Mr. Speaker, as I commence my remarks I want to pay tribute to the member for Mission-Coquitlam and her advocacy for grandparents. I may not agree with the legislation she has put forward, but I certainly agree with the spirit and intent of her advocacy.
I also want to take a line from her comments just now when she said, in conclusion, that if we do not care about everybody and particularly children we are going to be in trouble. That is refreshing and, I know from that member, a true statement of her feelings. It is also refreshing to hear it from the Reform benches.
However, the best way to put this is that there is place for everything legislatively and everything in its place. While I understand the member's frustration, given her advocacy on the question of access to grandparents in a post-divorce world, this bill does not deal with access. Access is something separate which may have to be dealt with at another time. This bill deals specifically with corollary relief and the situation faced by, for the most part, mothers attempting to deal with their financial lives in a post-divorce situation.
Sometimes to explain why amendments are taken in the manner in which they are taken and why the government decides to act in the way in which it decides to act, particularly in these circumstances, it becomes necessary to talk about the real world.
While I applaud the hon. member, I think there is a touch of naivety in the comments. This is not, particularly when we talk about post-divorce families, the best of all possible worlds. Indeed, for those of us who have long experience in the realm of family law, the post-divorce world is survivable for those people who have gone through it only if the legislation is strong enough to ensure behaviour that allows survival.
This is not a world to be looked at with rose coloured glasses. Post-divorce for a number of years and sometimes many years can be described best as a page out of hell for the people who are involved in it.
I would like to correct a mistake in statistics that I am sure the hon. member did not mean to make. The divorce rate in Canada is not 50 per cent, thank God. The divorce rate fluctuates somewhere between 3 and 3.9 in 10. This is not terrific but it is not as bad as 50 per cent. Maybe it should be at 50 per cent given some of the things that happen in marriages that still stay together. Nevertheless, just in the interest of accuracy, the divorce rate is somewhere between 3 or 3.9 out of 10.