Madam Speaker, I find the hon. member's question to be so absolutely typical of someone who does not really understand. He has never been there and does not even understand the reality of the lives of divorced families and of children of divorce.
This is the kind of statement that you would hear from an upper middle class male who does not have a clue. The hon. member talks about child support and that the adjudicator takes into consideration the real need and ability of the parent to pay. That is absolute rubbish.
Child support has, in the past, been dictated by who had the better lawyer. Invariably the custodial parent did not have the money to have the better lawyer and was at the wrong end of the stick. The point here is that it is the children who suffer.
The hon. member talked about income tax and child support. The interesting thing is that we get this kind of information coming across the floor because when you try to answer the question, you are not even given the courtesy of their listening to the answer. Misinformation continues to be fostered. They really do not want to hear the answer. The answer is that child support is not spousal support. Spousal support is income in the hands of the custodial parent. Child support is income in the hands of the child.
Parents who live together do not deduct the support for their child. They do not get to deduct it. Why should it be that we have this uneven system of parents who are not living together with their family get to deduct child support? Child support is not a discretionary thing. Child support is an absolute duty to the child.
I also heard the hon. member asking me about using 30 to 40 per cent of the half a million dollars in order to create a bureaucratic structure. I am not a mathematician. I certainly never claimed to be one. However, when I last looked 40 per cent of a half billion was not $15 million. This is grade 2 arithmetic we are talking about here. It is interesting that this kind of arithmetic comes out. Fifteen million dollars is not half of a half billion dollars. That is not 40 per cent of it.
One of the important things to remember is that if there is a system that is fair and equitable, that is going to be tracking people, you have to use the technology so the information is available across this country. That has been the major problem of enforcement. People leave provinces. They go to other provinces. No one can find them. They do not know where they are. If the defaulter cannot be tracked, support payments cannot be enforced.
It is a clear issue. We know that 43 per cent of non-custodial parents in the province of Ontario today do not pay a penny of child support. Of the remainder, only about 30 per cent of them manage to pay the full amount.
We are talking here about major default. We have to set into place the structures to help these children. Saying that this is a lot of rubbish actually means that the hon. member does not even understand the issue to start off with.