PM Carney announced a family IVF benefit up to $20,000. He also espouses social justice; definition: fair treatment and equitable status of all individuals and groups within a society.
Several banks have recently offered IVF benefits, some up to $60,000. In the “2019 TD Bank Group: Human Rights Statement PDF”, it states that TD has taken an approach to Total Rewards and Fair Pay that specifically targets women, visible minorities vs. non visible minorities. Marital status is not included.
Unions are supposed to be bastions of financial equality, yet they offer benefits that do not include youth and singles. Indeed, all institutions including provincial and federal governments, corporations, unions, and families often duplicate each other in benefit offerings ensuring families often have multiple entities from which to choose.
Benefits from these institutions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars include a non inclusive list of maternal/paternal leave, child daycare, elder care, coverage for fertility and reproductive treatments, support for surrogacy, donor and adoption costs, and free school food programs. Bereavement leave was extended to those mourning the end of a pregnancy or death of a child..
The addition of multiple benefits to families and married/coupled persons over the last fifty years without financial inclusion of youth and singles aged 18 to 64 ensures they can never achieve the same financial success as their own families.
Marital status, which once was stated to be implied by legal entities, now has completely disappeared except for programs which specifically give privileged benefits to the married like pension splitting. Solutions could base living wage financial formulas on equivalence scales or Canada’s Market Basket Measure (MBM) or to give fully refundable tax credits to youth, singles and the poor equivalent to those received by families.
A government report titled "Future Lives: Social Mobility in Question" by Policy Horizons argues that status quo government financial programs could lead to a "terrifying" societal breakdown by 2040 with increasing financial spread between wealth and poverty. AI will likely worsen unemployment rates.
Canada, as a democratic capitalist country, has completely lost its perspective on the financial lives of their own youth and single population, about 30 percent of the population. These persons have become financially ‘stateless” in their own country.
Lin Gackle
Cochrane, AB
