From the Toronto Star: “All but lost in the controversy over the Conservatives’ impending elimination of the mandatory long-form census is how, in the proposed $30 million dollar replacement — the voluntary National Household Survey — Question 33 from the long form has been cut. Question 33 (let’s call it Q.33) is a three-part query that has been in place since Canada made commitments at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. The question gathered data on how much time people spent on unpaid work: domestic chores, child care and attending to the needs of elderly relatives and friends. It helped make Canada a world leader in “time-use” data. The results have also been showing how women are faring, socially and economically. For example, the results indicate that despite a higher volume and percentage of women in the workforce over the past 20 years, changes between men and women in respective unpaid workloads have merely been “marginal.”
Based on information gathered in the 2006 census, StatsCan reports that, on average, “Women spend about an hour a day more on basic housework chores than their male counterparts. In 2005, women aged 25 to 54 averaged 2.4 hours daily cooking, cleaning and doing other basic unpaid household chores, compared with 1.4 hours per day for men in this age range.”
Two-thirds of Canada’s unpaid work is being performed by women. No matter how the value of that is evaluated —anywhere between 30 to 45 per cent of Canada’s $1.5 trillion GDP. That’s a heck of a lot of productivity that is being completely discounted.”
The full story is here.
Damn! That sounds like such interesting data they were gathering!
I KNEW IT!! It’s about Flaherty& the boys’ income splitting gimmick! This came up in class a few days ago. I told the prof that whenever goverments (read CONSERVATIVE governments) do away with reliable methods of gathering statistics, it leaves them free to invent compelling mythologies to compensate for the missing information. He looked a little dubious about my comment, in spite of the previous day’s lecture on Leo Strauss.
I got confirmation of what this income splitting is really about during an economics class in ’05 when it was still just a Tory campaign promise. The prof, a Chicago School proponent, didn’t even argue with me when I asked: So they’re going to tax women for the work they’re ALREADY not getting paid for?!? He said, That’s right. Then he went on to describe a pension incentive that looked like as big a load of hooey as those empty promises about scrapping the GST. Yeah, right. Bring it down by 2% and then piggyback it on to PST so we’re stuck paying GST on things we never had to pay GST on before.
Mark my words, this income splitting is just another cleverly advertised money grab, and this removal of Q33 is just their way of trying to treat Canadians like mushrooms–feed us BS and keep us in the dark.
I hope Ignatieff can figure out a way to suck up to Layton and Duceppe’s people to get those gold diggers out of office before they actually do get rid of the entire census, start charging tolls for using public freaking sidewalks, fining people for chewing gum, giving themselves 48 pay hikes in a year, paying rich CEO’s for having bigger belt buckles than anybody else…