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If you’ve already reproduced, or are planning on doing so, the government very much wants you to know they will be there for you.

You know, the government really could just tax us less and then wouldn’t need to go through the process of returning Canadians’ money to them or creating special programs for families. But then, what exactly would politicians brag about in budget speeches?

Politicians are great at signalling to certain segments of the population that they’re important. Seniors vote, so seniors get goodies. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was supposedly going to be government for the next generation, for young people. There are nods to that, in support of post-secondary education, for example.

Yet the fetish of the family still dominates our politics, our budget-making and our thinking.

Singles and millennials are two of the fastest growing voting blocs, so you’d think they’d be a priority. Then again, that it attracts votes doesn’t actually make for good policy; the Liberals have been busily pandering to older Canadians, with, for example, its reversal of a Tory decision to raise the age of eligibility for old age security.

In 2011 (the most recent census data available, says StatCan) 44.5 per cent of couples didn’t have kids, and 39 per cent did, though boomers whose kids have grown up torque those stats. Single people are mentioned in the budget mainly because “single” is a necessary prefix to single-parent families. The one mention with a dollar figure attached notes that single people get to keep $330 – not exactly a number that goes far – annually thanks to last year’s middle-class tax cut.