Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to address this bill today. I would first like to acknowledge the presence in the gallery of many grandparents. I welcome them here. These are people interested in this issue and I encourage them to listen and to work with us as we look to this legislation.
I also recognize their contribution, especially as seniors or grandparents in our society, to the past, the present and hopefully the future of this country.
Bill C-232 addresses the issue of granting access and custody to grandparents. This is a very real issue in our society. There are a growing number of grandparents and a growing complexity of marriage breakdowns and blended families within society.
As chair of the family task force of our party, we have done a fair amount of work looking at families and the importance of families in society. In that process we have determined a definition of family that we are using as a benchmark, those individuals related by ties of blood, marriage or adoption, where marriage is the union of a man and a woman as recognised by the state. It very much includes relations of blood, which means that grandparents are an important part of family and should remain so.
I will illustrate something that happened this week within my riding. We have a unique French community, one of the original French communities in British Columbia. It was established with the logging industry on the banks of the Fraser River at the turn of the century.
It was a thriving community, a mill town, called Maillardville. Every year we have the festival du bois which recognizes the importance of that in our community. This year there was a rededication of the original Millside school. It has been renovated and changed with the changing neighbourhood.
I talked with seniors, many of them watching with pride as being part of this community. In that crowd there were also second and third generation people, seniors who had attended that school in the 1920s. It was a French community of people who had shared in that community throughout their lives and watched their children and grandchildren raised there.
Through them and through their activity within their families, they have managed to maintain the language, the culture, the knowledge and the pride of their heritage, the sense of belonging in and around their community, the sense of history, the values they share and a sense of permanence within their families in this changing world.
There was an understanding between those generations. It was not an externally imposed understanding but an internally shared understanding between the members of families.
Is that typical in our society? Unfortunately it probably is not. We have had changes because of the tremendous new pressures in this society. Seventy-five per cent of mothers of school aged children now have full or part time work which keeps them out of the home. The average number of working hours in the 1950s was 48 in order to earn an average family income.
Today an average family income requires two people on average working 65 to 75 hours every week. The stress on families is tremendous. Therefore, as we have heard today, there is a high incidence of divorce and separation within families. With that comes the stress, the uncertainty, the conflicting loyalties, et cetera, that we have heard.
It is interesting that we have the same number of husband-wife households now as we had in the 1940s. Eighty-seven per cent of households are husband, wife and children. However, many of those households are second and third marriages or blended family units.
We do have single parent families in our communities which are very much a reality. The term single parent family denies that a family had two parents at one point and four parents at some point related by blood. Single parents should not be deemed as alone and isolated in our society. There are relations and support within society for them.
There are the factors of immigration and the mobility of families across the country. These put further stresses on ties of
blood but these separations are not as complicated by the tensions that we find in family break-up situations.
Death, separation and divorce are three real factors of our society and they all lead very much to the breakdown of fundamental family ties. What we are asking today is what we can do about it.
In this Chamber we should be asking about the government's role in doing something about this very real problem in our society. This Chamber recognizes in many ways that one of its primary responsibilities in society is to recognize the importance of heritage.
We hear in eloquent speeches the importance of heritage for our native peoples. We hear the importance of heritage for our visible minorities and our many cultures. However, I would like to see what the importance of heritage is in our laws for Canadians generally.
In family law there is an overlap between provincial and federal jurisdictions. Provincial law dictates what happens within relationships when a parent dies or when there is abuse within the family or when parents separate.
In B.C. when those situations come into the legal process, grandparents may be granted access by application to the courts on the same basis as anyone else. Within that province, as in most provinces, there is no recognition or privilege of any kind by the state given to a blood relationship outside of parenthood. There is a presumption that perhaps the court will make this decision but in law there is no recognition of that blood tie.
What we are looking at today is part of the Divorce Act. Forty per cent of grandparents who have access problems fall under the Divorce Act legislation. Anyone, blood or otherwise, can apply for access, and all non-parents must be given permission by the court to have that access. A parent comes into that situation with same status or same right of access as a bus driver or a neighbour. Their status in law is the same.
We have just come through the International Year of the Family. There are a couple of publications from that period, "A Focus on Canada: Families in Canada" and a look at the statistics in our society, "The State of the Family in Canada". These were extensive studies that looked at Canadian families. They made reference to care of the elderly, reference to relative care, divorces and marriage. There was no mention made of grandparents in Canadian families.
This is in contrast to the fact that within those studies it was pointed out that the most common choice of child care in Canadian homes was by a relative in the relative's home or a relative in the child's home. Grandparents probably made up a large proportion of that. They are a very important part of what is happening in our society and yet they are not recognized as such.
In aboriginal communities blood ties are recognized for many generations, not only one or two. It is only within the last few years that our immigration laws have been changed to not include grandparents.
As a legislative body we have recognized the importance of blood connections through multigenerations in other cultures. What have we done in the Canadian population? We have recognized child care by grandparents in unspecified statistics. They are disguised in a general statistic.
The recognition of rights of access in the laws both federally and provincially is no different than those for any non-parent or any person in society other than the parents.
I have discovered that within tax laws and support in foster care in the provincial jurisdiction, strangers have more support than grandparents when the state mandates the care of a child. Grandparents have been marginalized in our society.
This morning I heard about the rights of the child and the rights of the parent and even the rights the grandparent. What do we do when these things conflict? It is time the government recognizes the importance of family, not multiculturalism or state run day care or even government programs, but looking at what creates a strong society. Strong families create a strong society. Strong families create strong cultural ties. Strong families create a just society. Strong families create a strong economy. A child's best interests are society's best interests because that child is going to grow up in that society.
One step is to recognize the rights of access by grandparents in law and the right of inquiry as to the well-being of their grandchildren and their right to know about their health, education and general welfare. Bill C-232 is the right step in the direction to empower families and underline their importance in our challenging and increasingly difficult role.