For nine years, Alberta has used the Internet to hunt down parents who refuse to pay their court-ordered child support.

When parents cannot be found and fall more than six months behind in their responsibilities, the province puts their biographical information online and leaves contact information for people to call in or email a tip to police.

According to the province, this approach has been highly successful: Since the Maintenance Enforcement Program (MEP) website launched in April 2000, more than 200 parents have been caught.

Now the province is ramping up its efforts to catch these so-called deadbeat parents, by creating a top 10 list of Alberta's most egregious offenders.

Alberta's justice minister, Alison Redford, calls these parents "the worst of the worst."

These parents are "people who intentionally go off the grid because they want to avoid their responsibilities and they are breaching court orders," Redford said at a recent news conference.

When people now visit the MEP website, the top 10 offenders' faces are shown in a video that loops on the site's homepage.

Together, these parents owe a combined $1.6 million to their former spouses -- something Redford said isn't a temporary problem. "This is not a symptom simply of an economic downtown," she said. "These are people who are not prepared to either support their children or honour court orders."

But not everyone is pleased with the approach being used by the Alberta government.

Ethicist Arthur Schafer said he doesn't defend the behaviour of the accused parents listed on the MEP website. But he also believes the website goes too far and questions whether "we want to become a nation of snitches."

"How far do we want to go down this direction?" he said. "Do we want, for example, to allow private companies who have been stiffed by their customers, who've been given bad cheques or people who haven't paid their Visa bills and then disappeared -- do we want the companies to be able to create a website with your photo on it because you didn't pay?"

The bottom line for the government is that the website gets results, something that at least one other province has taken notice of.

Two years ago, the Ontario government followed suit with Alberta and launched its own deadbeat parents website, called "Good Parents Pay."

In Alberta, the province can also garnish wages, seize personal assets, place liens on property, withhold motor vehicle services and claim lottery winnings, to get parents to pay child support.

With a report from CTV's Janet Dirks