Survey Says…Marriage!

By Lee Harding

Marriage is harder, rarer, and yet more important to Canadians than in the past. These strange and conflicted conclusions of recent polls and statistics suggest a change in direction is needed in our national policy.

For the first time in Canada’s history, a minority of Canadian adults are married (48.5 percent in 2006). More than a quarter of our children are raised in single parent families. These children are already more likely to be mired in poverty than those in two-parent homes. But the worst may be yet to come. Studies south of the border suggest children raised without a father are twenty times more likely to be in jail later in life.

Sweden shows us that no amount of welfare can replace the invaluable presence of a parent. Social programs there leave only ten percent of children impoverished. Yet, a study of one million Swedish children published in Lancet in January 2003 showed that those raised in single parent homes were twice as likely to have “psychiatric disease”, twice as likely to attempt or commit suicide, twice as likely to be hurt, and three to four times as likely to abuse alcohol and drugs.

An ignorant Trudeau said, “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” Tearing down the legal structures that backed our traditional morals brought a terrible weight to the country--one that the welfare state actually deepened. The moral, social, and even legal costs of family breakdown led the government to invade our pockets, forcing more parents out of the home to pay the bills. Then the state, which wouldn’t invade our bedrooms, came to our front door to take our love-starved sons and daughters to foster care or jail.

“I don’t think marriage is going to come back,” University of Ottawa Sociology Prof Diane Pacom told Global National on September 12. “We want absolutely happiness and absolute autonomy and absolute sense of fulfillment. And we don’t compromise; and marriage is based on compromise.”

The path of self-determination has sunk us. After telling ourselves that one lifestyle is as good as another, we need to think again. The cost has been enormous, not only for the selfish, but also for everyone else.

Pacom is wrong about one thing, though: marriage isn’t dead. A recent poll of 1000 Canadians by Harris/Decima revealed 42 percent found marriage was more important to them now than in the past; 39% said it was about the same, and 17% found it less important. Yet, almost three-quarters said it’s harder to make a marriage work these days.

Another poll suggested at least one way forward. An Ipsos-Reid survey in February showed 77 percent of Canadians want income-splitting for couples filing taxes. Doing so would lower the financial pressures that sometimes contribute to family breakup, and even allow parents to work less and spend more time with their children.

It’s one way that our government can bring some peace to the bedrooms of the nation, including those of boys and girls.