Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to try to explain a very complicated program as simply and as quickly as I can. I passed out a simple graph--there's a French version beneath it--that says “Net Universal Childcare Benefit”. I'm going to speak to that graph.
As you know, the universal child care benefit is the showcase of the government's social policy agenda in the last budget, and it's certainly the largest part of its child care plans. I know in the previous session you talked about other aspects.
I want to focus on the child care benefit itself. There are basically three major flaws with it that I want to bring to your attention, and then I want to propose a practicable alternative.
It's an unfair program in three ways. First of all, it's devilishly complicated in terms of looking at the actual amount of benefit that families are going to end up with at the end of the year. They're all going to receive $100 a month for each child aged five and under, but that benefit is going to be taxable and is going to be financed in part through the elimination of the young child supplement, which is part of the existing Canada child tax benefit. What it means is that you would literally need to be a tax accountant or a social policy wonk to figure out the actual amount of benefit you will end up with at the end of the year. This graph shows you how bizarre the distribution of benefits actually is.
There are reasons for this. The taxability is not based on family income in the way the Canada child tax benefit, GST credit, and other income-tested benefits--the guaranteed income supplement--are based. It's based on individual income. It's the individual income of the lower-income parent in the case of couples; in the case of a single parent, it's the single parent.
That means that the amount of tax that each family type is going to pay on the new benefit is going to vary considerably. It also means they're going to lose the $249-a-year young child supplement, which mainly benefits low- and middle-income families. We end up with a distribution of benefits where the largest net benefit is going to go to one-income families at $250,000 a year. They're going to get more net benefit than welfare families.
Welfare families are going to get more net benefit than working poor families, which is going to raise the welfare wall higher again. We tried to get rid of that through the national child benefit. It means that different kinds of families, whether they're single-parent or two-earner couples or one-earner couples of the same income levels, are going to end up with different amounts of benefits.
One final point, Mr. Chair. There's a simple way to solve this. Deliver the $1,200 benefit through the existing Canada child tax benefit. That's a transparent, fair benefit that we give virtually every family. It's really $1,200 a year, not a pretend $1,200 a year.