Mr. Speaker, recently one of my Reform colleagues introduced a private member's bill extending the child care tax deduction. The key is that the deduction would be converted to a refundable tax credit which would benefit those parents who choose to care for their own children.
Presently a tax deduction can be received if someone else cares for your children but not if you choose to stay home and raise them yourself. As usual, the Liberal government refused to support the bill.
Its solution to helping families cope with the stresses of the nineties is to implement a national day care strategy, a new $700 million bureaucracy. I can well imagine the chaos a program like this will create for families in rural Saskatchewan and indeed in rural Canada.
We all know that an institution is no substitute for the family. In fact, in a Maclean's poll last year, 70 per cent of Canadian families said that if they had the choice they would prefer to have one parent stay home with the children.
Our children are our future and no costly bureaucracy can serve as a replacement for an economically stable and happy family.