Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you both for spending some time with us today.
As the parliamentary secretary said, I'm happy to support this bill and will be supporting it in the House. I have a couple of questions, and I'm hoping that, in the same spirit of cooperation, these might actually be issues you would pursue a bit further.
First of all, when I saw the bill, I was surprised at the definition of children. It's a categorical definition of anyone under 18 years old, but it's not the traditional definition of dependants. For example, in other pieces of legislation we would include children who are still going to school and therefore still dependent on their parents, or people with disabilities who have a dependency relationship with their parents. Why in this bill are we defining children only as those who are under 18?
Maybe I can ask two questions at once. I'll just ask the other question as well.
With respect to the threshold for the grants to parents of murdered and missing children, it is set at $6,500, presumably to show some kind of attachment to the labour force. Why is it $6,500 as opposed to hours worked? It seems to me that somebody who is making minimum wage, for example, has to work many more hours than somebody who is potentially making $150 an hour. Why would we make that distinction when certainly people at the lower end of the wage scale would perhaps need the financial support even more so than those at the higher end? I wonder whether you might want to think about how we prove attachment to the labour force. I understand why we need to do it, but why is it in dollar terms? Why not in terms of hours worked?
I have a couple of other questions, but I'll leave those two first.