Madam Speaker, I am delighted for many reasons to respond to the motion put forward by the hon. member for Calgary Southeast.
It is really nice to know that the opposition party suddenly cares about women. This is a party that talked about women as a special interest group for so very long that I am delighted to hear that it has suddenly recognized that women exist and have complex issues to face in our society.
What is intriguing is that, as usual, the party takes what is an extremely complex issue and puts it into a very simplistic way. There is a danger in that because when we take complex issues and deal with them in a simplistic manner we quite often make worse the disparities that have occurred in a society as a result of those complex issues. We tend to bring the wrong measures to correcting things and make them far worse.
We have to look at the complexity of the issue. That is why I am glad to speak to this today. I would like to inform the members across the way about the complexity of the issue.
The issue is about valuing unpaid work done in our society. When hon. members talk about single income families, what they need to understand very clearly is that single income earning families come in many shapes and sizes. They are not only the single income family in which one parent stays at home and looks after the children and one parent goes to work.
There are single income families that have no choice about going to work. I would like to inform hon. members that these are called single parents. They have no choice about going to work. They go to work because there is no one else to do so. They cannot afford to stay at home. Eighty per cent of these families tend to be made up of women and about 60% of them tend to be in very low income jobs.
These single income families are the ones that are to benefit most by what this government has done to deal with the issue of single income families, i.e. the national child benefit. These single income families earning $20,000 a year will be able to get $1,800 for their first child and $1,500 for the second child. That is $3,300 a year, which I think is a fairly good way of assisting people in supporting their children.
This is not only about families and the complexity of the single income family. It is also about the issue of ensuring that children are taken care of. Whether a parent is forced to work because he or she is a single parent or whether a parent makes the choice to work in the paid workforce, these are the complexities of the issues.
I want to make sure members across the way understand the complexity of the issue before they try to apply the usual simplistic band-aid solution that they do to everything they discuss.
The issue therefore is how do we value the unpaid work that is done in our society mostly by women.
For members who do not know what the government has been doing about this because they have never cared about women and consider them to be a special interest group, this government has led the world, literally, in valuing unpaid work. We were the first country to put questions in the 1996 census about unpaid work, the amount of unpaid work in families looking after children, seniors and those who are ill.
The second thing we have done is a great deal of analysis with communities living in the real world. There is a group that has being doing a lot of work on unpaid work in partnership with the government. It is called Mothers are Women. It tends to want to look at the issue of unpaid work, which the people across the way should talk about. Unpaid work is not only done by women. There are some men who still do some of the unpaid work and stay at home and look after their children. I hope those gentlemen across the way would be pleased one day to stay at home and look after their children. I wonder if this would happen.
What is the government doing for that group? Right now if one chooses to drop out of the workforce to look after one's children there is something called the Canada pension plan. I bring that to members' attention. It is the only insurance that allows for a child rearing drop out. It allows for the person to get out of the workforce, stay at home and look after their children. They do not lose the benefits that accrue to give them a pensionable income at the end of their lives. This is an extremely progressive form of assistance.
The other one is when people drop out of the workforce to look after children they can have up to five years away from the workforce. Then they can go back and be retrained to get back into the workforce if they so choose.
This is all about choice. This is all about ensuring that Canadian families, the complexity of them, the multiplicity of them, have the choice for any parent to stay at home if they choose. We also have something called parental leave that addresses that issue. Either parent can take parental leave to look after their children.
We have the Canada pension plan that gives them the ability to stay at home and look after their children. Employment insurance gives up to five years of leave. We also have the national child benefit that values single, low income earner parents in the workforce to get up to $3,300 for two children. Those are some things the government is doing.
The issue is how do we talk about the income tax system which the hon. members have been talking about. Let us look at what happens when we have a two parent, one income family with two children making about $60,000 and a two parent, dual income family making about $60,000. Hon. members across the way are absolutely right. If all we do is look at how the income tax system treats these parents, the single income, dual parent family does a lot worse than the dual income, dual parent family.
We are back to choice. There are some families that cannot choose to have both parents stay at home because they need to work to bring up their children and do some of the things they want to do to give their children a better chance in life. In those families, other than the income tax, when we factor in payroll deductions, the cost of quality child care for those children, the dual income family is way behind the single income family by about $3,500 to $3,800. This is a complex issue. If we did the simplistic response hon. members across the way would have us do we would now have made that dual income family worse off than it is today.
The issue is complex. We need to look at the issue in its fullness so that we can talk about the complexity of the issue. The point is that the government has been looking at the issue in many ways.
In one of the first chances we had we looked at how we valued the unpaid work that persons do in society. That was when the Minister of Finance, in his budget of 1998, gave a $400 tax credit to persons who looked after the seniors and the disabled in their families. That was a first step.
We are still looking at the issue because it is complex. We want to make sure when start valuing the unpaid work done by whomever that it is done in such a way that we do not make worse the situation of people who are suffering disparities right now.
I want to inform hon. members across the way about the issue in all its complexity and let them know what we have been doing so far on this issue and to make them understand that the single income family comes in many shapes and sizes. It is not only about one person staying at home while one person goes to work.
We want to talk about the new policy measures we can take as a government to encourage the connection between non-paid and paid work. Forty-five per cent of women today are in the paid workforce. We know that these same people have to go into the communities, do their paid work and come home and do the unpaid work as well. These are the kinds of things we want to look at. How do we value the unpaid work? We are talking about choices.
The statistics prove the incontrovertible evidence of one of the great achievements of the century now drawing to a close. Women know more now about freedom, flexibility and choice. They can decide to pursue a career in the paid workforce or to dedicate themselves to raising their children or to volunteer within the community. That is another area of unpaid work that is being done. In fact, some women in Canada do not just one but all these things.
Let me make very clear that the government recognizes the valuable work being done by women and men in the home. In today's debate I hope that both sides of the House will send a strong signal across Canada to all women that we respect and support the decisions they make, whether they choose to go into the paid workforce or whether they choose to stay at home. It is about respecting choices, not about forcing people to do one thing or the other.
The Government of Canada is measuring and valuing unpaid work. As we create public policy our role as government is to ensure that government is a force for good, that government makes good public policy, not just policy because we want to throw a band-aid at the issue or not simplistic policy as the hon. members across the way would have us make. We want to make good public policy that will eventually ensure that as time goes on, and very soon within the next century, men and women will be able to make the choices they want about going into the workforce or not.
The reality remains that we do not have the resources to do everything we can to provide Canadians with the kinds of initiatives which would help families to ease their burdens whether they are engaged in paid or unpaid work. The government knows that this is a challenge and that more has to be done.
We are committed to doing it as resources permit. We are not committed to doing what hon. members across the way would have us do. They would have us increase the disparity which now exists within families that go into the workforce and between dual income earning families and single income earning families in spite of their complexities.
Let us look at the real cost of providing for one's family. Have hon. members taken into consideration how much money a dual income earning family or a lone parent earning family has at the end of the week for day care needs? When other factors such as that are taken into consideration, dual income earning families as we know have very much less after tax disposable income than single income earning families with two parents. I want to make a distinction between single income earning families with two parents and single income earning families with only one parent, the worker in the paid workforce and the unpaid worker, at the same time.
If we treated the single income earning two parent families equally, it would not achieve equity. I repeat that we can treat people equally and not achieve equity because it is a very difficult idea for hon. members across the way to get their heads around. It is very complex.
There is a difference between treating people equally and achieving equity. The government is committed to equity. In spite of the different barriers that people face, we are committed to achieving equity regardless of whether barriers exist because it is a single income earning one parent family, because it is a dual income earning two parent family or a single income earning two parent family, or whether they are disabled or their race, culture or language are problems in the workplace. We are talking about equity. That is something I want that group to understand. One size does not fit all.
Perhaps the hon. member's solution would be to eliminate paid child care as a cost of employment in the tax system. Are hon. members across the way talking about eliminating paid child care as a tax deduction? That would surely equalize things. It would create equality as they see it. It would, however, increase the disparity to no end between parents who must go out into the workforce, single income earning or not.
That would be another way to apply the illusion of equality in the system. It is all about illusion; it is all about smoke and mirrors across the way. It is all about pretending to care. It is all about talking about complex issues in a very simplistic manner that will make it worse for families with children.
The Canada pension plan recognizes non-financial contributions to families, as do the child rearing dropout benefits, the maternity and parental benefits, and the divorce law. I suppose hon. members did not even factor them in. They were just looking at one small component of transfers and how families have net incomes. It is not just the income tax system that deals with the income of families. It has to do with benefits, with pension plans and with transfers to individuals. It is very complex.
The divorce laws should be brought into this debate. I want to talk about when a family breaks up and how the children are cared for in the family. In that family there may be still be only one income earning parent who is no longer living in the home. How does that parent ensure there is income in the home for the children. The divorce law looks at that and divides the pensions equally so that the spouses who do not go out to work and look after the children have something in the end when they retire.
It is complex. It has to work in the progression of the life cycles of Canadians. We cannot simplistically look at one spot in the life cycle of Canadians. Any policy affecting unpaid work must be guided by the principles of equity and fairness. It must recognize the different situations of women and men who may be full time homemakers and women and men who work for pay and at the same time provide care to dependants.
I reiterate that in spite of what we hear today from opposition members, Canada is a recognized leader in how we measure and how we value unpaid work. Everyone talks about how Scandinavia has been doing very well, and it has. The Scandinavian countries have done a great deal to look at the issue, but they are not world leaders in looking at the issue of valuing unpaid work. We are. They are getting their information and analytical stuff from us so that they can start looking at how to make good public policy.
Our efforts are ground breaking. They are varied and they will continue. Hon. members across the way may scoff, but they scoff because they are ignorant of the issue. Because they believe women are a special interest group they have never bothered to look at the issue, never even bothered to consider it or analyse it in the great policy analysis they do. Women do not figure in their policy analyses. Let us not forget they do not know so they can scoff: ignorance is bliss and 'tis folly to be wise. I can never accuse hon. members opposite of being too wise.
This is the first time in Canada that we have been looking with the provinces at economic gender indicators. We measured the time spent doing unpaid work whether or not one was in the paid workforce. It was the time spent and the value received. The provinces worked together very closely in that regard. Canada hosted an international symposium on the issue last year. We attended and conducted workshops.
I do not think hon. members opposite have anything new to teach the government. In fact they might learn from us. I would be pleased to give hon. members a briefing any time they wish.