Madam Speaker, I am delighted to be able to speak to this important motion. The parliamentary secretary has assured us not to worry, that the Liberals are in charge and everything will be fine. I guess we should relax easy knowing that the family is protected. Yet I find it rather ironic that while it is undoubtedly true that the Liberals are committed in principle to supporting families and to not undoing the facts of biology, they do indeed tax families much more heavily if those families make the determination that one of the parents is to stay home and look after the children.
I have some firsthand experience with this since my wife has worked as a nanny. The best and most important principle is that parents should be given a free choice as to who looks after their preschool children and their school age children before and after school. Different parents for different reasons make different choices. My wife has done such a great job raising our own three children so I can go on public television and tell all the members in the House that the family that had my wife as nanny probably could not have chosen better, except if their mother could have stayed at home, but she was working and that is her choice.
When our children were young my wife said she would be a full time mom and stay with the children. All our lives we lived on one income. We chose to live on only my income because we thought it was very important for the children to at least have mom home. It would have been wonderful if we both could have stayed. We would have been even more skinny than we are now. That would have been most unfortunate. All those years we paid a penalty for that choice. Had we made the same amount of income between us, with my wife earning some and me earning some, our tax bill would have been considerably less.
I remember teaching night classes. I taught at a technical institute. One of the pleasures of that job was to teach night courses. We had wonderful young people during the day and in the evening the institute filled up with working people who went there in order to upgrade their skills. I taught mathematics and computing. I had a lot of people who wanted to learn how computers worked. You can tell by my age that I was invented about the same time as computers were. They were new when I was a young man giving instruction at the technical institute. I worked Tuesdays and Thursdays. I remember saying back then that I work on Tuesdays for Trudeau and on Thursdays I get to work for my family. That was because even then the marginal tax rate was around 50%. If my wife had been able to earn that money she would have had a lower taxation rate because that is the way the tax structure was.
I always felt that the real solution, not the solution this member is proposing of paying a salary with taxpayer dollars, is simply to arrange our tax system in such a way that families that make that choice are not discriminated against by the tax system. That is something I strongly believe in. It is something I hope this government will very quickly implement. I do not expect it but I would like to see it in the next budget. We are probably only about two and a half months away from the next budget and I would like to see that happen in the next budget.
I wish the Minister of Finance would say, as the parliamentary secretary just said, we value families. I hope he follows that by saying beginning today we will no longer have discriminatory tax practices against those families that choose to have one parent at home. I would be so appreciative. If that happened it would be very persuasive because it is such an important thing, although maybe not enough to make me vote Liberal.
Of course I will not vote Liberal because the Reformers are the ones who thought of this and that is one of the reasons I joined the Reform Party. We are promoting the idea. That is one idea I really wish they would steal. I think it is so critically important.
I remember over the years sometimes it was tough, especially with my working overtime and being involved in a lot of voluntary organization for which I got no extra money. Sometimes I did not get to see my family as much as I wanted. I really wished that there would have been a less discriminatory tax practice even against the parent who was out trying to earn a living so that I would not have had to work as many hours in order to provide for my family.
I strongly urge the government to consider that. Certainly the member who has brought forward this private member's business today has the right principle, to free up parents to make those choices. We just disagree in the detail of how it should be done.