Recognizing the Stay-at-Home Mom

What a difference a day can make. Following his budget speech, Finance Minister, Paul Martin, hopscotched across the country drumming up support for its provisions. Unfortunately, his plane ran into mechanical problems in Vancouver which delayed his return to Ottawa. As a result, he was unable to respond to questions on the budget during Question Period in the House of Commons on the fateful day of March 1st.

In the Minister's absence, MP Jim Peterson, a junior minister, Secretary of State for Financial Institutions (Willowdale, Ontario), went to bat to swing at questions by the opposition on the budget. One question that day was posed by Deborah Grey (Reform, Edmonton North):

... Take two Canadian families that earn $50,000 a year. In one family both parents work outside the home and in the other, one parent stays home with the kids. One would think they would pay the same amount of taxes, right? No, they in fact do not. The family that has one parent stay at home pays $4,000 more a year in taxes. Why does the Prime Minister think that is fair? How does the Prime Minister think that is fair?

Mr. Peterson, who incidentally has no children, swung at the ball and replied that when two members of a family work, they are putting in twice the working hours, have twice the expenses in regard to clothes and travel and do not have someone at home doing the housework. This implied that mothers staying at home to look after their families did not work as hard as those in the paid work force. Havoc broke out across the country. Stay-at-home parents, mostly mothers, were furious. A beleaguered Mr. Peterson profusely apologized next day, but the damage was done and the debate continued to rage across the country for nearly two weeks.

Providing ammunition for opposition attacks, Hedy Fry, Minister for Women's Issues issued a report defending generous child-care deductions available only to double-income couples, saying that additional tax relief for parents who stay home to look after children would keep them out of the work force. She stated:

Any new measure targeted only at parents who stay home to provide care to children would only further reinforce barriers to employment by reducing the incentive to engage in paid work.

This infuriated women even more. Women are quite capable of deciding what they wish to do, and they don't want or need the government attempting to herd them in a particular direction, i.e., into the paid work force. Of course, the government, ever greedy for tax money, wants women to do just that -- hence, Ms. Fry's frank response.

A recent report from the prestigious C.D. Howe Institute added further fuel to the fire. The C.D. Howe think tank calculated that a two-income couple does, indeed, have a much greater tax advantage over a single-income couple. The think tank also believes that this inequity could be rectified by overhauling the tax system to create a joint filing system where couples would submit a combined return. It also recommended replacing the current system with a universal deduction of about $2,000 for each child. If the child-care tax deduction were cut by the same amount, the report says, families that now declare the full amount of the deduction would be no worse off, while families claiming less than the full deduction would receive a tax cut. Such a tax system would cost Ottawa about $3 billion. The report went on to say:

... current Canadian tax policy affords no universal recognition of children ... In effect, it treats children in middle and high-income families like consumer spending, as if parents had no legal or moral obligation to spend money on their care.

On March 4, the Reform Party introduced a motion in the House of Commons which stated that:

... in the opinion of this House the federal tax system should be reformed to end discrimination against single-income families with children.

The vote was called on Tuesday, March 9th. All the Liberal members, dutifully followed orders and voted against the opposition's motion which, for once, had united all the opposition parties -- Reform, Bloc Quebecois, NDP and Conservatives. The final vote, however, was 145 opposed to 123 in support of the motion which it went down to defeat.

Notwithstanding the lost vote, however, considerable damage has been done to the Liberal Party as a result of its refusal to consider assisting stay-at-home parents.

Consequently, Mr. Martin is now sending increasingly strong signals that he intends to unveil a "children's budget" next year to mark the new millennium, but, for the present, he has opted to hand this politically charged issue to the Commons Finance Committee for study. The committee, chaired by Toronto-area Liberal MP, Maurizio Bevilacqua, decided to strike a sub-committee, which will begin examining the issue after Easter and present recommendations by June. We await its recommendations with great interest.

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