Editor, The Globe and Mail Re: Stay at home mothers blast Liberal minister -- March 3: The sorriest aspect of Liberal cabinet minister Jim Peterson's 'asinine' and 'ignorant' remarks about stay-at-home parents is that neither he nor his Reform Party critics seem to notice or care that what most Canadian families want and need is balance between their family and work lives, not just tax subsidies for extreme 'choices' between over work or staying at home. The Liberal government buried one excellent chance to do something about achieving a better balance between work and family when it slunk silently and swiftly away from the 1994 report of the Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work, chaired by Arthur Donner. That report called for -- among other things -- a new public policy priority that emphasizes redistribution and reduction of working time and the initiation of a national dialogue on the issue of work time. The Liberals flubbed another chance in 1997, after the federal government's Advisory Committee on the Changing Workplace issued its report. One of that report's recommendations was that "public policy should not create artificial incentives for a longer work week or for creating part-time jobs at the expense of full-time ones." As Lars Osberg explained in his chapter of the Advisory Committee report, the current design of payroll taxes and tax exemptions for employer-paid benefits creates artificial incentives both for longer work weeks and for contingent and short hours part-time work. How did the Liberal government respond to those recommendations? Not at all, directly. But after the report was published, the Liberals jacked up Canada Pension Plan contributions and used unnecessarily high Employment Insurance premiums to achieve a budget surplus. Both actions have added even more artificial incentives for longer work weeks and insecure forms of employment. If one assumed that the government paid any attention to its own consultations and advisory committees, one might conclude that it is the Liberal's intention to arbitrarily punish Canadian families. Tom Walker #408-1035 Pacific Street Vancouver, B.C. (604) 669-3286 Stay-at-home mothers blast Liberal minister Jim Peterson suggests that salaried women work harder than mothers at home. The reaction is swift and angry Globe and Mail, Page 1 Wednesday, March 3, 1999 SHAWN McCARTHY Parliamentary Bureau Ottawa -- Liberal cabinet minister Jim Peterson stumbled into the messy room of gender politics yesterday when he suggested in the Commons that stay-at-home mothers don't work as hard as women in the work force. Women across the country were irate when Mr. Peterson, the Secretary of State for Finance, made the remark in response to Reform Party complaints that the tax system discriminates against families in which one parent stays home to look after children, compared with two-earner families. But in doing so, he failed to note the financial sacrifice that stay-at-home parents make or the importance of the work of a parent in the home. And women were quick to point this out. "It's a tremendous amount of work. I basically work 14-to-15- hour days non-stop," said Margaret Christakos, a former editor and an author who now stays at home with her children. In a review of the income-tax system published last week, former C. D. Howe analyst Kenneth Boessenkool calculated that a dual-earner family with two preschool children and an income of $70,000 gets more than $14,000 in child-related tax breaks that are not available to the single-earner family. Mr. Peterson defended that tax advantage, but he incurred the wrath of many women for not showing the proper respect for stay-at-home mothers. "One thing we have to recognize is that if we have two members of a particular family who are both working, first of all they are putting in twice the working hours [compared with a single-earner couple]," Mr. Peterson said, "but they also have close to twice the expenses, the work-related expenses of clothes and travel and the expense of not having someone home doing the housework. "There are added expenses with more than one person in a household working," he said. That comment drew an immediate rebuke from the Reform Party, and from Canadian women. Tracy Jenkins, 32, a Toronto mother of two young children, said the suggestion that stay-at-home parents don't work as hard as those in the work force is "so outrageous it's laughable." "Obviously it's work. When you do it with other people's children, it counts as work. It's incredibly important work," she said in an interview. In the Commons, Reform MP Dick Harris jumped on Mr. Peterson's statement. "The fact is that women who stay home to look after their families and parents who stay at home work as hard as those who are in the work force in this country," Mr. Harris stormed. "But the government does not give them one bit of credit for it. As a matter of fact, it charges them for the sacrifice they make to stay home to look after their families." In an interview after Question Period, Mr. Peterson said he has "tremendous respect" for the work of parents in the home, adding that his statement in the Commons was merely comparing the expenses of a two-earner couple with a one-income family. He said the Liberal government does offer some tax breaks for one-earner couples, including a higher child benefit on average and the ability to transfer a number of tax credits from an employed spouse to a spouse with little income. Liberal MP Jean Augustine said she cringed when Mr. Peterson uttered the faux pas in the Commons, although she didn't think he meant to denigrate stay-at-home parents. "It was an unfortunate use of language," said Ms. Augustine. Pat Armstrong, director of Canadian studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, said women's groups have long argued that the work women do in the home is undervalued. "I think it's a mistake to refer to one group as 'working' and not the other," Ms. Armstrong said. regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm
