The invisible voter: Are politicians cheating single Canadians?
A quarter of Canadians are single. When will politicians notice?
Marcel Watier’s life sounds pretty cushy, if you don’t know him well. He’s 39, living on his own east of downtown Toronto. He earns a good salary, thanks to one full-time job as a sports facility supervisor and a parttime job on the side.
Watier says people think he must be spending his money on stereotypical urban luxuries — dinners out, craft cocktails, a condominium with a pool and a rock-climbing wall — since he doesn’t have a partner or children.
But Watier actually rents a basement apartment. In addition to supporting himself, he helps his two sisters, who have eight children between them and a ninth on the way.
If those were his children and Watier were married, he would be eligible for a long list of tax breaks, benefits and programs. As a single person, he’s on his own.
“It drives me up the wall to hear the whole ‘selfish single’ term,” he says.
Singles are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country. People living on their own make up more than one quarter of Canadian households.
Some of them do earn sixfigure incomes they can spend at the spa. But the median household income of workingage single people in Canada is $31,000 — one-third of what the median two-parent family with children under 18 makes, according to Statistics Canada.
You wouldn’t know that from listening to politicians. The phrase “Canadian families” has been spoken 5,669 times in the House of Commons since 1994, according to OpenParliament.ca, with Conservative MPs accounting for almost half those mentions.
And party leaders campaigning for the October federal election seem even more focused on promising goodies to moms and dads than usual. The Conservatives and Liberals are touting increases to the monthly child benefit parents receive. The New Democratic Party wants to bring in a national subsidized day-care plan.
There are nine federal ridings — all in urban centres — where at least 40 per cent of the adult population is single and not living with children. Pandering to families and ignoring singles’ needs means supporting suburban sprawl over walkable urban neighbourhoods, 45-minute commutes by car over accessible transit, and homeowners in healthy real estate markets over long wait lists for public housing.
If Canada’s singles were to get up tomorrow and decide it’s high time they stood up for themselves, they would form a formidable voting bloc. Maybe it’s time to try.
Tim Powers, a former Conservative strategist and vice- chairman of the Ottawa-based communications and government relations firm Summa Strategies, says there’s one simple reason why politicians focus on families, not singles: It works.
Tax breaks that put money directly back in families’ wallets have been crucial to helping the Conservatives win key suburban ridings in the Greater Toronto Area since 2005, ridings that have the lowest concentrations of single people in the country.
“The government recognizes if it is going to win the next election, it has to dance with the ones that brought them to where they are now,” Powers says.
But there’s also a wider cultural bias toward traditional family values, says Powers — even in an age of gay marriage, high divorce rates and more family diversity than ever before. He also says most voters believe families need more help than singles, even though the numbers prove otherwise.
Because they don’t have anyone with whom to share expenses, singles spend more of their income on necessities: 35 per cent of it goes on food and shelter on average, compared to 30 per cent for couples with children. That may not sound like a lot, but it catches up to them later. Singles approaching retirement age face a median $30,000 savings deficit, compared to a $172,000 savings surplus for couples, a Statistics Canada study found.
A long list of government benefits only available to married couples or people with children widens the disparity. The Post counted 17 federal programs that provide benefits, tax deductions and credits to couples and families.
Some are geared to the family’s income, but many are available to wealthy and poor families alike. For example, based on measures introduced in the latest budget, a couple with a six-figure household income can still receive $160 per month for each child under six through the Universal Childcare Benefit. They can also deduct up to $1,000 per child for fitness expenses, $500 per child for art classes and $7,000 per child for childcare at tax time.
Ted Rechtshaffen, of TriDelta Financial Partners, says his clients don’t realize the implications of those tax breaks until they reach their senior years. In addition to the savings deficits, there’s the huge financial impact of income splitting for married seniors, which the Conservatives introduced years before their new income-splitting plan for families with children.
Rechtshaffen says framing this as a women’s issue, rather than a singles’ issue, might garner more sympathy. Women tend to outlive their spouses, which means they are likely to spend their final years alone.
“Their spouse passes away and over the course of the next year or two, things start to hit financially,” he says. “It’s the first time they realize there are all these financial disincentives to being single.”
Singles who can afford it tend to move to urban centres where they can be around people in similar circumstances, according to a study by American sociologist Eric Klinenberg discussed in his book Going Solo: the Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. As the population ages and widowed boomers move out of their suburban homes and into condos, the phenomenon shows no signs of slowing down.
“Our species has been living in groups for hundreds of thousands of years. We’ve been living alone for maybe 80 years, or less. We’re very new at this,” Klinenberg says. “Our thinking and ways of organizing politics hasn’t caught up to the new demographic reality.”
Urbanization, feminism, poverty and income inequality — the issues that affect singles — are those traditionally associated with the political left. A study of data from the 1993, 1997 and 2000 Canadian federal elections, titled The Spouse in the House: What explains the marriage gap in Canada?, found married people were significantly more likely to vote for right-leaning parties, especially when those parties took socially conservative stances on issues like abortion or gay marriage.
Meanwhile, the urban ridings with the most singles tend to be held by the Liberals or the NDP. So why aren’t they appealing to single voters directly?
Ian Capstick, a former strategist for the federal NDP now with the Ottawa communications firm MediaStyle, says promising help for Canadian families is a good way to appeal to everyone, even the fast-growing ranks of people who don’t fit the traditional definition.
Family “becomes a very generic term. It means, I care about Canada,” he says.
These days, politics has a lot in common with marketing, identifying target groups of voters (the infamous urban “Zooeys” and suburban “Heathers” of the 2008 election) and coming up with ways to appeal to them specifically. But singles are less likely to see their unmarried status as a political identity.
Matthew Wilson, a politicalscience professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and one of the authors of The Spouse in the House, said politicians court the single vote indirectly, with socially liberal policies. While the Liberal party hasn’t promised any tax breaks for singles, one of the first policy positions leader Justin Trudeau took was in favour of marijuana legalization.
“Those kinds of socially liberal policies are one tool that parties on the left can use to generate more enthusiasm for them from single people,” Wilson says.
But the parties are going to have to do better than that if they want to win Alexis Sciuk’s vote. The 33-year-old pharmaceutical professional finds the idea of parties pandering to young people and singles by promising them legal pot “a touch insulting.”
Sciuk says she doesn’t resent families for getting a tax break while she doesn’t. Her problem is with politicians who promise things to certain groups of people, rather than thinking about how to improve society as a whole.
When our political leaders make it sound like the family from Leave it to Beaver is still the Canadian norm, there are consequences for the rest of the country, Sciuk says.
“It’s really antiquated. There’s a big demographic that’s being left out,” she says.
“I don’t want people who have families and children to feel like I think they’re getting something and they don’t deserve it. That’s not how I feel at all. I think we maybe just need to take a different look at how we incentivize our citizens.”
Our species has been living in groups for hundreds of thousands of years. We’ve been living alone for maybe 80 years, or less. We’re very new at this. Our thinking and ways of organizing politics hasn’t caught up to the new demographic reality. — Eric Klinenberg