"Family-friendly" tax gets national attention
No tax help for stay-at-home parents.
By Kevin Heinrichs ChristianWeek staff
OTTAWA–Reformers pushed the government to admit it discriminates against families with a stay-at-home mom. Liberals accused Reformers of trying to turn back the clock to Leave It to Beaver. The political grandstanding was familiar, but the issue was one that Christian family groups have been lobbying about for years.
The current tax legislation creates tax advantages for a mother who puts her child in institutional day care while working, but provides no equivalent tax breaks for a mother who chooses to take care of her own children at home. That, say a number of Christian family groups, amounts to discrimination.
"Why should families which choose to keep one parent at home be penalized thousands of dollars–on top of income they have already forgone?" asks a Canadian Family Tax Coalition (CFTC) press release. CFTC includes groups such as Focus on the Family Canada and the Canada Family Action Coalition. The Canadian Christian Business Federation and the Family Coalition Party echoed this sentiment and weighed in with recommendations for reforming the tax act.
That argument was also picked up by the Reform Party. It presented a motion in early March stating that "the federal tax system should be reformed to end discrimination against single-income families with children." As an opposition-sponsored bill, it never had much chance of making it past the House’s Liberal majority. Nor did it have much of a chance of making it onto the front page of the nation’s newspapers.
Until Liberal MP Jim Peterson spoke. In defending the legislation, Peterson, Secretary of State for Finance, let slip that a mother who works outside the home works harder than a stay-at-home parent.
Women across the country were outraged. The ensuing accusations and counter-accusations about the value of a parent’s work made for fiery debate in the House and in newspapers across the country.
A motherhood issue
Suddenly, stay-at-home moms were under the spotlight of the nation. The United Nations was even hearing a complaint by Alberta homemaker Beverley Smith, who says that the federal government routinely discriminates against stay-at-home mothers. A book released by C.D. Howe, a conservative think tank, the previous week suggested that "Canada’s income tax system is inequitable and inefficient in its treatment of families with children."
But getting an issue onto the national stage doesn’t necessarily mean that meaningful change is around the corner. Reform’s motion was defeated. All opposition parties voted for the motion; all Liberal members voted against it.
Eric Lowther, Reform’s opposition critic for Children and Families, told ChristianWeek that discrimination against families is part of a "fundamental mindset" of the majority of Liberal MPs. "They feel they have an obligation to engineer social policy in their tax act," he says. "The fundamental thought is that government should act as a surrogate parent. [Reform] believes that choices and tax dollars should stay with families, and let them make the choices. It’s too dynamic for government to bless one option and not the other."
Lowther sees the Liberal’s referral of the issue back to the Finance committee for further study is "just a methodology to bury it."
Not so, says Liberal MP Paul Szabo. He has been a Liberal front man on the issue of families, has written a book called Strong Families Make a Strong Country, and recently chaired a Liberal caucus committee that recommended that the government replace the current child-care tax deduction which is not available to stay-at-home parents. The committee recommended that it be replaced with an income-tested benefit that would be available to all parents below a certain income level. Szabo also says the paid parental leave program could be increased to one year.
"We should not try to penalize or compel choices. Maybe there should be a caregiver benefit, paid directly to the caregiver of the –family’s choice," Szabo told ChristianWeek. Though his recommendations have not been implemented since being presented late last year, he says he is hopeful that changes will be made for the next budget, especially now that the Finance committee has been instructed to restudy the issue.
Rhetoric, rhetoric everywhere
So with a similar intent to equalize benefits for families, regardless of whether a parent stays at home, why couldn’t the Liberals agree with the Reform motion?
Politics, says Szabo. "There is no one in the House of Commons who didn’t support the spirit of the motion," says Szabo. However, he says the motion was simplistic, not specific enough and that the intent of Reform’s motion was simply to embarrass the government. Other Liberal MPs said Reform’s motion was just a thinly veiled attempt to keep women out of the work force.
Szabo says that if Reform would have changed the wording of the motion to something less inflammatory, "we would have voted for it." Szabo accuses Reform of just making political hay.
Reform’s Lowther says there was little chance for change on this or any other government policy because the Liberals, who control the majority of the House, all vote the same way. Lowther says that now that the motion is defeated, all they can do is hope the government takes the concerns of families more seriously.