5 Questions With Family Studies: Andrea Mrozek on Canada’s Crumbling Commitment Culture

Canada is a cautionary tale. So close in proximity to the United States, yet “light years ahead” when it comes to some of the public policy solutions championed but not implemented here: paid parental leave, universal child care, and generous welfare allowances. And yet these long-established programs have a patchy record on delivering on their intended consequences. To learn more about Canada’s family-related policies, we spoke with Andrea Mrozek, Senior Fellow at Cardus, a think tank located in Ottawa, Canada. Originally a journalist who was uninterested in family and marriage policy, her drift into think tank research led her to conclude that how we treat family and marriage truly is at the heart of how we can best support individuals, families, and communities—and that this is true for all of us, no matter where we sit on the political spectrum. 

Institute for Family Studies: Here at IFS, we are largely known for supporting the institution of marriage—often against a tide of elite opinion that’s dismissive of it. What’s the vibe in Canada when it comes to marriage?

Andrea Mrozek: Canadians largely view marriage as nice but not necessary. If anything, there may not be hostility to marriage, just more of a “so what?” about it.

I’d say capstone marriage is firmly entrenched—the idea that you get married as a reward or social norm for slogging it out in your career during your 20s. For example, the average age of first marriage is 31.2 in Canada, higher than the 29.6 in the US. 

Cohabitation is also more of a norm too in Canada—about 13% of couples in the United States cohabit rather than marry. That’s much higher in Canada, at nearly 23% of Canadian couples who cohabit, though this national average figure is skewed by Quebec’s extremely high rates of cohabitation: 43% of all cohabiting couples in Canada live in Quebec. 

Overall, I’d say Canada is neutral on marriage, and Canadians take the goods of marriage for granted. You really need more than neutrality to bolster and bring back the institution. In that sense,Canada is not as friendly to marriage as it needs to be.  

Related to the issue of marital decline, Canada has a total fertility rate of 1.26, which is pretty much the lowest internationally. What’s going on there?

Well, we did some research at Cardus with IFS Senior Fellow Lyman Stone that shed some light on this. We conducted a survey of Canadian women’s fertility ideals and intentions. We were surprised to find that half of Canadian women have fewer children than they would ideally like to have.  

The top reasons women gave for not who wishing to have children in the next two years included “wanting to grow as a person,” a desire to save money, needing to focus on career, the concern that kids require intense care, plus the inability to find a suitable partner. “Wanting to grow as a person” suggests to me that “capstone fertility” is at play; women may think they can only try for children when they’ve achieved mythical levels of personal growth, when other career and financial successes are behind them. This dovetails with the idea of children as having very intense care requirements. If you think it is very difficult to raise kids, then you may well believe you should wait to have any. 

It’s fairly clear that, specifically in contrast with the USA, Canada’s system of generous maternal/parental leave and child benefits is not encouraging people to have kids. These benefits are helpful when people start their families, but people are not motivated by the benefits to do so. Specifically on Canadian parental leave, my colleague and I wrote about the pros and cons here. 

What might be done to turn the tables in terms of views on marriage and family life, and to help boost fertility rates?

Both are tall orders! Since it’s likely that increasing marriage rates would help boost the fertility rate, I’ll focus on that. 

But it is worth explaining why we’d focus on marriage at all—and the research I have done over the years with my colleagues leaves me clear that marriage has a foundational purpose relating to how we organize society and what tools we give young people in pursuit of the good life. 

It’s tempting to give priority to deep friendships, as Rhaina Cohen writes in her recent book The Other Significant Others. It just sounds more hip. But one could argue that giving priority to friendships is de facto what Canadians do, and it is not offering the same level of stability as advancing a supportive culture for marriage would.

With the exception of eradicating any remaining marriage penalties in law and policy, my co-author Peter Jon Mitchell and I argue in our new book I…Do? Why Marriage Still Matters that the biggest changes will tend to be cultural. To this end, for marriage to flourish again, we need to overcome bad narratives about marriage and tell better stories. 

Second wave feminist ideas that marriage “annihilates women” (Simone de Beauvoir) are still prevalent. Not everyone is taking gender studies, of course, but for my formative years, this story of marriage as a patriarchal institution where women lose their identities hung over me. 

Marriage needs a better PR team. Married parents, even in Canada, are still the dominant family form at nearly 65% of families.  Canadians need our own surveys that would likely mirror US results showing married men and women with children are the happiest in contrast with married people without children, and those who do not marry. As the decline in fertility in most developed countries is driven by a decline in marriage rates, boosting marriage rates should boost fertility rates.

For marriage to flourish again, we need to overcome bad narratives about marriage and tell better stories. 

For those who do have children, Canada offers a universal child care system. You’ve been critical of that, and yet it’s being expanded by Canada’s Liberal government. Why should the U.S. not follow Canada’s example? 

Ultimately, the new system is failing in what it aimed to deliver, which is high levels of access to highly subsidized daycare. By prioritizing federal funding to not-for-profit and public daycare centers, the system is squeezing out private forms of care, by design. In preferentially subsidizing only one form of care, it is artificially inflating demand for that form of care, so wait lists have grown. 

Canada is currently enforcing a one-size-fits-all system on really different parts of the country that have different needs. It has not created greater access to day care, and it is leaving out the vast majority of families who either can’t access the care, or don’t prefer that form of care. 

End-of-life care is another big issue facing families and policy makers in both Canada and the United States. Canada legalized Medical Aid in Dying (or MAID) in 2016, with continued expansion of the program since then. In the United States, 10 states and DC have legalized assisted suicide, most recently New York. Tell us how Canada’s MAID law has affected your culture. More importantly, what can the U.S. learn about the dangers of legalizing assisted suicide/euthanasia from Canada?

 “Medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) in Canada is now in many instances viewed as part of medical “treatment.”  It is effectively tied as the fifth leading cause of death in Canada. The law legalized not only assisted suicide but also euthanasia, and 99.9% of MAiD deaths in Canada are euthanasia, through lethal injection. Those U.S. states that have legalized around this area allow only assisted suicide—self-ingested lethal medication. 

Canada, on the other hand, has continued to expand the breadth of euthanasia or “MAiD,” with no restriction to those with terminal illness, and in a few years, will allow it for those with only mental illness. The criteria for eligibility are highly subjective, and there is no transparent oversight of compliance with existing laws. 

Compounding this are problems for Canadians in accessing medical care, including palliative care, as well as disability supports. This has created a lethal combination where suffering people feel they have no recourse but to choose death. 

The U.S. should not only learn from the Canadian experience of assisted death, but also from that of other jurisdictions—including U.S. states with a history of legal assisted suicide. Expansion of "eligibility criteria" and erosion of "safeguards" is evident and inevitably leads to a normalization of death as a solution to suffering rather than care, accompaniment, and true assistance in living.