If you're looking for equality for women, the only way they're going to attain equality is by being in the labour market. The problem with a stay-at-home mom is that there is a lot of psychological experience that in fact they're not being very happy and they're not necessarily being very good mothers. But the important thing is that they're necessarily dependent partly on the government, perhaps, because there may be subsidies from the government, but they're mainly dependent on a husband. That means they're also losing experience and losing contacts in the labour market. If the marriage breaks up—and we still have very high divorce rates—that's when we get low-income single mothers who are not equipped to regain their autonomy. The people who are most in favour of stay-at-home mothers are the ones who are most aggressive against welfare mothers, but they go hand in hand.
Back in 1936, Alva Myrdal, in Sweden, introduced maternity leave, not so much to allow mothers to maintain their income as to allow working women—because at that time women had to work in Sweden if they wanted not to be poor—to have children.
Our experience in Quebec now that we have the new maternity program, which is a year old, is that we have increased the birth rate by something like 7,200 babies a year, and it's still going up, and we've increased the labour force participation rate of women. It's the only way to prevent poverty.