There are aspects in the budget, particularly things like some of the measures for disability policy, that I think are actually sensible and progressive, and I would commend the government on this, so I'm not condemning the whole budget.
You're absolutely right, though, the trend in recent years in the area of child care and child benefit has been to improve and increase benefits for low-income families, as you've said. The Canada child tax benefit, the federal benefit, reduces the rate of child poverty by about one-quarter, which is a phenomenal success.
When we look at the distribution of income in Canada over time there has been, particularly after recessions, a widening gap between rich and poor in terms of market income. The government programs like child benefits remarkably reduce that gap; in fact, we don't take enough credit for that kind of thing.
The difficulty I have with this particular measure is that it turns the clock back on progress that we've been making. The Canada child tax benefit and the national child benefit had all-party support, in fact all-governmental support, when those reforms were being implemented. Yet this program takes us back to the child benefit system we had in the early 1980s with its bizarre distributional consequences. The tragic thing is that it would have been so simple and such a win-win for this government to deliver it through the existing Canada child tax benefit. Not only could that have given a larger benefit to families, but it would have further closed the gap between where we want to get to in child benefits and where we're going to be.
In fact, the new program is going to be implemented through the existing Canada child tax benefit machinery, so I find it really hard to understand why we would turn the clock back when there's absolutely no need to do so.