The clock ticks just as fast for stay-at-home mother Elizabeth Keobke of Surrey as is does for any working mom. Between the volunteering, the driving of her three children—to school, sports practices and music lessons—and the countless tasks of managing an active household, the 41-year-old Mrs. Keobke has little time for herself. But she is not complaining. "I'm a stay-at-home mom and proud of it," she says. And as for the notorious suggestion by a federal Liberal MP that she does not work as hard as a woman with both an outside job and children, Mrs. Keobke has just two words: "Oh bull."

Canadian stay-at-home mothers may be one of the biggest stories of the year so far because of the recent House of Commons debate over family taxation rates, but to Mrs. Keobke, money plays second fiddle to her family. "Being at home with the children is more important than the luxuries that an extra income will allow," she says. With two daughters in high school and a son in primary school, she feels her priorities are in the right place. "I want to be there for that key time of day, from three in the afternoon to five, when they arrive home from school, carrying the baggage of the day, to listen, support and just be there for them," she says. "If you're a working mom, by the time you're home at six, they've already called their friends."

Deciding to staying at home full time is not something Mrs. Keobke did lightly. Her salesman husband Brian makes a healthy income, but a second income would have allowed the family to enjoy more luxuries and vacations. But what's lost materially is gained in other areas. "I really feel I have a role in raising citizens for tomorrow," she says. "Inside, you know and you're proud that you're making a difference."

And that difference extends well beyond the home, too. "Stay-at-home moms are the ones who volunteer at schools," Mrs. Keobke points out. "If is wasn't for us, the schools wouldn't function nearly as well as they do. There's the hot lunches, there's the fundraising that we do. That influences not only your own child, but everyone's."

Calgary homemaker Lynda Blazina, 27, has similar feelings. "I want to be home to raise my children and influence their lives as much as possible," Mrs. Blazina says of her two-year-old daughter Ryshon and nine-month-old son Christian. "Nobody else will raise my children in the way I would with the values and morals I hold high."

Alberta Treasurer Stockwell Day hit the right note for families like the Blazinas in that province's budget three weeks ago by introducing tax breaks for families—and in particular, one-income families with children. Barring a serious economic downturn, in 2002 basic personal income exemptions will increase from $7,131 to $11,620. Spousal deductions will rise to the same level, and single parents will be able to claim the deduction for one of their dependent children. Combined with a change in tax rate to an 11% flat tax, a dual-income family making $40,000 will see their taxes cut in half, and a single-earner family with the same income will pay only one-third of the current amount.

Mr. Day's good news came in the middle of a raging parliamentary debate over family tax policy. Seizing upon remarks by Liberal MP Jim Peterson, who implied that stay-at-home parenting is less valuable than work outside the home, the Reform Party put the government on the defensive and made equal tax levels for one-income families this spring's hottest political issue.

Reform proposes increasing the basic federal personal income deduction for both paid workers and spouses to $7,900 from the 1998 levels of $6,456 and $5,380, instituting refundable tax credits of $4,000 to $7,000 for all families, and re-indexing the tax system to protect Canadians from inflation.

On March 9, the Liberal government, pitted against combined opposition forces, voted down the proposal 145-123. But the pressure has been so great that hints of a general cut for middle-bracket tax rates from 26% to 23% and raising the income level for the top rate are now coming out of Ottawa. While this would ease the overall tax load, critics maintain that it ignores the basic inequalities in family tax policy.

"I'm really disappointed that the Liberals have refused to recognize this discrimination," says Calgary Reform MP Jason Kenney. "It's a pretty black and white issue. Single income earners pay 60% to 100% more in taxes than double-income families, besides making an economic sacrifice."

After denigrating Reform as advocates of the economic subjugation of women, Hedy Fry, minister responsible for the status of women, then attempted to undermine the opposition's tax and income calculations. Seizing on Reform's assertion that single-income families pay about $4,000 more each year in taxes than dual-income families, Ms. Fry argued that if Canada Pension Plan payments, employment insurance premiums, costs of employment (which she set at $3,000, double that for a single earner) and $8,000 in childcare costs are all considered, a two-income family would actually take home about $4,000 less on their paycheques, despite childcare expense deductions.

Her critics pointed out that Ms. Fry's math ignored the fact that single-income households are almost invariably poorer. "She overlooks the fact that people at home are forsaking their total income," notes Gwen Landolt, vice-president of REAL Women. "A situation where both partners work can result from economics or a matter of choice. If it's a lifestyle choice, why should the taxpayer pay? If they're low-income, that's another story."

The income gap between one- and two-earner families bears out Ms. Landolt's point. The average income for a two-parent, one-earner family in 1996 was $45,322, compared to $66,241 for the average dual-income family. The difference equals the amount the second spouse could make working full-time at $10 per hour. The bulk of two-income families are at the upper end of the income scale, according to Statistics Canada. One-income families are mostly middle-class, if there are two parents, or lower if a single parent is struggling to make ends meet.

In spite of this, high-income two-earner families can claim the most deductions for their children. Two children under seven means $14,000 tax-free in childcare expense deductions for family incomes over $70,000. Single-income families at this level get no comparable tax relief. Ottawa says it does not want to subsidize the proverbial "wealthy banker's wife" (a very small number of women, by the statistics), yet the current system rewards a family of two wealthy bankers the most overall.

But Ms. Fry, who in an interview professed ignorance of these figures, feels such comparisons are irrelevant. Instead, she insists that the government needs to continue research begun in the census two years ago before any solutions can be discussed. "We need to find out how to value unpaid work across the mix of families," she says (see story, page 49).

Whatever the value of unpaid housework, it is paid work that fills government coffers. Ottawa's agenda, revealed in its defence to the United Nations against Calgary housewife Beverley Smith's complaint that Canada discriminates against stay-at-home parents, is to get as many parents working as possible. Of course there are few incentives to stay home, says the leaked draft of the document; policy needs to "promote attachments of parents to the paid workforce" and "provide incentives for parents to engage in paid work."

The establishment position has been well-supported in the media by aging tribunes of the feminist movement. Catherine Ford's vitriolic March 12 column in the Calgary Herald was typical: "Staying at home is a privilege and a choice...Why should I pay in taxes or guilt for that privilege?" Her answer, rather than finding a solution to make the choice to stay home less of a privilege and more of an equal and viable option for more women, is to spend billions in tax dollars on universal daycare.

While subsidized childcare is a traditional feminist doctrine, Canadian demographic data seems to indicate that it may not appeal to the average family. The current childcare expense deduction requires that parents use a registered daycare that issues receipts. Only about 16% of dual-income couples in Canada currently claim the childcare deduction, which implies that many are relying on informal, non-deductible childcare arrangements. If institutional daycare is unattractive to parents, other means of supporting them could be more useful.

Jim Davies, a professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, believes that tax policy is unfair to parents overall. "In equitable tax policy, those who have an equal ability to pay should pay the same," he says. "More kids means a lesser capacity to pay personal taxes. Children should be taken into consideration when we compare horizontal equity. There should be deductions just for having kids."

A C.D. Howe Institute study released in February agrees with this assessment. "The tax system treats the decision to have children no differently from the decision to purchase a fancy boat," it stated. The study suggests reducing the childcare expense deduction by $2,000, but then introducing an equivalent child deduction that would be available to all families.

Ultimately, it seems most women would like to have more flexibility to raise their children in the ways they believe are best, whether by earning money for them or staying home, or a combination. Some women are fashioning their own flexibility even in the absence of government support. "If you told me this is where I would be at seven years ago, I would have thought, 'It's not possible,'" says Edmontonian Tina Kawalilak, who home-schools the youngest two of her five children, Noel, 12, and Nathan, 14. A single mother, she cut back her bookkeeping income of around $3,000 per month to about $800. She also gets about $500 in child support.

The 47-year-old now gets her kids up at 8 a.m. every morning, does schoolwork with them until 1 p.m., and then spends the afternoon doing paid work. "Success is being with my kids at home," says Ms. Kawalilak, whose voice takes on a glow of pride when she describes her daughter's figure skating and her son's participation in army cadets. "The beauty of being with my family is knowing their strengths, weaknesses, likes. Seeing a purpose in their life, their gifts. I still don't really know what my older kids like—even what they like to eat or their favourite colours."

Ms. Kawalilak has seen changes in herself over the past years. "I was a poor mother when I started," she says, but then corrects herself. "I was a good mother, but had developed poor qualities of motherhood. You have to invest time to develop mothering skills, and you can't do that in two hours per day."

Seventy percent of women Ms. Kawalilak's age with children under six choose to continue their careers. But less than 54% of 20-something married mothers leave their preschool children and go to work, according to the 1996 census, down 3% from 1991. These young families are also likely to be at the lower end of the pay scale, and would benefit greatly from tax relief or child benefits.

"It would, of course, be considered extremely regressive for a woman of 22 or 23 today to get married and promptly have a baby," Danielle Crittenden writes of career-oriented women in her newly published book What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us. "But I wonder if it wouldn't be the most radical and even progressive act an ambitious woman could commit."

Rather than following the trend of jumping immediately into a career after finishing college or university, Ms. Crittenden suggests that beginning a family might be more strategic. "To a modern woman, this surrender of youthful freedom might seem unimaginable," she writes. But it is a sacrifice with a payoff. "By the time her second child is toddling off to nursery school, she'd still be only 29 or 30...she could enter the workforce or go to graduate school (if she hadn't already)...By the time her children were in school for a full day, she'd have just begun to hit her stride at work."

Ms. Crittenden makes these observations from experience. Married at 25, she had her first child at 28 and her second two years later. Now in her mid-30s, she has increasing freedom to pursue her career. "While it is obviously true you can't go back in time, it is not true that the teachings and principles that have guided humans since the beginning of civilization have suddenly become irrelevant," she writes. "The problem we face as modern people...is how to reconcile the old with the new."

Ms. Crittenden has been much criticized for her ideas by reviewers and pundits defending feminist dogma. "If throughout this book I've been critical of the women's movement, it is because I see the failure of its ideals, not because I'm against, or pessimistic about, women's aspirations," she writes. Thinking of her daughter, she adds, "I want to her be accomplished and fulfilled in her work, to be interested in the world, for her soul to be broadened by ideas, by religion, by music and by books. But I also want her to be a wife and mother, and to experience the fulfilment and joys that come from these roles, their duties and sacrifices, their incomparable love."

Young women are making attempts to bring together their work and families in ways that compromise less of each. Technology is making that task easier. Three years ago Calgarian Carla Novello, now 29, was expecting her first child. "I didn't know what to do," she says. "I didn't want to go back to work, but we needed money." An automobile insurance underwriter, Mrs. Novello asked if she could be set up to work from home by computer.

"It was a pilot project," she explains. For a week she was put in a room alone to work, both to test her ability to work on her own and to set productivity standards. When she began at home Mrs. Novello was put on a series of three-month trial periods. Two-and-a-half years later the program is still running, and more parents have signed on.

"Sometimes, by the end of the day, I feel like pulling my hair out," Mrs. Novello admits. She usually puts in a couple hours of work early in the morning, then gets breakfast for her kids. For the next few hours, the children will play or nap while she works again. The computer link-up is on until 7 p.m. three evenings a week, so on busy days she can work in the early evening when her husband, a systems analyst, comes home. "I have to put in an average of 35 hours per week each month," she says. "I will probably continue like this. It's very flexible."

The complexity of family decisions surrounding who will work, how they will work and how much they will work makes the issue of fair treatment for all families difficult. Added to this are the ideological agendas of policy-makers. As the Kids First Parent Association of Canada noted in a parliamentary committee meeting last fall in Calgary, "Taxation policies are not neutral. They are used to direct behaviour, to encourage people to make certain choices." BCR

with notes from TERRY O'NEILL

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