Mr. Speaker, it must be abundantly obvious to everyone sitting in this House that we need more time to debate this very important issue.
I am very thankful that I have the opportunity as someone who has helped to develop Reform's family issues policy to be able to address this motion for a very brief time this morning.
I want to immediately let everybody know where I am coming from. Caring for our children is the most worthwhile and important task anyone in this country can perform. I think we all agree on this. I have been listening to the debate and we may not agree on the solution but we do agree that this issue is very important and needs to be talked about in this House.
There is one thing that I have not heard very much talk about and which needs to be discussed. Whenever we talk about developing a program such as this one, we have to first ask what the costs will be. I am talking about money but there are also justice, education, health care and social costs such as welfare that need to be factored in when we develop a program like this one.
I have studied this for quite some time. If, as we have advocated many times, we were to run this through the tax system and recognize child care in that way for those parents who wish to stay at home and take care of their children, the reduced justice costs, education costs, health care costs and social costs would more than pay for any program.
One of the things that disturbs me and actually surprises me is that members who have been talking about this have not told us what the costs would be if we simply paid out a certain sum of money for child care to the parent.
The second point I would like to make is incentive. Every time we have a government program there is going to be an incentive of some kind or another built in and that needs to be analysed. If we were to simply pay out the money through another large government program, what kind of an incentive would that give? Would a small percentage of people abuse it and have children simply for the sake of having children rather than having them because they wish to raise the next generation?
Finally, the devil is in the details. What regulations would accompany this? When the state gets involved and interferes in family affairs, problems will come down the road. We will run into problems unless parents take care of their children as they wish rather than as the state dictates.
In conclusion, the highest quality of child care is given by parents who care for their children because their motive is love. Unless that is happening, we are going to have problems. That is why we need to run this through the Income Tax Act, income splitting and so on.
Because of the importance of this issue, I would like to ask for unanimous consent to make this a votable motion so that we can debate the issue further.