Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues on both sides of the House for allowing me 10 minutes of comments on an opposition day motion. It is not the worst motion I have seen from the opposition side but it is certainly not one that I can support even though they have kindly let me have a few minutes here this afternoon.
There is a hidden agenda with this motion but I suppose we should come to expect that from the third party. As much as I respect individual members of the third party, the total package from time to time leaves something to be desired. The hidden agenda I sense in this motion is that the Reform Party is against a broad based day care, child care, system in Canada.
I would like to begin by relating an experience that I had when I was a student at the University of Toronto. At that time I was involved in establishing the first parent co-op day care centre at the University of Toronto, a day care centre I am proud to say still exists as the Sussex Parent Co-op Day Care Centre. It is quite an interesting story and maybe some other time I could go into details.
That experience taught me that there is no one simple solution for the care of our children. While I accept that the pre-eminent place of care for children should always be the family, the circumstances in this present world do not always allow us to have that circumstance available to everybody.
Single parents need day care whether they can afford to fully pay for it themselves or whether they need publicly assisted day care. In some families it is absolutely necessary that both parents work in order to pay the bills that are part of family life.
To suggest that simply providing a child care tax deduction to all families of all income levels pretends that there is a uniform situation for families. I think we tend to fool ourselves sometimes by talking about the typical family or standard family. There are many varieties of family arrangements in the modern world and we cannot try to adapt the social culture to take care of all situations with the simplistic solution we are offered here today.
The tax system provides a measure of relief for low and middle income families.
I would be the last one to say it is perfect. In times past, when my children were younger, I was happily able to take take advantage of that tax deduction. My children are old enough now that I do not have to worry about that, but I was sure glad it was there for me at the time when I was a low to middle income person in my younger years.
I do not think even well-to-do families would generally agree they need a tax deduction for which I have seen estimates of billions of dollars. I ask the Reform Party to take note of these numbers and do their own arithmetic. I wonder if the arithmetic might not be better than we have seen in the past.
I will quote from some research notes. If Reform means to give a $5,000 tax credit for every child under seven years of age and a $3,000 tax credit for every child aged seven to twelve, the cost of the program would be approximately $21 billion or far greater than the figures Reform projects when it says its total package of tax breaks is worth $12 billion. Even $12 billion is a lot of money. I wonder whether the upper income families the Reformers may be thinking about need that kind of tax break at this time.
I am not against targeting tax cuts and tax incentives for needy sectors of our society at the proper time when the deficit is taken care of. However this smacks of a broad based tax break from income zero to income millions per annum and I must object to that.
The other hidden agenda, besides being against a broad based community day care system, is that the Reform Party is telling women to stay home to take care of the children. I accept that a lot of women would choose that. Some are able to and some cannot because of life circumstances.
It is an individual decision on the part of the mother. It is not a decision we as a society should be imposing on any woman. It should be that men and women are equals in society. I resent the subliminal message in this Reform motion that women should stay at home to take care of the children.
The government has already answered-and I admit we have a way to go-the concerns of families with children. I wish we could go further right now. In due course I suspect we will be able to. We should be focusing our attention on the the whole issue of children and poverty among children in our society.
I do not think this plan which would redistribute tax dollars to upper income families would allow us to do what is needed to ensure the poor and the poorest in society have a proper share of what this great country has to offer.
With great respect to the fine members who are here, I do not know how Reform Party members can argue on the one hand for deficit reduction-and I would argue the government is doing a great job with that program-and then propose a plan that would cost $10 billion to $21 billion according to our estimates. Perhaps they could explain that to me as other members participate in the debate.
As I much as I appreciate it is the privilege of the opposition members to bring forward ideas for debate, they have missed an opportunity to bring forward a good idea. They brought forward an idea I cannot support.
I conclude by saying that there are among other things two hidden items: that the Reform Party is against broad based child care and that it is asking women to stay home to take care of their children.