Lorne Gunter: Promote equal parenting

Children who grow up without both parents in their lives are more prone to a whole host of social problems.


According to a three-year study done by Edward Kruk, an associate professor of social work at the University of British Columbia, 85% of young people in prison and youth detention are fatherless. This is a particularly important finding since, according to Statistics Canada, youth crime is the only category of crime that has been consistently increasing over the past decade. Nearly one-in-five young Canadians will have a run-in with the law — more than twice the percentage of adults — and most of them have no father in the home.


A combination of his own research and the findings of dozens of long-term studies of the effects of divorce on children, Professor Kruk’s study explains that 90% of runaways, as well as 71% of dropouts and majorities of depressed, suicidal, addicted and pregnant teens, grew up in father-absent homes.


It’s true: There are bad dads out there — men who abuse their wives or children, or both, or even just abandon them, disappearing entirely from their lives. But more often than not, father absence is the result of divorce, and, increasingly, of our legal system’s deliberate bias in favour of mothers and against fathers in custody awards.
Nearly 80% of custody awards in Canadian courts are made to mothers, and visitation rights are almost never enforced with the same enthusiasm as child support awards. Public officials are quick to condemn so-called deadbeat dads, passing laws to suspend their driver’s licenses and government cheques if they are behind on their payments to their exes. Yet mothers who deny visitation are almost never punished. No province, in practice, has penalties for access denial that match those for falling behind on support.


Federal judges and many appointed to provincial courts are required to take sensitivity training on women’s perspectives of and experiences with the justice system. No similar courses about men’s perceptions are required, because the (badly mistaken) belief within the system is that our laws and courts are stacked in favour of men.


Among all the examples of anti-male bias in our family law, two stand out. In the mid-1990s, then-justice minister Allan Rock changed Canadian law so that men could no longer deduct child support from their taxes, while women receiving support no longer had to pay taxes on that income. In other words, men are taxed on income they do not have, while women — who are the recipients and beneficiaries of the income — don’t pay.


Many judges in divorce cases initially “grossed up” or “grossed down” their support awards to compensate for this new upside-down tax arrangement, so the net effect was neutral. Still, the point of the change was to punish men because the bias within the federal justice department held that men were all heels and women all victims.


Over time, too, the initial neutrality has vanished (if men’s stories of their financial experiences after divorce are to be believed), forcing many divorced fathers into poverty, alienation from their children, depression and even suicide.


The other glaring example of anti-male bias comes from Justice Canada’s rejection of a 1998 recommendation by a joint Commons-Senate committee that all child custody awards in divorce cases start as 50-50 mother-father arrangements. Not only did the justice department ignore the suggestion of “equal parenting,” in 2001 arch-feminist civil servants conducted their own cross-country review in secret, inviting testimony only from those special interest “experts” who agreed with their jaded view of men.


According to the latest census figures, husbands and wives who both work outside the home now spend nearly equal time raising children. If, in divorce, one parent is given far more time than the other with the children, the kids suffer badly from the loss of affection and contact with the non-custodial parent, who is usually the father.


The best solution is for couples to work harder to avoid divorce. It is a modern myth that if the adults are happier after divorce, the children eventually will be, too. Divorce is hard on kids, period.


But given that divorce is unavoidable today, the Conservative government must heed Prof. Kruk’s finding and reconsider the concept of equal parenting when marriages fall apart.
National Post
lgunter@shaw.ca