Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The proposals are similar in the sense that we both recommend that the non-refundable child tax credit be eliminated and basically folded into the refundable child tax benefits, enhancing them. The reason is very simple. The only way you get benefit from the non-refundable portion is if you pay income tax. The amount of benefit you receive goes up the more income tax you pay. Therefore, it's very regressive.
Mr. Bulkowski talked about scarce resources. We need to better target those resources, and the way to do that is to fold the non-refundable portion into the overall refundable child tax benefit system.
On the question of the universal child care benefit, if you put aside the fact that it is a not a child care program--it's a parental support program that provides extra financial resources to parents, which they may or may not spend on child care--then is it such a bad program as a parental support program? I say that for a couple of reasons. One is that it provides extra benefits to families with very young children, under the age of six years. It's true that those families do tend to incur extra child care costs because their kids aren't in school yet. What's wrong with providing some additional support for very young children? Secondly, parents with young children tend to be starting out in their careers, and therefore it might also be fair to provide some additional assistance.
I guess the reason I came up with this concept was to try to invent a better mousetrap. There has been this constant debate over whether we favour parents who put their kids in child care versus parents who stay home. To some degree, this is an attempt to kind of bridge that divide. That's why I am suggesting that we look at perhaps retaining the universal child care benefit but basically changing it somewhat.