What’s the difference between a canoe and a Canadian?

A canoe tips.

So goes the old joke, submitted by a reader in response to my recent column advocating tipping 20 per cent at restaurants.

But gratuities are no laughing matter, as hundreds of you eloquently pointed out through email, Facebook and Twitter.

Tipping can be demeaning and discouraging, you said; it fosters guilt, anxiety and resentment. It perpetuates unfair labour practices and creates human inequalities.

So the consensus wasn’t about how much to tip.

It was to eliminate tipping altogether.

In what was the majority view, reader Ali Unsal said:

“We should not tip any service. It should all be included in the price and restaurant workers should be paid a decent wage. We get service from government and private sectors, where we are not tipping them. We do not tip a salesperson in a retail store. So why tip a waiter?”

Such a change, while welcome, isn’t a given, not when industry group Restaurants Canada is fighting legislated wage hikes. (Servers in licensed restaurants will earn $12.20 an hour, less than Ontario’s Jan. 1 minimum wage of $14.)

“To be clear, Restaurants Canada is not opposed to minimum wage increases. Wages need to keep up with the cost of living. We are concerned, though, about the unintended consequences of increasing the minimum wage too quickly,” the group’s website says.

Restaurants Canada, which represents more than 30,000 businesses, wants a special wage for liquor servers because they “earn well above minimum wage when you factor in their tips. This allows restaurateurs to pay more to staff who don’t earn tips.”

Here are six good reader arguments about how much to tip, if at all:

1. Gratuities are not good incentives

“Studies have shown that tipping is not an effective incentive for performance in servers,” wrote Andrew Mathai, citing research by Cornell University professor Michael Lynn:

“It also creates an environment in which people of colour, young people, old people, women and foreigners tend to get worse service than white males. In a tip-based system, non-white servers make less than their white peers for equal work.”

Mathai also references research from the Restaurants Opportunities Center, writing: “Consider the power imbalance between tippers, who are typically male, and servers, 70 per cent of whom are female, and consider that the restaurant industry generates five times the average number of sexual harassment claims per worker.”

2. It’s degrading

“Having been a waitress, I needed and appreciated the tips I got — and never for a second assumed I was entitled to them. But I nevertheless found it a degrading experience,” Anita Dermer says.

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“It made me feel like a servant from a bygone age. Worst of all was receiving a tip from friends who might happen to come to the restaurant. They were just as embarrassed trying to figure out whether they should tip someone who was ‘an equal’ … both tipper and recipient recognizes there is something rather demeaning about the whole process.”

Bea Broda remembers her discomfort being tipped for playing in a Winnipeg piano bar in the ’80s: “I returned every one of my tips. When people didn’t want their money back, I started a charity jar.”

3. We can serve ourselves

“I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to establish a restaurant where you can walk a few feet and grab your own meal from a counter for free — in fact, I’m sure plenty already offer this service,” Ruben Michael Borges said on Facebook.

4. Try flat fees

“I still don’t get why I tip a waiter at a high-end restaurant 20 per cent of a very expensive meal and a waiter at the local diner who works just as hard to serve me a $15 meal gets three bucks. I’m tipping for the work involved, not the value of the meal,” said Brian Stewart on Facebook.

“Waiters should make $15 to $18 an hour, tip including,” Ariel Mintrup said on Facebook.

5. It’s obsolete overseas

“I tip 20 per cent (here), but I prefer New Zealand (where there is) no added tax or service charge. And no one expects a tip. Tipping isn’t a thing there; paying a decent wage is,” wrote Peter Omnet of Willowdale.

Others pointed to the lack of tipping in Australia, Japan and parts of Europe.

“Love the European way. Tax and tip included. No surprises, no guilt and no aggravatingly saccharine servers saying, ‘Hi, my name is Mandy and I’m your server today,’ ” Lisa R. Marshall posted on Facebook.

6. It’s bad for business

Ken McFarlan of Oshawa referenced Guelph University hospitality professors Bruce McAdams and Michael von Massow, who published a 2016 study of restaurant managers and servers. The study found that tipping leads to “inequity and unfairness, loss of control of service quality, and difficulties in succession planning and promotion.”

Correction – Nov. 10: An earlier version of this story misspelled Andrew Mathai’s name.