Conservatives tout benefits of baby bonus cheques with election in three months
Cheques arrive three months before election
The “baby bonus” was Canada’s first universal welfare program, and in its short history it has been rolled out to keep infants from dying, possibly put the brakes on women’s lib and — in one case — create 90,000 new Quebecers.
Now, with the Conservatives sending out $3 billion in backdated cheques with the stated purpose of helping “hard-working Canadian families make ends meet,” skeptics are noting they will arrive only three months before election day.
“Few politicians are looked at poorly when they start handing out cheques,” says Kevin Milligan, an economist at the University of British Columbia who has plugged the numbers on previous baby-bonus programs.
Canadians have already been receiving $100 per month for any child under six, under a revival of Family Assistance brought in by the Harper Government in 2006. But under the new policy starting July 20, that amount will be boosted to $160, as well as another $60 for every child between six and 17.
For a family with a set of twins in diapers and a child in Grade 5, that’s $4,560 a year.
In Canada, the idea of paying a per-child bonus to parents came in the waning years of the Second World War.
Then, just as now, the prime minister — William Lyon Mackenzie King — was dragging in opinion polls and was spooked by the election of a left-wing government in the Prairies (Tommy Douglas’ C.C.F.).
Thus, with the stated intention of boosting the standard of living, Mackenzie King’s Liberals drew up the Family Allowance Act: When Canadian soldiers came home from Europe, they would receive an average of $5.83 per month for every child they added to the Baby Boom.
“It is a question in ethics whether parents ought to be bribed to take the care of their infants to which, in their helplessness, the infants are entitled,” reads a 1910 article in the British medical journal the Lancet, describing the then-revolutionary idea of “Bonuses for Babies.”
“Many of the parents may use the money judiciously, some foolishly, and others may spend it on drink.”
In Britain, the original idea was to give poor families enough extra cash to keep their infants from dying. But in Canada, the idea took hold largely because of its expediency.
In 1944, if a government was looking to draw up a policy to target Canadian families, the easiest possible plan was to send a cheque to everyone with a baby.
But the Family Allowance Act likely wasn’t all social welfare. One theory holds that family assistance was partly a plan to take Canada’s women — thousands of whom had been employed in munitions factories — and hustle them back to the kitchen before they got too empowered.
“It’s been suggested that (incentives) were given so that women would be happy to go back home after working in the war,” said Raymond Blake, a University of Regina history who has studied Canada’s history of family allowances.
It might also have had unionbusting undertones. Coming after a year of vicious labour strife, the Family Allowance was a way to boost incomes without needing to strengthen workers’ salaries.
Baby bonuses of some kind are in place in virtually all OECD member countries, be it tax breaks or more elaborate pro-baby policies.
Most famously, Finland has the “baby box.” Since the 1930s, new Finnish mothers have received a free cardboard box filled with baby clothing, blankets and a baby snowsuit.
The box, with a small mattress at its bottom, even doubles as a crib.
Fertility was similarly the goal of the 1988 Allowance for Newborn Children in Quebec. In that case, though, the eight-year policy led to the birth of 90,000 babies (largely third children) who would otherwise not have lived, according a 2002 C.D. Howe Institute analysis by Milligan.
Ironically, Canadian Conservatives have traditionally hated the idea of sending money to citizens just because they happened to have a baby in the house.
Conservatives originally derided the 1944 policy, which would ultimately be dismantled 40 years later by prime minister Brian Mulroney, who dismissed it as an inequitable burden on a debt-saddled nation.
“Does the man who makes $500,000 a year as bank president need to collect family allowances,” Mulroney asked a Vancouver crowd in 1984.
Thirty years later, the criticism from the opposition benches sounds remarkably similar.
“The Conservatives are deficitfinancing a pre-election candy toss to try and buy people with their own money,” Liberal finance critic Scott Brison said in a Monday phone interview.
Aaron Wudrick, the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said his group generally prefers individuals to decide for themselves how to spend their government bonuses.