Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to advise the House that I am going to be a grandfather in February for the very first time. This is a rather interesting experience. I have always wanted to be a grandfather. However when my wife's aunt asked what I thought it was going to feel to be a grandfather, I thought: I cannot be that old. It is a very unusual feeling.
I am standing to speak in favour of this bill not only from a personal point of view but also from the point of view of the concerns that many of my constituents have passed along to me.
The stability of children is the question we are discussing here. When children have stability as they grow to be adults that our society will have stability. Our society is made up of individual components, 29 million of us. As we have individual stability so our society will be as well.
Unfortunately, it is a widely accepted premise that during the course of a divorce many children if not the majority feel as though somehow they are the people who are to blame. They end up blaming themselves for all of the fracture within their family unit that is going on around them. They truly need stability.
Almost invariably there is hostility at that particular time. Again, children pick up on that and unfortunately part of that hostility can be focused specifically toward the grandparents. In other words when the parents are fighting with each other, particularly if their parents in turn become part of that fight, there ends up being this hostility.
If we are going to be able to work in the direction of creating a feeling of roots and self-worth, then the grandparents have a very, very important place in that. Children have to have a feeling of ownership, that they are part of something. Children have to be able to develop a feeling of self-worth.
I also believe that each of us in our own way feels it is important that we have a feeling for our heritage. Many of us have travelled to the places our grandparents came from, places we have never seen before. Perhaps they are overseas or perhaps they are in this country. We have never seen them and yet we have a feeling of belonging and a feeling of heritage.
For all of those reasons I speak in favour of this bill. However I knew that the Liberal members would be disappointed if the Reform Party did not end up talking about dollars and cents at some point in this debate so I will not disappoint them. I quote from a submission on behalf of the Canadian Grandparents Rights Association to the Custody and access project, family and youth law policy section of the Department of Justice:
We believe that one large problem in this area is a gross misconception of the powers and capabilities of the state. In British Columbia for instance, out of 850,000 children, the state has seen fit to apprehend into its custody about 6,000 at current levels. Most of these are children who have been in and out of custody repeatedly, rebellious teenagers, or Indian children. Less than 2,000 will be small children it was necessary to remove from their parents. Even this small number (one that has been declining for two decades) creates a huge financial obligation for the state in terms of immediate care, foster care, and the associated activities of the state, including investigation, apprehension and after care. It is hard to reach a definite conclusion as to what those costs are, but we believe they are more than $50 million a year.
There we have it. We have a dollar and cents argument to something that to any rational and reasonable person is not a dollar and cents issue. Nonetheless it does have implications for our society.
Rather than standing and beating my gums for another eight minutes what I simply would like to say is that I speak strongly in favour of this bill. I believe as we have strong citizens in our country with a strong feeling of self-worth which comes in no small part from the feeling of heritage and parentage that we will be building a better and stronger society.