Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

Earlier this week, I spoke to you about the new 2006 census numbers for the family. The numbers indicate that the institution of marriage, not just the middle class itself, is under siege. I believe that there is a relationship to these phenomena — that they are not separate.

For years, the indices are that more and more money is flowing into fewer and fewer hands. The attenuation of the middle class and the cost of education, health care, homes, and cars have greatly increased; as a percentage of income, these items of life are simply unrecognizable from the family budgets and economics of the past. Moreover, a condition characterized as “imposed affluence” exacerbates the effect of wealth diminishment – people have to go out and buy computers, cell phones, blackberries, electronic games, etc. as a result of cultural/business expectations.

Other items, such as electronic gear, keep getting updated — and we buy them. One father, with whom I have spoken, purchased a composite hockey stick for his son that cost $300.

What is occurring is an entrenchment of conditions and an increasing of economic effects that reinforce a status quo of middle-class and nuclear family deterioration. I wonder if some of our personal choices are a reaction to all of this. Are the demands of daily living, and the expectations of daily living — the drip, drip, drip, of the costs of daily living — simply applying too many strains on couple hood?

If so, these personal choices have a collective wallop – more common law relationships, fewer marriages, more single parents, and increased child poverty — it all means, in the end, just plain, fewer people. Fewer people ultimately means a smaller tax base, this, at a time of looming greater public demands as all those hippies age. The offspring of the free-love hippies have deified consumerism, treated marriage as a commodity, while fraternizing on Facebook.

Quebec has the lowest birth rate in the country, and it also has the highest acceptance and adoption of common-law marriages, coincidence? The general statistics say that common-law couples don’t stay together as long as married couples. That means a bigger household income for a longer period with married couples. Married men (before divorce, I might add) also earn, on average, 18 per cent more than single men. Moreover, more women are choosing to raise kids by themselves if the marriage becomes difficult (women’s own lives are plagued by child-rearing, career and cleaning – more work, on average, than the man). And women’s lives, and men’s roles, are more difficult these days. 

Very few young women from affluent families, statistically, choose to have families out of wedlock. More and more young women from poorer families are passing up on marriage. This, according to me, is a hardening of the socio-economic arteries.

Rich people rarely work against their own best interests. Poor people usually do. And they each reinforce their own respective class origins and self-perception.