As Robert alluded to, though, it really is a very complex thing that needs to be sorted out. Any time you make one change with one population, you have to see how it affects others, and I understand that income-splitting for tax purposes runs into a few problems.
First of all, it gives kind of a tax subsidy to those households compared to lone parents, who can't split with anybody and have to do all the work and earn all the income. That gets kind of complicated; you don't want to penalize lone parents.
The other issue I've heard talked about is that if you could make the theory of income-splitting in a household a reality, if you could actually ensure that the wife got the income for the unpaid work she's doing, that would be one thing. But you have a lot of enforcement issues there. For instance, how do you guarantee that's actually happening?
One of the other ways around that...and it came up around the committee hearings that were looking at tax treatment of dependent children and that led eventually to an increase in the maternity benefits system. Another way of managing that unpaid work situation is to, at least for the youngest years, try to open up the employment insurance maternity and parental system so that it's available to all mothers who have newborns, not to base it just on past labour force participation. I mean, it's for a more limited time, but it would provide a much more egalitarian start to households with children, to women who aren't immediately put into a situation of dependency. It becomes de facto income-splitting, because she has, for that year, her own source of income and her own ability to plan to re-enter the labour force when the time is right for her family, and that type of thing.
A number of things can be looked at, and there are different, creative ways to do them. But it is complicated.