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Canadian culture is an endangered species I've been watching happy couples with fascination recently -- those whose eyes, as John Updike has it, "had married and merged to three." There seems to be quite a lot of them around. Which is hopeful and wonderful, because I can't forget Lynn Darling's benchmark essay in Esquire in 1996, in which she remarked that "married couples now are like punched out fighters, bathed in each other's sweat, too exhausted to break the clinch, hanging on to each other because it's the only alternative to falling down." Marriage, in the delirious worlds of film, writing, design -- all the fancy pants professions -- was just shredding. Everywhere else, too. Perhaps '96 was the nadir. As Anne Kingston makes crystal clear in The Meaning of Wife, the power relationship in marriage has been due for realignment for quite some time. Along with that readjustment, the way couples have children is shifting -- which is to say, we aren't having them at all. Canadians are reproducing well below replacement rate, and have been for quite some time. In Europe, particularly those states so admired in Ottawa, a low birth rate has them winding down to cultural extinction. And as Barbara Kay pointed out last week, our politicians and bureaucrats created the social policies that made having children unattractive. Now, it's beginning to dawn on them that there aren't going to be enough young people to pay for their indexed pensions. Boomers, despite their idealism, are profoundly pragmatic. We comfort ourselves that heavy immigration will solve our fiscal problems. But recent immigration, as Martin Collacott has so ably demonstrated, has been a drain on the public purse. The previous wave of immigrants was highly educated; the latter, which has emphasized family sponsorships, not so much. The result? Services in cities like Toronto are overwhelmed with the needs of immigrants who can't speak English, can't find a job and need extensive health care. Last week, Tom Kent, long-time Liberal party idea man, floated the idea of filling the Prairies with young immigrants. He pleads the case on humanitarian grounds, which was, little doubt, precisely how the idea of residential schools for aboriginals was sold. The kicker of course, is that young immigrant couples, once they come to have children, will figure out it's not worth it, have 1.5 kids, and we'll be back where we started. So if we're to set about avoiding cultural extinction, what can we tolerate, policy-wise? Italians, who are having babies at half their replacement rate, are considering forcing well-off women to pay for their second, third and fourth abortions. Our health system is delisting lots of things -- how about abortions for middle-class girls? A $3,000 bill for your last thoughtless party might slow you down. I'm a keep it simple kind of girl. I think we should flat-out pay women to have children. I think we should privilege Canadian women -- and not only that, privilege married couples. Rather than welfare, which encourages dependence, give them tax breaks, which encourage achievement. First child: 35% tax break to the wife, 17.5% to the husband. Second child: 30% tax break to wife, and so on. Because no matter how liberated the couple, and how advanced the redistribution of wealth, women do most of the child-rearing. Supporting marriages, that last, with increased levels of tax breaks for long-time relationships, would pay off. Sure, there would be abuse, but at least we'd be supporting something that has proven a critical factor in the survival of the human race. And even social scientists who once insisted that unhappy marriages make for unhappy children, faced with mounting and irrefutable evidence that divorce severely disadvantages them, are revising their opinions. Some would go even further. Some conservatives long for the old days -- orphanages, restricted divorce, women barred from professions, the stigma of illegitimacy. The leftish journalist Barbara Ehrenreich suggests co-parenting contracts between breeders, which seems cold and complex and has no body of case law to guide it. Some religious conservatives have entered into Covenant Marriages, within which the rules for break-up are positively 19th century. More practically, economists Richard and Grandon Gill have suggested a Parental Bill of Rights, which would reward young women who had children within marriage with -- among other things -- an education fund. When the children entered school, the young women would have money to go back to college, and have an enhanced career later in life. Seems eminently sane. Women will never return to a dependent position from which they have to beg or sue a man for alimony and child support. So why not give mothers the tools to become autonomous, while supporting an institution that is the bedrock of civilization? Preposterous as it seems, if we want our multi-billion-dollar Canadian culture to survive into the next century, we have little choice.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.