PUBLICATION:  Citizens Centre Report
DATE:  2003.03.03
PAGE:  23
Byline: Peter Stock

Limited Government

From freedom to freeloading

Welfare, crime, divorce, abortion, dependency and taxation have all surged under federal management

by Peter Stock

An anonymous wag once quipped that sometime in the 1960s Canadians went from being “hewers of wood and drawers of water” to “doers of good and drawers of welfare.” Clever, and lamentably true.

In the two decades following the Second World War, Canadians began to define security less in terms of family, hard work, community, Christian charity and a place in the British Empire, and more in terms of government programs and personal lifestyles. At the same time, government—especially federal government—was transformed from something distant to which you owed a duty, into something omnipresent that comforted, cured and supported you.

David Murrell, an economics professor at the University of New Brunswick, says, “Government expenditures took a big leap in the Pearson-Trudeau era. In 1950, federal government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product was 12.6%, in 1960 17.0%, in 1970 17.2%, in 1980 20%, in 1990 24.7% and in 1998 21.1%.” The increase was not invested in traditional federal priorities such as defence, law enforcement or public works. Rather, it went mostly to health, education, welfare, unemployment insurance and pensions.

Higher spending drove up taxes, Prof. Murrell says, to the point where they soon became the biggest single item of family expenditures. “And that,” he recounts, “created a strong social trend towards women in the workforce.” Indeed, according to Statistics Canada, in 1967 59% of husband-wife families with children under 16 had a single wage earner. The situation reversed over the next three decades. By 1997, 62% of such families had two wage earners.

With most women working, another trend with long-term consequences emerged. “There is little discussion of it in the government,” says Prof. Murrell, “but there was a decline in the birth rate. It correlated almost exactly with women’s participation in the labour force.” The birth rate in 1959 was 116 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49. By 1970, the rate had dropped to 71 and by 1997 to 44. It is now well below replacement level.

The federal government has provided the impetus for social change through other policy initiatives as well. “The obvious one is what happened to the divorce rate,” says Focus on the Family’s vice-president of family policy, Derek Rogusky, in Vancouver. “In 1968, the [federal] government introduced no-fault divorce. Since then, there has been a 700% increase in the number of divorces, to 70,000 annually. That has wreaked havoc on families and children.”

Ottawa having already declared marriage to be (in effect) an unenforceable contract, judges by the late 1970s and early 1980s were “equating common-law relationships with marriage,” continues Mr. Rogusky. “The courts viewed them as the same. In 1981, approximately 200,000 children under age 14 lived in common-law households. By 2001, that number had risen to 732,915.”

Only lately has it become evident how unstable this can be for children. Statistics Canada’s longitudinal study of children, released in 1999, revealed that 63% of children born into common-law households had lost one of their parents through separation by the age of 10, while only 12% of children in married households had lost a parent through separation or divorce.

Mr. Rogusky is also concerned about a current federal initiative to outlaw spanking. He explains, however, “It is a much bigger problem than just spanking. Family is an institution, just like Church or government. The problem is the government is trying to expand its role and become those other institutions. It is trying to become the parent by removing authority, even though it cannot do the parenting job.”

The government has also supplanted the Church in many of its institutional roles, comments John von Heyking, a University of Lethbridge political scientist. “Religious people have a long tradition of giving to Church-run schools, hospitals and charities,” he explains. “However, as church attendance has dropped off, people have looked to government as a moral agent with a responsibility to organize such charitable endeavours.”

Weekly church attendance, reported by 53% of the population in 1957, had dropped to 23% by 1990. Since then it has been steady, and still held at 21% in 2002, according to surveys compiled by University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby.

Professor von Heyking says the Church is being elbowed aside in a political search for a national identity. “Courts and various elites view the Charter of Rights as a tool for building a homogenous Canadian nation. Religion makes competing claims.” Religious freedom was not too heavily circumscribed by the courts until it ran up against the court-ordered expansion of gay rights in the 1990s.

Another area of federal jurisdiction that has seen considerable deterioration is crime. There is far more today than there was before activist, no-fault government began in the 1960s. “Basically, I think we grew up in a safe society,” says Victims of Violence spokesman Gary Rosenfeldt in Ottawa, who is 62, “But, since then, I think we’ve had tremendous change.”

The murder rate is a key indicator of the level of violence over the decades. While the number of Canadian homicides hovered around 1 per 100,000 population throughout the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, it took a huge leap upward with the effective abolition of the death penalty in 1967, and the change from punishment theory in prisons to rehabilitation. By 1975, the rate had peaked at 3.02 murders for every 100,000 Canadians, slowly subsiding to 1.92 by 1997.

Mr. Rosenfeldt says, “Violent crime has dropped in recent years. But that’s because we have an aging population. Even so, the murder rate hasn’t come down as much as it should. Youth violence has increased, and the violence is more extreme. For instance, I don’t know of any case from the 1950s, ’60s or ’70s where a group of girls beat another young girl to death, as happened to Reena Virk in Victoria.”

The light sentences, easy parole and the more comfortable correctional facilities implemented since the 1960s lead Mr. Rosenfeldt to conclude, “The community isn’t seeing justice done. When you see a pedophile who has violated children get a conditional sentence and not go to jail—when you see a 17-year-old, here in Ontario, get three years for rape and murder...The reality is we’ve trivialized violence with the sentences handed down.”

Carroll Rees, Ottawa spokeswoman for Action Life, points to related trends set in motion by another Criminal Code amendment in 1969—the decriminalization of abortion. In 1970—two years after legalization—there were 11,000 abortions. By 1998, the annual Canadian tally had reached 110,000. (According to some estimates, more than 40% of women nowadays will abort at least one pregnancy.)

Ms. Rees comments, “Canadians were lulled into believing it would only be used in extreme cases. But once it was legalized, people began to find it acceptable.”

“Abortion was supposed to solve social ills,” Ms. Rees says. Instead, respect for the intrinsic dignity of human life has diminished. “Take the case of Tracey Latimer. Unless life is perfect, we don’t want it any more. Today, over 80% of babies diagnosed with Down’s syndrome are aborted.”

William Gairdner, author of the 1990 best-seller The Trouble With Canada, observes that over the past half-century “The state has insinuated itself into the relationships between individuals that were formerly reserved for family, Church, community groups and sports teams.” Yet families and “voluntary associations, not the state, are the highest form of social expression.”

He thinks the word “socialism” is as accurate as any to describe contemporary beliefs. “Socialism is a good thing if you have limitless supplies of money,” he adds, “but the theory falls apart when you can’t pay for it. There is lots of evidence that is where we are at today. Look at the hospital waiting lists.”

Mr. Gairdner nonetheless remains hopeful that many social ills may yet reverse themselves. “Western nations are shrinking,” he reasons. “At some point, governments will ring the panic bells and there will be not-so-subtle shifts in public policy. We’ll see changes in the tax code to spur the birth rate and create incentives to marry. Society will become anti-homosexual, anti-feminist and pro-life. And it will happen for purely economic reasons, not religious ones.” At age 62, his only regret is, “I wish I were going to be around to see it happen.”