Income splitting has become a thing we’re talking about here in Ottawa. It was an election plank for the Conservatives but after unveiling the budget Finance Minister Jim Flaherty suggested that income splitting does not benefit enough people, in fact not many at all. And maybe the government is backing away from this promise.

There was much inside baseball discussion yesterday that the minister was offside and the PM would be angry. (It’s funny, because baseball is one of the few sports that doesn’t have an offside rule).

John Ivison was reporting today that he’s hearing that Flaherty was not, in fact, offside, and the PM is backing away from income splitting:

And this is when I got angry.

Because you see, I had a good job, I like working. There’s lot I don’t miss about it, but my incentive to leave was not the idea that we might be able to somehow pay less tax. My incentive to leave my job was being totally burned out. Dealing with day care schedules and paying half your salary for childcare is hard.

If we had a national daycare strategy, with a flexible schedule, that didn’t cost me so much of my paycheque, perhaps I would have seen that a more of an incentive to stay out there.