Were N.L’.s ‘mother-in-law doors’ a tax avoidance strategy?

With the April 30 personal tax deadline looming, Canadians are scrambling for any claim, loophole or exemption that will reduce the amount of tax they owe.

According to local legend, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians came up with a tax dodge all their own: the mother-in-law door.

Front doors floating several feet off the ground, looking like an accident waiting to happen, were once a common sight across much of the province.

They were allegedly so prevalent because without front steps a house was considered unfinished and homeowners weren’t charged property tax. Savvy residents could go in and out through the back door while banking their annual tax savings.

The only problem with this theory is that large swaths of rural Newfoundland and Labrador, where most mother-in-law doors are found, weren’t historically subject to property tax.

N.L. has no provincial land tax, and small towns often weren’t incorporated as municipalities, meaning their residents paid either a flat fee for services or no taxes at all.

But if they didn’t give homeowners a tax break, why did mother-in-law doors become such a fixture of the Newfoundland and Labrador landscape?

Krista Li, a historian and lecturer at the University of Alberta, grew up in a house with a stepless front door in Canning’s Cove, Bonavista Bay.

“A lot of the homes in our area didn’t have front steps,” she said, “but they always had these really nice decorative front doors.”

Li recalls the surprise her husband, who grew up in China, expressed the first time she brought him to her family home.

“I remember my husband saying, ‘How come this door doesn’t have any steps?’ And I thought, ‘How do I explain this?’”

Li’s parents built their house in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It’s a bungalow with an excavated basement and tiered front garden that set the front entrance well above the level of the lawn.

“We moved in before everything was completely finished, and my dad picked up things and finished things as he could afford to do them,” she explains. “Putting on a front patio is the least of anybody’s concern when you’ve got cabinetry to put in or you’ve got — you know — flooring to put down or extra windows to buy.”

Research by Philip Hiscock, former archivist at Memorial University’s Folklore and Language Archive, suggests this judicious approach to construction is one of the real reasons mother-in-law doors were commonplace across the province.

Another factor was the way Newfoundlanders and Labradorians used their living spaces.

Many of the early dwellings built here by European settlers had only one door. It led to the kitchen, which was typically the largest, warmest room in the home, where a woodstove was kept burning in the cold months.

The kitchen was the heart of the household, where the family cooked, ate, relaxed and worked on small projects like mending, carving, and rug-hooking. It was also where guests would be invited for a cup of tea and a yarn, and they rarely penetrated any further.

“Two or three generations ago,” Hiscock wrote, “a visitor to most outport homes would not even walk through the house to use the toilet — there was no indoor plumbing so they went outside to the privy. Generally speaking, what was beyond the kitchen was private space.”

Some houses did have a parlour or “front room,” but it was used only on formal occasions, like a visit from the parish priest, a wedding or a wake. Because the front part of the house was so little visited, the back or side door remained the main entrance even when a front door was added.

After the Second World War, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation began releasing model home designs with blueprints that could be purchased for just $10, the equivalent of $170 today. People across the country used these affordable, modern plans — which invariably included two entrances — to build their homes.

Though housing styles changed, local lifestyles didn’t. Residents of N.L. continued to use their back doors as the primary entrance.

When excavated basements came into vogue, the province’s rocky soil meant they were often dug shallowly, so that a few feet of foundation remain above grade. In outport communities, homes were typically built facing the ocean, and the slope of land away from the front of a house could leave more foundation exposed at the front than the back.

The result was that front doors became less accessible, and, since they were rarely used anyway, adding front steps fell to the bottom of many homeowners’ to-do lists.

The nickname “mother-in-law door” dates back to at least the 1970s. Depending who you ask, the joke is that these doors were either the best way to invite an unwanted guest in or the best way to usher an unwanted guest out.

It’s one of a number of terms that make a gag out of endangering this frequently villainized relative.

In the early 20th century, the precarious open-air seating at the back of a motorcar was called a “mother-in-law seat,” and in several European languages “mother-in-law’s chair” is an alternative name for the golden barrel cactus.

“Mother-in-law door,” though, may have been more than just a sexist jibe.

Hiscock believes it was “a townie joke about the baymen,” one that not only poked fun at the unfinished entrances to rural homes but chalked them up to baymen’s supposedly crude attitudes towards their female relations.

Whatever urbanites thought of stepless doors, they were a way of adapting national architecture to local culture. In rural Newfoundland and Labrador, front doors were redundant.

As Li recalls, “My parents have lived in that house since the early ’90s, and I don’t know that that front door has ever been opened.”

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