Basically, we had one program, the Canada child tax benefit. It took about 30 years to finally get one rational, sensible program that worked. The current government came in and brought back a version of the old family allowances, which became the $100-a-month universal child care benefit. One budget after that, it revived the old non-refundable child credit that we got rid of ten years ago. We got rid of those programs for good reason: they had built-in inequities. By adding them back in we've created a more inequitable system. Not only is the universal child care benefit a taxable benefit—and therefore what you see is not what you get—but what you get depends on what province you live in, because it's also taxed through provincial and territorial income tax. If we gave examples, in some places high-income families would end up with more money than low-income families in another province. It made for a very irrational system.
All we're saying is let's go back to the single income-tested program, the Canada child tax benefit, fold the money that we're spending on those other two programs into it, and we'd just boost that into a larger, more effective program.
One final thing that's important. The proposal that we made is fairly expensive—$4 billion is not inexpensive, although it's a long-term target—but one of the reasons for the proposal is that we would increase benefits for modest- and middle-income families as well. They have not seen an increase in their child benefits for 20 or 30 years, virtually. We don't want a child benefit system where most of the money goes on the bottom end and then you get a steep dog leg like that, and if you become of modest income, you end up with a huge reduction in your child benefit. So we created a smoother descending curve so that the large majority of Canadian families would see an improvement in their benefits. The low-income would see the largest improvement, but modest- and middle-income families would see an improvement too, and that's important.