Taxing Choices: The Intersection of Class, Gender, Parenthood, and the Law

Margaret Kechnie is head of the Women’s Studies Program at Laurentian
University and the coeditor of Changing Lives: Women in Northern
Ontario.

Taxing Choices makes a substantial contribution to the field of Canadian
legal studies and particularly to an understanding of women’s ability
to achieve equality in the workplace.

Lawyer, feminist, and political activist Beth Symes undertook a
constitutional challenge to the business-deduction section of the Income
Tax Act. She argued before the Supreme Court of Canada that the failure
of the Act to allow her to deduct her child-care expenses as a business
expense was a violation of her right to equality under Section 15 of the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The issue raised questions of
gender, class, and social privilege. Symes pointed out that the section
of the Act in question was based on the assumption that the worker was
male, with little or no responsibility for children. She and other
business women like her were disadvantaged in terms of child-care
expenses because their costs as working mothers were higher than those
of men without primary child-care responsibilities.

The case generated considerable controversy not just between women and
men but also in the feminist community. Symes is a member of a highly
privileged class. A successful outcome in her case would affect few
women and only those whose earnings were from business. Most Canadian
working women are wage workers, so a favorable decision would be
irrelevant to them. In a decision that divided the male and female
members of the Court, Symes lost the case.

For Rebecca Johnson, the importance of the Symes case resides in the
opportunity it provided for issues of power and privilege to be analyzed
and debated. Her well-written and accessible book will be of interest to
both general readers and those in the legal community.