This is very important to what we're discussing, Madam Chair. It's very important.
This is a document that I've received just recently, and it has to do with the base underlying our whole tax system, where it says our tax system was based on idealizing the images of the heterosexual nuclear family. Some of it I'll read because it's faster that way. It goes on to say:
—cohabiting couples have always existed in Canada, the original income tax rules in Canada were deliberately constructed around the assumption that people either do or ought to form male-female pairs raising children, preferably with one income-earner and a stay-at-home domestic worker.
Then it goes on to say:
—by continuing to enact tax provisions that directly and unambiguously reinforce the economic dependency of women on higher-income partners (usually men); and (c) by continuing to withhold the real social and employment benefits from women that they need to escape from the 'female economy'.
Then it goes on to say—these are some of the excerpts—“The income tax rates on people with low incomes are quite high.” It then notes that in 1988 the “lowest federal tax rate was raised from 6% to 17%—which if you look goes as low as $10,000, $20,000 and the bulk of the people working at that wage are women.”
It says that the tax structure is in such a way that it actually discriminates against women and only reinforces the nuclear family with the woman staying home. The latest policy from the current government, which is the $1,200, for instance, “further enhances the many tax benefits that flow from a woman's 'choice' to withdraw from waged work but it is woefully inadequate”.
Then the very last budget, which deals with the income splitting:
—produces open-ended tax benefits that grow larger as the incomes of supporting spouses increase. The tax benefits of income splitting are highest for single-income couples and disappear completely when spousal incomes are equal.
In other words, it still benefits the stay-at-home single income. Then the strongest tax rewards the traditional family.
So the tax system is set up to basically—I hate to use these words—screw the women. Sorry I have to use it that way, but it's the only way I can read this--or to undermine women. I'm sorry. I was reading this from the beginning. And I apologize for the language, for those people who are upset with it, but I was somewhat worked up and I had never thought of it this way.
My question to all of you, because this policy continues to be the case, is this. Has there been any study by Finance and HRDC to do a thorough evaluation of our whole tax structure and how it impacts on women in this country, from the underlying premise, from the beginning to the end and the continuing policies that we continue to implement, which continue to disfavour women in our society?
