DeepDives is a bi-weekly essay series exploring key issues related to the economy. The goal of the series is to provide Hub readers with original analysis of the economic trends and ideas that are shaping this high-stakes moment for Canadian productivity, prosperity, and economic well-being. The series features the writing of leading academics, area experts, and policy practitioners. The DeepDives series is made possible thanks to the ongoing support of Centre for Civic Engagement.

Few policy goals command broader political support than increasing the well-being of children. It seems self-evident that any society that wants to secure its long-term future needs to be investing in the citizens, workers, and taxpayers of tomorrow. Both the Conservative government of Stephen Harper—with its Universal Child Care Benefit—and the current Trudeau government—with its Canada Child Benefit—made income support for families with children a key policy priority.

However, the policy debate about how best to improve outcomes for children—both in Canada and in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom—has had something of a blind spot in recent years. Despite the enormous changes in rates of marriage and divorce over the last half-century, there has been very little discussion of the role that family structure has to play in affecting children’s well-being. As we shall see, fewer than six out of 10 Canadian children live with their original parents, and many of those will see their families break up before they reach adulthood.

And yet, there seems to be a fear that any discussion of the relative merits of different family structures is “hurtful to the families being talked about and hurtful to our culture,” in the words of the Vanier Institute for the Family, a Canadian think tank that focuses on family issues. As well-known economist Tyler Cowen said in a 2022 interview with The Hub, “For many people, [family structure] is a subject you’re not even really allowed to bring up.”

But perhaps not anymore.

Two-parent families in the spotlight

The last year has seen two American authors put their heads above the parapet. The first was Melissa Kearney, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her September 2023 book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind is a data-driven look at how divergences in family structure in the U.S. have exacerbated high rates of income inequality. In a podcast discussion with The Hub in March she drew attention to the situation in the U.S., where:

the most highly educated, high-income segments of society are still getting married at high rates, raising their kids in two-parent families at high rates. Others in society who are struggling economically, their economic struggles are made worse by the fact that now they’re more likely to have just one adult, one parent in the household. Their kids fall further behind and that cements the inequality and perpetuates it across generations.

While the Washington Post, perhaps not surprisingly, dismissed Kearney’s book as “tiresome,” the reaction of the other house journal of liberal America was quite different: the New York Times published a guest essay by Kearney outlining the ideas in her book, and columnist Nicholas Kristof gave her work a sympathetic review in a column entitled “The One Privilege Liberals Ignore.”

In March of this year, Brad Wilcox, a sociologist from the University of Virginia, published Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, a book with a similarly clear message about the benefits of marriage for children. In another Hub podcast discussion, he argued that:

poor kids in communities across America are more likely to rise from poverty into affluence, that classic rags to riches story, when they’re growing up in communities where there are lots of two-parent families. A poor kid growing up in Salt Lake City is much more likely to become affluent as an adult compared to a poor kid growing up in Atlanta. That’s in large part because there are many more two-parent families in Salt Lake than there are in Atlanta.

Both these books build on extensive evidence from the U.S. and elsewhere that children who grow up in intact families—i.e. with their original parents (biological or adoptive)—have higher educational attainment, are less likely to engage in risky or delinquent behaviour, and have lower incarceration rates and teen pregnancy rates. Nor is the benefit of being in an intact family simply a result of the much greater financial resources relative to single-parent families: boys especially can often go astray without a father present in the home to be an appropriate role model. (This point is made eloquently in the new book Of Boys and Men, written by Richard Reeves, a former adviser to the British Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg and now senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.)

Children also do less well in stepfamilies: children are much more likely to be abused or neglected in a stepfamily than they are in an intact family. Furthermore, at least in the U.S. data, families where the parents are married also seem to produce better outcomes for children than families where the parents are in a common-law relationship (i.e. cohabiting), partly because those relationships are less stable, and this instability has a negative effect on children.

With the idea that marriage might produce better outcomes for children than common-law relationships or single parenthood now the focus of serious debate in the U.S., it is perhaps a good moment to take a look at the state of two-parent families in Canada, which is what we plan to do in the rest of this article.

Trends in two-parent families over time

Figure 1 shows the proportion of Canadian children living in one of three family types: married; common law (sometimes called co-habiting); and single parent. The share of children in married-couple families has declined steadily over time, from 93.6 percent in 1961 to 63 percent today. Of that 30.6 percentage point drop in the share of children in married-couple families, about half (15.9 percentage points) is accounted for by a rise in the share of single-parent families, with the other half (14.7) accounted for by a rise in the share of children in common-law couple families.

Interestingly, the biggest decline in the proportion of children in married-couple families took place not in the 1960s or 1970s, the decades that saw the legalisation of divorce and the decriminalisation of homosexual activity, but in the 1990s, as the children of the baby boomers came of age. Since 2011 the pace of decline has slowed although not halted, with the proportion of children in married couple families dropping 1.9 percentage points between 2011 and 2021, compared to a 5.8 percentage point drop between 2001 and 2011.

Intact families versus stepfamilies

It’s important to note that not all children in married-couple families live with their original parents (either birth parents or adoptive parents). Many live in stepfamilies, due to their parents being divorced and they now live with one of their original parents and this parent’s new spouse. Statistics Canada breaks down stepfamilies into two types: simple stepfamilies, where all the children living at home are the original children of only one of the parents; and complex stepfamilies, where there are children who have different birth parents.

This distinction matters significantly for outcomes, because, as noted above there is significant evidence that children do not do as well, on average, in stepfamilies as they do in intact families.

Figure 2 below shows how the children in married-couple families are distributed between intact families, simple stepfamilies, and complex stepfamilies. Of Canadian families, 58.1 percent of children live in intact families, with 2 percent in simple stepfamilies and 2.9 percent in complex stepfamilies. Thus, a bit less than a tenth of children in married-couple families live in stepfamilies.

Figure 3 shows the same breakdown for common-law couples, where 9.7 percent of children in Canadian families live in intact families, whereas 2.2 percent live in simple stepfamilies and 2.8 percent in complex stepfamilies. This means that about a third of children in common-law couple families live in stepfamilies.

The much higher prevalence of stepfamilies in common-law relationships likely reflects the reluctance of people who have lived through the breakup of a previous relationship to remarry, as well as the greater instability of these relationships.

Adding together the proportion of children in intact married-couple families and intact common-law couple families implies that 67.8 percent of Canadian children live in an intact family. However, that number is simply a snapshot in time: many children currently in intact families will see those families break up over time, so the proportion of children who reach adulthood still in an intact family is likely to be significantly less.

Breakdown by province and urban-rural

How do the proportions of children in different types of families vary across the country? Figure 4 answers this question for the provinces and territories. Quebec has the lowest proportion of children in married-couple families, with only 42 percent in this kind of family (compared to 63 percent for Canada as a whole) and 35 percent in common-law families (compared to 15 percent for Canada). This difference reflects the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when Quebec went from being one of the most religious parts of Canada to one of the most secular. Interestingly though, the proportion of children in single-parent families is only 23 percent, just slightly above the Canadian average of 22 percent, and so the greater incidence of common-law couples doesn’t seem to have led to many more children in single-parent families.

Looking at the rest of Canada, the Territories also have a high incidence of children in common law families: in this case, however, they also have a higher proportion of children in single-parent families—29 percent, the highest in Canada.

Alberta has the highest proportion of children in intact families, with 72 percent of children in this kind of family, closely followed by B.C. and Ontario (both at 70 percent). Manitoba (66 percent) and Saskatchewan (64 percent) have somewhat lower proportions of children in intact families.

Interestingly, the Atlantic provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have significantly lower proportions of children in intact families (60, 59, and 57 percent respectively), with correspondingly higher shares of children in common-law and single families. This difference with Ontario and the West may reflect the rural nature of these three Atlantic provinces. Figure 5 shows the breakdown for large Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) (Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver), small CMAs (other towns and cities with over 100,000 people), and non-CMAs (small towns and rural areas).

It’s readily apparent that there are fewer intact families in more rural areas: in the three largest CMAs, 67.1 percent of children live in intact families, compared to 64.9 percent of children in smaller CMAs, and only 55.3 percent in non-CMAs.

Family size 

Are married couples likely to have more children than unmarried couples or single parents? This seems a relevant question to ask given the significant decline in Canada’s fertility rate, which is now the lowest in our history. Unfortunately, we don’t have data on fertility rates by family structure, because data on the common-law status of the parents isn’t collected at birth. However, we do have data on family sizes by family type. These are shown in Figure 6 below.

The data show that intact married couple families have somewhat more children than intact common-law couples: 1.9 children per family for married couple families compared to 1.7 for common-law couple families. When it comes to stepfamilies the average number of children is similar for both married and common-law couples: 1.5 for simple stepfamilies and 2.9 for complex stepfamilies. The higher average number of children in complex stepfamilies arises partly because partners are often bringing children from both previous relationships, and partly because they have gone on to have children in this new relationship. By definition, a simple stepfamily would only have children from one of the previous relationships.

The average number of children in single-parent families is only 1.6, similar to that in simple stepfamilies and common-law couple families. Obviously, single parents are much less likely to have additional children, although the parent may have more children once he or she has a new partner and is no longer in a single-parent family.

Overall, these data seem to suggest that married couples have higher fertility rates than common-law relationships, although the difference isn’t large. Whether this difference is because marriage makes people more likely to want children, or because people who want children are more likely to get married is of course hard to say without conducting an in-depth experimental study.

International comparisons

We now look at how Canada compares to five other G7 countries: the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy. (Comparable data were not available for Japan). Because these other countries report data for children aged less than 18, we have adjusted the Canadian data to match. Beginning with the U.S. and the U.K., two countries that are culturally quite similar to Canada, we can see from Figure 7 that Canada has a smaller share of children in married couples: 62.2 percent compared to 64.7 percent for the U.K. and 67.7 percent for the U.S. The comparatively low proportion for Canada reflects the greater popularity of cohabitation: 16.9 percent of Canadian children under 18 are in common-law couples, compared to 13.7 for the U.K. and only 4.7 percent for the U.S.

This high proportion in Canada is entirely driven by Quebec: without Quebec, the proportion of children in common-law families would be lower than the U.K., although still higher than the U.S. When it comes to single-parent families, Canada has a lower proportion of children in this family type, with only 20.9 percent compared to 21.7 percent in the U.K. and 27.5 percent in the U.S. The high proportion of children in single-parent families in the U.S. is driven by the Black population, for which the proportion is slightly over 50 percent.

Turning now to the three continental European countries, we see that France has a significantly higher proportion of children in common-law relationships—26.3—than any of the other countries. This proportion is similar to, although slightly lower than, the 35 percent of children in common-law couples in Quebec. In both cases the retreat from marriage reflects societies that have, officially at least, rejected the Catholic church and embraced secularism, although it is notable that it is still the case in both places that more children live in married couples than in common-law couples. The proportion of children in single-parent families in France is 22.6 percent, only a little above that in Canada or the U.K.

In contrast, both Italy and Germany are more traditional, with 76 percent (Germany) and 77 percent (Italy) of children in married-couple families. In both countries, the proportion of children in common-law families is much lower than in France, the U.K., or Canada, although somewhat above the U.S. The proportion of children in single-parent families is much lower: around 15 percent for both countries, compared to over 20 percent for the other four countries.

Overall, when we look at other countries, Canada is on the low side when it comes to children in married-couple families, largely owing to the popularity of common law relationships in Quebec. However, the proportion of children in single-parent families is about average, lower than in the U.S., about the same as in the U.K., and France, but higher than in Germany and Italy.

Key takeaways

Canadians have every reason to care about the kinds of families that children grow up in. As we saw in the introduction, children who grow up with both their original parents do better across a whole range of life outcomes. What we see in the data is a gradual erosion in the proportion of children who grow up in these kinds of families. In 2021, only 58 percent of children lived in intact married-couple families, and many of these children will see their parents split up before they attain adulthood themselves.

Looking across Canada, the traditional married couple family is, unsurprisingly, most prevalent in Alberta and least prevalent in Quebec, although the proportion of children in single-parent families is higher in several of the maritime provinces than in the other provinces, probably reflecting their more rural nature. The territories are somewhat apart, with a significantly higher proportion of children in single-parent families, and significantly fewer in married-couple households.

Internationally, Canada has somewhat fewer children in married-couple families than the other G7 countries for which we have data, but the proportion of children in single-parent families is in the middle of the pack.

Thus, while there is no reason to panic about the state of two-parent families in Canada, there is cause for concern. Simply increasing monetary benefits to children will fail to deal with many of the underlying drivers of poor outcomes for children, such as the absence of a paternal role model. Policymakers need to think about what policies can encourage families to stay together and so provide the best possible environment for children to thrive. That debate is now very active in the U.S., and we in Canada need to have our own debate if we truly want to improve life for Canada’s children.

DeepDives is a bi-weekly essay series exploring key issues related to the economy. The goal of the series is to provide Hub readers with original analysis of the economic trends and ideas that are shaping this high-stakes moment for Canadian productivity, prosperity, and economic well-being. The series features the writing of leading academics, area experts, and policy practitioners. The DeepDives series is made possible thanks to the ongoing support of Centre for Civic Engagement.

Introduction

Canadians are losing their trust in the media. According to a report from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, overall trust in the media among the Canadian population has fallen from 55 percent in 2016 to 40 percent in 2023. Among English-speaking Canadians, trust in the news is even lower with just 37 percent saying they trust the media in 2023.

The decline in trust comes at a time when the federal government is increasingly intervening to support major incumbent firms in the Canadian media landscape like The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and Postmedia. These measures include subsidies supporting the payrolls of qualified private news media, mandating Google to pay $100 million annually to support the journalism industry, and a tax credit for news subscriptions, among other measures. At this point, estimates suggest that there could be as much as a 50 percent subsidy on journalist salaries up to $85,000 per year.

Amid already declining trust in the news media, there are growing questions about how government support for the industry is perceived by Canadians and to what extent this may influence trust. Likewise, further effort is needed to decompose trust along various social cleavages (including education levels and political preferences) to better understand variation in media trust among Canadians.

To this end, The Hub has partnered with Public Square Research to conduct polling on the public’s trust in the news media across the country and its views on the government subsidization of the industry. This DeepDive presents the results of this poll and discusses the potential threat that government backing of the media might pose to the news media’s already deteriorating relationship with the Canadian public. It also puts forward some alternative policy options that aim to minimize the scope of government intervention by following consumer behaviour in the market.

Survey methodology

The “Trust in News Media” survey project is focused on the trust relationship with news media in Canada. It was designed with two main objectives.

The first objective was to grasp overall perceptions of news media in Canada that may contribute to and/or undermine existing trust in news. The second objective was to gauge public awareness of recent federal legislation that will fund news organizations, as well as the overall support for public funding of journalists and journalism.

The questionnaire was designed by Public Square Research in partnership with The Hub. The survey included twenty-four discrete questions, with additional demographics. The questions covered perceptions of news media, awareness, and support for government legislation, as well as both positive and negative arguments underpinning government legislation, and the potential impact of legislation on trust in the media.

The online survey was conducted in both French and English and included 1,500 adult Canadians, which were reflective of the gender, age, and regional composition of Canada. The survey was conducted between May 28 and June 2, 2024. While online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error, the corresponding margin of error for a probability sample of this size is +/- 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The margin of error will be larger when looking at sub-populations in crosstabulation.

Impressions of the media

Survey respondents were given a list of positive and corresponding negative statements about the news in random order and asked to select the statements which came closest to their view of the media. This question was designed to isolate positive and negative perceptions, and rank which specific qualities have the greatest impact on overall perceptions of the news.

As seen in Figure 1, not surprisingly, negative statements were selected more often, with one-in-three saying that there is a lot of bias in the news—depending on who is paying for it. One in four say a lot of news is just government propaganda, and one-in-five say that news is stuff they don’t care about (22 percent) or that they don’t think they get the truth from mainstream news in Canada (21 percent).

By contrast, positive judgements were selected by fewer, with two in ten or less saying the news was fair and transparent (20 percent) or easy to relate to (18 percent), and only twelve percent saying they were getting truth from the news.

Impressions of the media by party support 

Reviewing the same questions through a partisan lens we see a distinct pattern emerge. Liberal Party supporters are much less likely to agree with negative statements, and much more likely to agree with the positive statements about the news media (see Table 1).

Conversely, Conservative Party supporters are much more likely to hold negative views of the media and are less likely to hold positive views, with half of Conservative Party supporters saying that the news is biased, depending on who is paying for it, and four in ten saying that a lot of news is just government propaganda, and more than a third (36 percent), saying that they don’t get the truth from mainstream news. NDP, Green,* and Bloc* supporters fall more closely to the average, with a few exceptions.

Very few aware of government funding journalists’ salaries

In order to understand the public attitudes about the public funding of news media, we need to first gauge awareness of the broader legislation. When asked, we found that few Canadians said they were actually aware of the details of the government’s direct and indirect support for the industry, including specifically through the Online News Act (Bill C-18).

In fact, only four percent said they were following the legislation closely, and roughly another quarter (24 percent) said they have heard of it, but don’t know the details. That leaves close to three-quarters of the Canadian public unaware of the legislation, or details of the legalisation (data not shown). Consequently, few would have known about the government’s intention to defray the costs of journalists and journalism at all.

Few supportive of government funding journalists’ salaries

Importantly though, when asked how supportive they would be of government subsidies for the salaries of private news organizations, such as the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, or the National Post, only four percent said they were very supportive, and another twenty-six percent said they were somewhat supportive. That leaves a strong majority of Canadians—seven in ten—not very supportive, or not supportive at all.

Young people and those who are university educated are most likely to be supportive, and older Canadians (sixty-five years of age or older) are most likely to be not supportive at all.

Once again, we find a distinct partisan split on this issue, with Liberal and Green Party supporters more likely to be supportive (44, and 41 percent respectively), compared with only two-in-ten Conservative Party supporters. Conservatives are also most likely to be not supportive at all (47 percent).

Why Canadians aren’t supportive of subsidizing the news

Concerns about the growing subsidisation of news among the public centred on issues of objectivity and the ability of the media to perform a key function in holding governments to account (see Figure 2). More than three-quarters (76 percent) of Canadians agreed that the government subsidizing journalists’ salaries could negatively impact journalist objectivity. Likewise, almost three-quarters (73 percent) of Canadians agreed that if the government was funding the news, this would make it more difficult for news media to hold government to account, a core public interest function of the media.

Canadians were also concerned about the capacity of government to subsidize private news media in a fair and transparent manner. Specifically, two-thirds (66 percent) of Canadians felt that they wouldn’t trust the government to decide which specific news organizations qualified for funding and two-thirds (67 percent) also felt that they wouldn’t trust the government to define which specific media qualifies as journalism.

Interestingly, while there was partisan disagreement over support for government funding news media, there is greater agreement among Canadians of different party affiliations in terms of concerns about the effect of government subsidies on journalist objectivity (see Table 2). Over 70 percent of supporters of all major political parties agree that having the government paying journalists’ salaries could undermine journalist objectivity, ranging from a high of 86 percent of Conservative supporters to 72 percent of NDP supporters. Similar strong cross-party majorities are also concerned with how government subsidization will impact the ability of news media to challenge government.

Where there is more partisan disagreement is in terms of whether supporters of different political parties trust the government to decide who receives the funding and which organizations are deemed sufficiently journalistic. In this instance, a slight majority of Liberal supporters trust the government to make these decisions, while on the other side, less than one-quarter (23 percent) of Conservative supporters trust the government to make those decisions.

Trust in news organizations that receive funding

Finally, we turn to an evaluation of Canadian trust in the media by different funding models in Figure 3. Overall, trust in the media is highest if the media organization funding is based on readers paying for the news. Indeed, three in five Canadians (61 percent) trust media that is funded by readers. This is in comparison to two in five (42 percent) of Canadians trusting media that is funded by the Canadian government, while only one in five Canadians (21 percent) trust news organizations that receive funding from a political party that they’re opposed to. This result further highlights the risk of how funding from partisan governments could further erode trust in news media, which is already in decline.

Key takeaways

Public trust in the Canadian news media is declining. As of 2023, according to research from the University of Oxford, only two-in-five Canadians have trust in the news media. Polling by The Hub in partnership with Public Square Research provides some indication of why trust is eroding and how growing government subsidies of journalist salaries may further impact this slide. For instance, Canadians are concerned about perceived bias in the news media, fairness and transparency in news coverage, as well as the relatability of news coverage. Moreover, most Canadians are unaware of recent policy initiatives that see government funding journalist salaries, and seven-in-ten Canadians are not supportive of these policies, with concerns including that government subsidization will negatively impact journalistic objectivity and the ability of news media to hold governments to account.

Our research also illuminates a growing partisan dimension towards how Canadians view the news media. Liberal and Green Party supporters are more likely to be supportive of government subsidization of journalist salaries (44 and 41 percent respectively), compared with only two-in-ten Conservative supporters. However, there is some partisan agreement in terms of concerns regarding the negative effect of government subsidies on journalistic objectivity and government accountability. Regardless of party support, at least seven-in-ten Canadians share these concerns.

Taking the issue of declining trust in news media seriously and recognizing the democratic importance of a free and independent press to hold the powerful (including government) accountable, it’s worrisome that government subsidies and partisan perceptions could erode this trust further. The poll results highlight the potential importance of initiatives like the Ottawa Declaration on Canadian Journalism to establish the independence of emerging news media in an attempt to rebuild the trust of the Canadian public.

Moreover, the federal government should consider the impact of current and future subsidization initiatives on public trust in the news media.  It should also recognize the unintended consequences of the further erosion of public perceptions of legitimacy. As such, the government may wish to consider policy reforms that could mitigate the concerns that the Canadian public has (see below) by creating a stronger market role for any public programs that support the industry.

Ultimately, a key takeaway from this DeepDive is that trust in the news media is highest when journalism is funded by readers.

Policy proposals for reforming government support of the news media

In light of the above polling, one of us (Taylor Jackson) has a series of policy proposals that could reform government support for the industry and stop the further slide of Canadians’ trust in media.

1. Tax credits for digital news subscriptions—let the money follow the reader

The federal government’s digital news subscription tax credit is presently a non-refundable tax credit of 15 percent on up to $500 in annual subscription spending. France’s equivalent tax credit is 30 percent. Canada’s political tax credit is more generous than both—it can be up to 75 percent on the first $400 in donations. The government may consider expanding the generosity of the digital subscription tax credits to bring it closer in line with France or the political donations tax credit. The government could also make the tax credit refundable so that Canadians receive the benefit independent of whether they have taxes owing. A key virtue of the tax credit is that public subsidies follow consumers’ market behaviour. It therefore creates a market test—something which is missing from the current subsidy model.

2. Define news journalism as a charitable activity and allow charitable incorporation of new groups

Journalism isn’t presently an eligible charitable activity under the Income Tax Act. The government has sought to get around this issue by creating a whole new class of organizations called Registered Journalism Organizations that have the ability to issue charitable tax receipts. Few journalistic outlets have opted into the new model because of its onerous approval process and overall complexity. A simpler approach would be to make journalism a charitable activity. News media organizations could then be able to avail themselves of the benefits of charitable status. Public subsidies (like in the case of option one) would follow consumer behaviour and flow to individuals rather than news media outlets themselves.

3. Reform the CBC and make it a local news wire service

The strongest case for policy intervention in the industry may be to support local journalism where one could argue there is a genuine market failure. The problem is that the CBC is presently solving this issue. Its footprint only extends to about 40 cities and communities which mostly includes provincial capitals and other key population centres. Although it has added to its local journalism capacity in recent years, it would require a far more fundamental reconfiguration of the CBC’s staffing and operations to reposition the broadcaster as primarily focused on delivering news and information for smaller markets. One such model would be to transition it to a Canadian Press-style wire service, with journalists in communities across the country focused on reporting on local issues.