Madam Speaker, I am proud to stand in my place today to support Bill C-41 which amends various existing legislation to ensure that child support reforms become law.
I am proud to do so because the Department of the Status of Women Canada and my predecessor, the hon. member for Mount Royal, played a major role in bringing this legislation to the fore. The hon. member did so by going around this country with a three person task force to meet with women, with custodial and non-custodial parents and the public in general. They listened to some of the problems and ideas that came from women, men and children with regard to child support. As a result, some of this legislation was brought into the fore.
This was also brought about by working with the Law Reform Commission of Canada which again has the body of expertise that can understand and deal with the law. The family law committee of federal, provincial and territorial representatives brought understanding and expertise on what happens when people divorce, on what happens to the child.
This piece of legislation speaks clearly to and in support of one person in this problem: the child. It speaks to one group of people who have had no one to advocate for them very strongly. This government has decided that we will advocate for the child.
Above all, this reform is a tribute to the hundreds of people across Canada who contributed to the dialogue. We heard from men and women, advocates for children, for mothers and fathers. We heard from accountants, lawyers and social service providers to name only a few.
The result before us is a law that will create a system of child support that is fair, equitable and beneficial to all Canadians. But above all, this legislation represents a balanced approach that is fair for children. It puts children first.
If I could summarize this bill in one phrase, it would be that child support is not a discretionary payment. Both parents must assume responsibility for their children, whether they live together or not. This is a duty, a responsibility. It is not something that a non-custodial parent can choose to ignore because the non-custodial parent has suddenly assumed a new life and wants to undertake a new lifestyle. The child is a responsibility of both parents.
We have seen clearly that children live in the same socioeconomic status of the custodial parent. I am using the term custodial parent, but we know that the majority of custodial parents in the country are women and that the majority of single women with children are living in poverty. These children must be supported first and foremost by both parents. They must, if possible, be assisted in support by the state wherever it can be done. This is where the working income supplement will apply.
When families break up it is generally the children who suffer. As a physician who has spent 25 years in practice, I can say that children suffer greatly. Many children of divorce who live with the mother do not have the same access to post-secondary education that other children have. We know many of these children are living pretty close to the poverty line. They are a shared responsibility. It is the right of the child to be financially supported by both parents.
We would then create a system where families would still be united. But there are divorced parents and the children, therefore, live in different status purely because they happen through no fault of their own to be living in a divorced situation. Children should not have to bear the brunt of that. There should not be two classes of children in this country.
The government applied gender based analyses to these reforms to ensure that neither women nor men are unfairly disadvantaged by the legislation. We have ensured that the outcome of the changes are fair and equitable to both men and women.
The child support strategy rests on four very important pillars. One is the tax treatment of support payments for children. I want to stress the tax treatment of support payments for children, not of spousal support. We are talking only of child support. We have set up guidelines that will make it clear across the country that we are no longer going to have to depend on the discretion of lawyers, judges or courts. It will be a fair system of guidelines, based on the income of the non-custodial parent. It takes into consideration whether the non-custodial parent can afford to pay or not. It also makes very clear that afford to pay does not mean that child support for a non-custodial parent comes after the car, the holidays and the investments, but that child support is considered as one of the first and foremost duties of the non-custodial parent and not as a second thought.
These guidelines are clear, equitable and they will be the same no matter where those people pay live in this country. It takes into consideration the cost of living, the standard of living and the tax treatments of each province. Different provinces will have clear guidelines for what the non-custodial parent must pay, based on the number of children, as a percentage of the income of the non-custodial parent.
The third pillar on which this rests is enforcement of child support guidelines and child support, period. We know that many children do not get child support. This is a major problem. I do not think hon. members across in the third party would disagree that enforcement is extremely important.
The fourth pillar is the working income supplement. This is the so-called tax grab that the hon. member just spoke about. We know that by changing the tax treatment of child support the federal government will receive a windfall of money. That money is not going back into federal government coffers. After $50 million of that money has been taken to set up the data bases and to assist provinces to get this going, the rest will go into a working income supplement which will assist 700,000 children.
As a state we need to ensure that our children are clearly supported and that our children are treated equally whether their parents can afford to or not. Children are the future of this country.
The first pillar of change is the way in which the child support system is taxed. This system has been place for 54 years. It has become outdated. It was an inequitable system which said parents who live together and who are bringing up a family do not get to tax deduct the money they spend on their children, but if they become divorced all of a sudden their child because a tax deductible expense. This did not make any sense at all because it was creating an uneven playing field.
It was saying that if you were divorced it was better for you to be able to support your child because you got the tax deduction. If you live together as a family you were in fact being discriminated against in terms of caring for your children because caring for your children is not a tax deductible expense. It is not an expense of business. It is not a discretionary expense. It is a duty and a responsibility for parents.
Under the new system the full amount of the support payments can be used to care for the child so that when a custodial parent is given a sum of money that custodial parent knows that all of that money is going to the child and that some of it does not have to go back to Revenue Canada so that the child only gets part of the money.
Child support payment under a written agreement or court order made on after May 1 will therefore not be deductible to the payer or included in the income of the recipient for tax purposes. This has finally given us an equitable system and not a system that is based on the fact that if the custodial parent can afford a good lawyer, then the custodial parent gets a better amount of money for the child.
We know that many custodial parents did have the money and it really rested on who could afford the better lawyer. This has been taken away now. The system is going to be fair and equitable and that is the second component of the pillars of this legislation. The guidelines are clearly set and clearly written down so that there is no more trying to see who could argue their way out of the paper bag that we have had in the past in terms of how child support has been accepted.
The tax rules, however, will not automatically apply to existing orders. Governments cannot unilaterally change support agreements between parents negotiated on the basis of another set of rules. This is not going to be grandfathered. We know that if parents are not happy with the way their child support has been structured they can go back and seek to change it and bring it under the new rules if they work together to do that and if they work together in the best interests of the child.
Implementation of the new rules will not take effect until the spring for two very important reasons. First, we expect there will be a large increase in applications to change existing orders to conform to the new child support rules because in many cases much of the child support that is today given is not being enforced and is not enough. It would cause chaos if the federal government did not have the provinces to establish a more efficient way to deal with the sudden influx of support orders.
For that reason we have established a $50 million fund that will be used in partnership with the provincial government to develop, pilot and implement efficient and cost-effective mechanisms to help parents obtain, vary and update their awards.
The second reason for leaving the implementation until May 1997 brings me to the second pillar of child support. The implementation date allows us time to enact federal child support guidelines. These guidelines are going to make the system equitable.
If I could sum up this bill in one phrase it would be that child support is the single most important thing that we can do for our children tomorrow. This legislation introduces a number of measures that the provinces and the territories can draw on in partnership with the federal government to enforce support payments.
Federal pensions can be diverted so that we can garnishee from a federal employee who is not paying child support. We can garnishee out of that federal employee packages, whether it be pension funds or some sort of benefit funds, in order to ensure the child gets the support.
Revenue Canada's data base will now be used for the federal information network so that we can track defaulters. In other words, they can move from province to province and they can run but they cannot hide.
Passports and even certain federal licences can be suspended if a debtor is in persistent arrears. We will develop finally a standardized data base across this country so that there will be compliance with the support orders in Canada.
This will help both levels of government to design more effective mechanisms for support enforcement. In addition, the legislation provides for measures to help the provinces streamline the collection of out of province orders. In these ways the federal government will help the provinces to pursue what is really their jurisdiction which is to support enforcement programs.
Although it is not covered in this legislation it will be noted that the fourth pillar of our child support strategy is the doubling of the working income supplement of the federal child tax benefit. This is the tax grab the hon. member across spoke about and conveniently ignored, that the money is to be going over the next five years, half a billion dollars, to support approximately 700,000 low income working families. About one-third of these families are single parents. These single parent families are predominantly led by women and they predominantly live in poverty.
We as a government are making a very strong statement. We are saying that we as Canadians, all of us, whether we have children or not, whether we are living together with our children or not, owe it to all Canadian children to prepare them for the future, to prepare them for tomorrow, to give them equal opportunity so they can realize their fullest potential, so we do not continue to foster two sets of levels of children, those who have and those who do not have and who will be the people we look to carry this country forward in the next century. If we do not give them the tools and the skills, if we do not give all our children the opportunity and value our children, we are not truly looking to our future for tomorrow.
The four pillars in our child support strategy reinforce one another. These changes have long been overdue. The government has studied these issues carefully and we have worked closely with all the stakeholders, not only the public but accountants, men and women, and lawyers to talk about this issue and to find the right answers. This is not a thrown together piece of legislation, as hon. members across the floor would have us believe. This was discussed in public hearings. I do not know if the hon. members even went to the public hearings or even listened to some of the information we heard from men and women who spoke on behalf of the children of this country.
More important, our children deserve the right to be treated fairly. They deserve the right not to have to be forced to live with
the consequences of what their parents have done and with the power struggles between parents as we have seen in the past. Our children deserve to be given every opportunity. This bill does exactly that for all our children.