Thank you, Alan.
About 25 years ago, one good person began the process of changing and raising awareness about the issues of divorce. Senator Anne Cools helped put together the Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access. During those times, discrimination against fathers and men was extreme, at the highest levels. That committee's main objective was to discover all the issues and come up with solutions.
We see in the current Divorce Act most of the elements already included in the proposed amendments, with the exception of one very important element, which is the presumption of equal-share parenting. That gives the parents an equal level, starting equally, and the courts can decide after that if there's an issue of violence or any other matter to depart from this particular principle.
From that time on, we have had a large number of government officials changing their minds about the issues of divorce, and they began to support the concept of equal-share parenting. We know already from several bills that went through Parliament that the numbers are almost over 50%. We know which bodies are doing the support and others who cannot speak directly to these issues, so we're asking the government to open the floor for every MP to speak their minds about those issues. It's very important. This issue affects every parent, every mother, every father, and every child in the country. We have serious issues involved, including emotional and financial.
At our parent-child access centre, which Mr. Alan Hamaliuk spoke about, we help a lot of parents. In the last several years, we have seen a tremendous change in that process. We are seeing mothers coming in under supervised access, which is something we haven't heard about before, let alone us, as a men's organization, to help fathers.... We do respect mothers, and we respect fathers. We want them to be involved. We help those parents to resolve their issues directly. We help other fathers pay custody and level the issues between the mothers and the fathers. This is the approach that we need to take.
We know the issue of domestic violence. We've heard about it a lot already. Domestic violence is not a gender issue; it is a human issue. It affects all of us. Mothers and fathers, men and women, abuse each other at almost equal levels. Eventually, the Government of Canada came up with information, available from StatsCan, to indicate that fathers and men are abused at very equal levels to mothers. The issue with fathers and men is that they do not come forward as they're supposed to, and they are not reporting the issues of violence against them. We have to depart from that process of using violence as a scare process to tell the courts and the judges that we have to give custody mostly to mothers, because men and fathers are always violent. That's not true. False allegations are filling up our system.
The Divorce Act, the way it stands right now and the new elements in it, basically implicates every father and every mother who, for some reason, would not want to say a word or anything that might upset the other parent. The courts are not going to extreme lengths to investigate those issues and to make a proven fact whether violence has taken place or not. We stand against the violence. If there's violence, whether it was against the other parent, the spouse or the child, no parent should be close to that child. That's not to be confused with the issues that other groups are coming in to tell us about and convincing the government officials that it's only violence that has to determine the issues of divorce.
Other jurisdictions all over the world, basically, have implemented the concept of equal-share parenting, beginning in Australia. We know already several states in the U.S., most notably Arizona and Kentucky, which recently passed direct presumptive equal-share parenting process in their laws. We already have enough studies from researchers in the field that indicate that parents should have equal time with their children. Dr. Fabricius has done an enormous amount of work. He studied the most recent Arizona custody laws and found out that parents should remain with their children equally all the time, departing slightly depending upon their situations and their issues, whatever they face.
We have the issue of relocation. These are the most difficult cases that the courts face. We already know about important cases in court and how they've developed. What we see in the new Divorce Act is another section to place the burden on the non-resident parent, basically. If a parent decides to move with the child, they have to prove that the move should occur, which we totally reject. The burden of proof will always remain on the parent who wants to move away with the child, because we already know from the study that it affects the children tremendously. Their psychological development, their abilities and every aspect are affected. We support the mobility of reunification; we don't support the mobility of isolation and deprivation.
Children are deprived of their parents, especially fathers, and that leads to tremendous social issues in our society. If this trend continues, we will devastate our families, and we will devastate even our governments, because a healthy government comes from healthy families. Even though the divorce takes place, there's no reason to continue with that hostility against both parents. We already know this from many experiences in our groups, from people who come to us and tell us about their agony and the issues that they face from custody, access, child support, and family violence.
Family violence is the least thing they talk about, because it's the least thing that can happen in divorce cases, contrary to what we're hearing. False allegations are widespread and are considered family violence. This cannot dictate the process of the divorce. We have to depart from those assumptions about issues of violence and determine them 100%.