I think it would be very wrong to send the message “If you are a woman who chooses to stay at home, you will get a salary”. That is not what women are asking for. That is not what the feminist organizations are asking for. And I believe this must be taken into consideration.
It is quite right to say that it is a matter of free choice. I come from a family of five children. I have a twin brother, an older brother, a sister and a younger brother. My mother decided to stay at home. She gave her best for her family—and you can judge the results by what you see before you—but it was a free choice. I am profoundly convinced of that.
There is no question of not addressing the real problems. The real problem is taxation. The real problem is transfer payments.
The provinces are $42 billion short. The province of Quebec is $7 billion short. Family policy ought to be developed at the provincial level. Why? Because of its connection with education and child care. In this respect, I call on the Minister of Canadian Heritage.
You should have seen her in 1994. There was no holding her back from brandishing her little red book. What did that book say? That the government would create 150,000 new child care spaces. There was something about a national child care network. The Minister of Canadian Heritage has not forgotten that, has she?
What is happening? First, funds should have gone to the provinces. Today, five years later, nothing has been done with respect to child care. I have even been told that $650 million earmarked by Treasury Board for this purpose had not been used because the federal government said that the provinces did not want this money.
That is not true. I am convinced that all provincial governments want their own family policies. Had the government given them this $650 million and let them manage their own family policies, they could have used this money according to their own priorities.
Let us be clear, family is an important component of society. It does not always fit the traditional concept of family. We often talk about blended families. Two individuals who choose to live together and raise children form a family. There are all kinds of families nowadays. The traditional, nuclear family is no longer the norm.
The family in which I grew up was made up of two parents who lived together all their lives, with my mother staying at home while my father was the breadwinner, and five wonderful children. This may no longer be the norm, but one must accept such realities.
We would be sending an extremely negative, incomplete and strategically wrong message, and I would like the hon. member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik to take that into consideration. I do not think that the status of women council and feminist organizations, which know about and have studied these issues, want the support—