Mr. Speaker, I want to speak briefly to the bill and express my views on the importance of the initiative of my colleague.
Those in the House who know me will know how very strongly I feel that the work I do in Parliament and on behalf of my constituents is extremely important. The work all of us do as members of Parliament is important and valuable to the country. We should never downgrade that work.
I have had a previous career in my life to which I give even more importance. That has been raising three children fortunately with, so far it seems, very good success. I will never stop saying that has been the most important thing I have done in my life. I was fortunate enough to be raising my children at a time when economically we had the choice, or I certainly had the choice without feeling I was depriving my family by staying home and raising them.
That is a choice many women do not have these days. As the member for Québec has said, the majority of women with young children are now in the workforce. Whether women raise their children on a full time basis at home or before and after completing a full day's work, it does not change the significant economic value of the work they do in raising their children and keeping their home, which receives absolutely no recognition in society.
That is the fundamental issue my colleague's bill is attempting to address. I suspect my colleague has motivations for the bill that I would not necessarily share, including encouraging more women to stay home and look after their children.
What I do want to encourage, however, is choice for women. I want to ensure that whatever choice they make is valued by society and its economic worth recognized.
What happens now is that through family law across this country we have recognized family income and family assets accumulated during a marriage as joint and divisible assets. Unfortunately we only recognize that in reality when the marriage breaks up.
We have all followed the Thibaudeau case very carefully, the taxability of child support payments. We all know very well that there are large numbers of parents raising children after a divorce who do not receive the support payments to which they are entitled.
The fact is we do virtually nothing while a marriage is intact, when a couple are raising children together to acknowledge that the stay at home parent is contributing as fully to the economic well-being of the family as the parent in the workforce earning an income.
This is one way of trying to recognize that. I think it is important that we have this discussion because in the last few years I have increasingly heard resentment from women who are fully occupied and working full time raising three or more children. They resent that they are forgoing income to make that important contribution to the lives of their children and I believe to society. Yet because they made that choice, from their reduced income they are required to contribute to support children of other parents who choose otherwise.
That kind of resentment between women in society is not helpful to the equality of women, but it is a fact. It is a fact that will only be changed when we really address how to recognize the economic value of the contribution women make as mothers and homemakers.
This bill before us may not be a perfect solution to that but it is at least the start of discussions. The result of not recognizing the economic value of that work is far reaching and lasts a lifetime. It is a major contributor to the poverty of women that they interrupt a career, interrupt the opportunity to build a career either for a short or long period of time and they never recoup. Even if they go back into their career they never recoup economically.
As a society we want the next generation to be born, yet we penalize women who are the only half of our race capable of producing that next generation.
As I said, some of these are not the arguments of my colleagues presenting this bill. However, they are certainly mine. The result is that poverty is a women's issue and this is a cause of it. That very important work they do in child bearing and child rearing has no economic value in our society and that has repercussions throughout the workplace. It means that when women do go into paid work they tend to be slotted into the kind of work that most closely resembles mothering, looking after the needs of somebody else. Therefore, we underpay that kind
of work in the paid workforce that most resembles whatever comes closest to the mothering and supportive role. Therefore, we create pink collar ghettos in the workforce as well.
I honestly think that is only going to change when we do start addressing and valuing economically the work of women in raising children and creating a home.
I said it lasts throughout a lifetime. One of the things I find extremely attractive about this bill is that it gives women the opportunity to provide for their own financial security in retirement. It gives them the opportunity to contribute to their own pension plan. One of the major causes of poverty among women and particularly of elderly women is that they have never had or have had limited opportunities to contribute to pension plans.
For a number of reasons the motivation behind this bill is a positive one. We also have to address in our economic accounting how we value the work of women. There is a move afoot to have the census include valuing as employment the work that women do as volunteers or at home. I support that and I hope we will do that.
There will be all kinds of economic arguments as to why we cannot do what this bill proposes. We have to start fundamentally questioning how we can perpetuate a tax system that requires depriving some women of economic recognition for the important work they do. I do not suspect we will resolve that today or in the next few months but I hope this bill has made a lot of members of the House start to think about it. I see the hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance sitting close by. I hope he is listening because he is in a position to start having a positive influence in that direction.