf together. Another: in spite of my fervent prayers, curling rinks never split open wide and swallow up curlers into the icy drink.

But this here outrage I present is bigger and juicier, and involves catty rivalries between exes.

In Quebec, alimony payments are calculated on family income. This means that thousands of people are paying part of their regular salary to their spouse's ex.

Alimony, in case you don't know, is a throwback institution in which the wealthier spouse is ordered to give money to the other adult spouse even after they're divorced. It's like child support, but the poorer ex is the child.

So here's how the scam works: a married person can get divorced and then claim to be unable to work. The judge will then order that person's ex to pay support - around 35 per cent of his new family income.

Note the term "family income." The person who claims for alimony doesn't only get a regular portion (usually about one-third) of her ex's earnings, but rather, the claimant gets a percentage of the combined income of the ex and his new spouse.

I'll type this part extra slowly so you can understand how bizarre it is. The second wife of a divorced guy often has to pay out of her pocket for her husband's ex-wife.

For 21 years, Carole Ducharme has - along with her husband - been paying about a third of their total income to a woman who used to be married to her husband. "It cost so much that we never had kids, we couldn't afford it," she tells me. A decade ago Ducharme launched the Quebec Association of Second Spouses (ASECQ) which now has 804 members. The number of members has grown but she says others have quit the lobby group because the couples break up under the pressure of the financial burden of their court-mandated payments.

Ducharme stresses that members of her group don't mind paying child support. But they object to the "life sentence" of paying alimony to an ex. Ducharme's long and futile campaign demands that judges start ordering alimony payments for a limited period of "a few years, so that the person can go back to school or find work," and that the total alimony payable be calculated from the ex-spouse's income, rather than the combined income of whatever new relationship he's in.

It's unknown what percentage of Quebec's divorcees claim alimony from their exes but Ducharme has been told by bureaukrauts that it's around 12 per cent.

"Women fought so much here to be independent that I find that women asking for alimony is illogical now," she says. Indeed, the women's movement here has never been keen on alimony. In Quebec, unlike other provinces, common-law exes aren't eligible for alimony and the women's movement has never protested this.

Ducharme says that judges are an easy mark for winning your claim that you can't work. "You just mention a little bobo, a little health problem. It's also not hard to find a psychological problem. You say you're depressed. One just sat there crying throughout the hearing and the judge ordered the payments. It's easy to convince a judge that you can‘t work."

A salute to alimony recipients: they might not work, but their plan is working for them.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca