Mr. Speaker, from here on, official opposition members will be sharing their time.
I am pleased to speak to Bill C-41 now before us. It has two faces: the hon. member for Prince Albert-Churchill River sees it as a panacea, the answer to all ills, while our colleague, the member for Port Moody-Coquitlam, who just spoke, views it as a step backward, not forward.
The reality probably lies somewhere in between. There are some improvements, undoubtedly, but there are also serious shortcomings. It all depends on how you look at the bill.
Members will recall that the first federal Divorce Act only goes back to 1968. For our younger colleagues, 1968 is a generation ago, it is almost another century. For me, it was the year I was still at the court house and I remember the first times this act was applied.
Before 1968, the provinces had jurisdiction in matters of divorce and only two provinces had no divorce legislation: Newfoundland and Quebec. The legislation was made uniform in 1968. The act was amended in 1985 and we are now living with the 1985 Divorce Act, which, as these things go in Canada, took effect from June 1, 1986. There is always a time lag between the passage of legislation and the date it takes effect.
The wish to now set parameters for determining the amount of support payments, is, in my view, a positive feature in the idea of how things should work presented by the member for Prince Albert-Churchill River. It would be much simpler to have a judge determine the amount to be awarded for a child's needs than to continue with the method that has been in use since 1968 of producing the well known lists of children's needs.
My hon. friend and colleague, the member for Beauport-Montmorency-Orléans, who is himself a lawyer, has probably on a number of occasions in his career submitted lists of children's needs in court. When the lists submitted by the respondents are compared, you find that they add up to almost 238 per cent of the child's real needs.
The language used in the proceedings is inflammatory, something we must try to get away from. We must reduce the involvement of the courts, and this is one of the positive ways we can achieve this, by setting parameters, developing grids, from which we can undoubtedly deviate in exceptional circumstances, but which will at least serve as basic guides. So much the better if we can keep all or some of these problems from reaching court. It is not the ideal place to resolve them.
Those who spoke before me mentioned that the child must be at the center of all decisions made in a divorce. That is a principle on which everyone agrees, except perhaps for those who go before the courts, in many cases, and use the child not as a person to be protected but as a bargaining chip in the divorce if not an instrument of blackmail. One parent says: "If my support payments were not so high, perhaps I could afford to take the child more often" or "I will see her less often in other circumstances", whatever.
It is dramatic when a little boy or a little girl becomes a bargaining tool in court, when they should be protected. In that sense, it was a good thing to establish payment grids, parameters to determine how much should be paid in support.
It is also an improvement over previous legislation, the act of 1968 and the act of 1985, in that those who must pay support can now be located and forced to pay. Society should not have to pay for those who default on their support payments.
It is great that defaulters can be located and forced to pay, that there will be better access to information that can be searched to identify and locate these individuals or their employers and that, in other cases, instalments will have to be paid in guarantee. I do not think that we can disagree with such improvements over the 1968 and the 1985 legislation.
But these acts all have a basic deficiency. This basic deficiency about the Divorce Act, 1968 and the Divorce Act, 1985 was the fact that divorce become commonplace. As divorce became trivial, so did family policy. Under our Divorce Act, solicitors are only required to inform their clients that a mediation system exists. The parties are under no obligation to submit to any form of conciliation or mediation which, in many cases, would preclude the adversarial process and the adrenaline rush it causes on both sides of the barricade, and this is an appropriate word to describe the situation in this case.
If, like in some American states such as California and Michigan for instance, before divorce procedures can proceed further, appointments with social workers and psychologists were mandatory, I think this would be another step in the right direction.
It is clear that we miss the point every time we amend the Divorce Act without taking onto account the fact that there is, first and foremost, a family reality, a family unit to that needs to be protected, and parents find themselves without options.
Help comes their way after the fact, when it is too late to do any good. People seldom reconcile after battling against one another in court in an adversarial process. Experience shows that the doorstep of the court house is not the place where reconciliation takes place.
For all intents and purposes, the divorce decree does not put an end to the marriage. It merely testifies that the marriage is dead, stating that nothing is working between the spouses. Something should be done at a much earlier stage.
In this regard, we are poorly equipped because-it always come back to this-our famous 1867 Constitution, the British North America Act, divided powers between the federal government and the provinces. Thus, under subsection 91(26) of the British North America Act, marriage and divorce matters come under federal jurisdiction while, under subsection 92(12), the solemnization of
marriage and, under subsection 92(13), property and civil rights all come under provincial jurisdiction.
How can we have a standard policy when we have legislators setting their policies in different places? Quebec has long demanded a standard family policy to be set by a single jurisdiction. And it had done so.
Bill 89 passed by the Quebec National Assembly in 1981 even contained divorce provisions, an integrated policy they have never been able to implement because they never got the powers back. The famous 1982 patriation of the Constitution has made it impossible to amend the Canadian Constitution.
Quebec's civil code being one of the criteria for recognizing Quebec as a distinct society, according to the minister, Bill C-110 passed by this House supposedly recognized Quebec as a distinct society and thus it should have recognized Quebec's primacy or its exclusive jurisdiction over marriage and divorce matters whatever the solemnization and background may be. But all these considerations are not mentioned when this bill was introduced, just as they were not mentioned in Bill C-110, which is not worth much more than the paper it is printed on.
This is unfortunate if not regrettable because, under Bill C-41 as it now stands, some provinces will end up with provincial payment grids that will have to be approved by the governor in council, while other provinces will not set their own grids so that the federal grids will rightfully apply. There is no real standard policy. Why should the payment grids now being finalized by Quebec not be recognized?
I simply suggest that the bill should be amended in committee in light of the fact that some provinces already have their own payment grids. In the eyes of the federal legislator, these grids may not be sufficient, but it is not up to the federal legislator to judge what provincial legislators are doing. It is up to the voters in each province.
If the voters in New Brunswick are not happy with what their provincial politicians are doing with regard to family law, they only have to vote for a new government; the same goes for every other province and for us as federal legislators.
Since we are now sharing our time, let me close by saying that we will support Bill C-41 in principle for the reasons listed by my colleagues, the hon. member for Québec and the hon. member for Berthier-Montcalm. We will work on improving this bill in committee.