Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague's speech. He brought up many important and relevant points about the need to change the adversarial system.
The one thing I found of great interest in the debate today is that almost every speaker has talked about the best interests of the child and the children. I take that at face value. I believe that every member, regardless of political affiliation, whether they sit on the government benches or those of any one of the four opposition parties, are very sincere when they say that they want to see change that is in the best interests of our children.
I do not see how that can happen and how there can be a substantive shift in the way in which courts treat those disputes between parents, which are a minority, that end up in court. We can only wish that all the parents would join the majority and settle their issues, especially where it concerns the children, before they go before the court to battle over the children. As many speakers today have pointed out, they end up using children in many cases as pawns in this tug of war between the mother and the father.
We hear that everybody wants to keep the best interests of the children close at heart, but I do not see it in Bill C-22. As I have said repeatedly today, the minister and the Department of Justice have missed the fundamental building block of the report “For the Sake of the Children”. The report calls for a dynamic shift from the focus being on parents, whether it is the mother versus father rights to see their children or someone wronged someone or someone is a better parent, to the focus being on shared parenting. We need to recognize that both parents, both mother and father, not only have rights to see their children and to participate in parenting their children, but they have obligations to their children. When I heard the minister this morning say that he chose not to put into Bill C-22 the term “shared parenting” because he thought it would be too confusing, I knew the battle had been lost.
I will try again to bring forward amendments at committee stage to get that inserted into the legislation. Without it I fear we will not see any shift in the thinking and in the way in which courts rule on these cases where they pit one parent against another, or they reinforce a parent being against another, or they exclude grandparents or siblings. There are all too many cases. Every MP, regardless of political stripe, has people coming into their constituency offices, if not every day, I am sure every week, with tales of horror of how lawyers, judges and the justice system have wronged them in this important and critical area of parenting.
Could my colleague comment on this? How will we ever send the message to the courts that it is not acceptable to try to view the mother or the father as a better parent? No matter what we call it, it is still custody and access. We can change the wording, but it is still the same. Unless there are proven cases of abuse or neglect, which are few and far between, in the vast majority of cases parents should have equal rights, responsibilities and obligations. The only way to do that is by enacting shared parenting.