Finance Minister Michael Noonan recently said that reforming the tax code to make it less unfair to single-earner married couples and to take more account of dependent children was simply not on the cards.

Once a fierce opponent of Charlie McCreevey’s tax individualisation policy, on the post-budget Sean O’Rourke programme he went to bat for it. It’s bedded into the system now, he said. Can’t be undone. Besides, “society has changed” and while individualisation may “treat people unfairly as families” it treats them “fairly as individuals.” Changing it would be expensive. It would be impractical. Might even be a bit… illiberal.

Well, Canada have just done it. From the Globe and Mail:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has unveiled a package of family-focused tax cuts worth nearly $27-billion over six years that will shape the political debate heading into the 2015 election campaign.

The combined measures are worth about $4.6-billion a year and include income splitting for families with children under 18 and an expansion of the Universal Child Care Benefit, which delivers monthly cheques to families.

Income splitting will allow couples with children younger than 18 to transfer up to $50,000 in income from the higher earner to the lower earner for tax purposes, for a benefit that will be capped at $2,000.

Income splitting has a very similar effect to the reversal of tax individualisation – and the increased child benefit spending takes greater account of dependent children.

Stephen Harper is a Prime Minister from the Conservative party, but we’re talking about Canadian conservatives here: by all accounts comfortably at home on the centre-left, particularly on social issues. But Harper sees something that Noonan doesn’t: people aren’t just individuals. The family is the fundamental building block of society. If these policies are good enough for Canada, why not Ireland? “Our goal has always been to make sure that Canada is the best country in the world in which to raise a family,” Harper said. Shouldn’t this be at least as important an aspiration as becoming “the best small country in the world in which to do business?”

We’ve got a blueprint for how to make it happen in an Irish context: the Family Fair tax reform that we call for in our new paper, which reveals that a single-earner family with three kids on 1.5 times the average industrial wage would be far better off under 1974’s tax code than they are under 2014’s. This squeezing of families should be overturned and it’s why the Commission on Family Taxation should comprehensively reform the system, but we can double the present home carer’s credit tomorrow and ease some of the burden – a policy endorsed by Táiniste Joan Burton.

Canada’s National Post newspaper objects to the new tax reform (in a news report, no less!) on the interesting grounds that it “will only benefit parents and families with children under age 18, no doubt leaving many Canadians without children, or parents with adult children, wondering where the tax breaks are for them.”

In other words: Stop the presses! The policy is doing exactly what it promises to do! The whole point of the exercise is to help families with dependent children as distinct from favouring people with no children, or whose children are grown up. People with children need more support than those who don’t: there’s nothing progressive about ignoring that.

Harper has pointed out that his way is much fairer than the Government subsidising day-care centres at huge expense because it is a benefit that only accrues to families where both parents work while doing nothing for those where a parent or relative does the caring. An Amarach research poll for the Iona Institute found that only 17pc of the Irish public see day-care as the preferred option for young children under five years of age.

Half (49pc) think the preferred option for children in this age group is to be looked after during the day by a parent at home and a quarter (27pc) think the preferred option is to be looked after by another family member such as a grandparent. The rest had no opinion. How about policies that actually meet people where they are, rather than imposing a one-size fits all model from above?

In Stephen Harper’s words, government support should go to “the real experts on child care. That’s mom and dad, and that’s what we are doing.”