Thank you, Mr. Chairperson. I'm going to start with a bit of a lengthy preamble, because I feel I need to get a couple of comments on the record.
First of all, I feel child care is somewhat different from day care or even babysitting. I think child care is everything that goes into the care of a child, which includes providing shelter, providing clothing, and providing guardianship and stewardship through the day. So to say this doesn't help with what is effectively day care...I don't believe that's saying it's not a child care benefit.
I also don't like how we're so willing to discriminate against certain members of society: those who would not use a day care centre. I think we need to be cognizant of the fact that this system was discriminatory. I might have children and I might not get a subsidized space, but my neighbour might, yet we pay the same taxes. I think that's a discriminatory system and I think that's wrong.
Mr. Polanyi, here's just a comment. You talked about putting heads together and talking. In my personal opinion, focus groups are terrible. I can sit in on a focus group with 25 people, and by the end of the focus group I can have most of them talking in exactly the same language that I'm talking in just because I happen to be the type of person who will fight for my point. I've sat in on focus groups for auto companies and discussed what people want in a car, and by the end of it they all come out saying that what I think is good in a car is what they want. Quite frankly, focus groups are terribly unreliable.
McDonald's goes into focus groups and everybody comes out saying people want salads and muffins, and then their sales go down. Do you know why? When people go to McDonald's they want fries and hamburgers. That's the truth of it. They don't go there for health food.