Thank you very much.
I appreciate all the groups being here today. From the United Way, it's good to see Émilie here again. Thank you for being here.
There's the good work that MCC has done over time, and I think most of us are familiar with that. I served with the Brethren in Christ, so I'm quite aware of and involved in some of the good work that MCC does in the country and abroad. Mr. Cannan is from a Mennonite church as well, so he's acquainted with the work you do.
Then there's the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, the new kid on the block here. I appreciate the contributions you're making with research and the study, prodding us in a number of areas through some of the questioning today.
I would like to explore that and get some response initially from Mr. Quist, and then from the others as well. You raised a fairly big elephant in the room on the matter of splitting of income. Some of us have looked at that and see some merit in it. I've looked at it abroad, and there's the paper in the package you've provided. I'd like to ask a few questions about “Taxing Families; Does The System Need An Overhaul?”, particularly as it pertains to poverty. Since that is the nature of our discussion here, we want to find out how that will impact poverty and to what degree it will alleviate or ameliorate it.
I notice that nine industrial countries around the world are cited in this paper. These countries say this whole issue of splitting income, or the family taxation principle, has an effect. They all have slightly different variations or formulas. In France and Portugal, they have systems that aggregate family income but explicitly allow for family size to reduce tax payments. The Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland, Switzerland, and the United States allow family members to file jointly and split income. It takes away a little bit of the administrative burden of managing or handling the individual ones. I suspect that other industrialized countries are looking at this kind of thing.
Do you have any recommendations for us as a country? I commissioned a study within the last year from the Library of Parliament on what it would cost the federal treasury in dollars. But I'm interested in getting a couple of things from you and then comments from the others. How would it help to move families up from below the poverty line? Which model do you tend to be drawn to more? Have you looked at any numbers on cost to the federal treasury if we went with something like income splitting?
There is a book about the declining population in our country--a demographic winter, if you will. That has happened in Japan, France, and elsewhere, and they've had to look seriously at that. Without question, it's an incentive to have families and a few more children than has been the norm, because we're moving into that demographic winter. Who will be covering my pension and taking care of me in my old age if we don't have these little taxpayers coming forward?
We want to bring people out of poverty. We also want to be sure we have a stable demographic in the future. So can you tell me the models you like best, the dollar amounts, and how you see them drawing people out of poverty?