Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak to this motion today and to offer my party's support for it.
We in the NDP are committed to tax reform that is both fair and progressive. It certainly goes to the root of our party's philosophy and vision.
We have been long time advocates of tax policies designed to ease the stress on families and children just as we have been vocal opponents of policies which discriminate against middle and low income Canadians and which benefit corporate interests and the wealthy.
New Democrats have also been aggressive in our support of children, whether as leaders in the movement to end child poverty or fighting for a child tax benefit that does not discriminate against the poorest of the poor or erodes over time because of deindexation.
We also fully support, for example, the ideas that families where one parent chooses to work to raise their children should not be penalized financially for that choice.
That is why we advocate extending the child care expense tax deduction to all parents, not just those who work away from the home.
We support that measure because it acknowledges that family friendly policies, progressive and fair policies, are policies that focus on children and not necessarily on the working status of their parents. That is also why we support progress indicators that are not only focused on the fiscal bottom line.
Current measures of well-being focused solely on GDP ratios do not recognize the important value of unpaid work to society as a whole.
By measuring the value of unpaid household work, genuine progress indicators like the GPI index championed in Nova Scotia remedy this flaw. Measures like this one allow us more accurate estimates of our actual growth as a society and should have a direct impact on social policy and on assessments of our quality of life and our overall progress as a society.
While the Liberal and Reform parties debate in the House who has it better, parents who work in the home or parents who work outside the home, the truth of it is that we are really missing the point. The truth gets lost in the platitudes. Even this motion, which has good points, misses the bigger picture. The truth is that all Canadian families and kids are under stress. This government often with the support of the Reform Party has done more to increase the load than to ease the burden.
There are many reasons for this. For example, incomes are dropping while time spent on the job is increasing. According to the recent growing gap report the annual income of the least well off 90% of families fell in real terms between 1992 and 1997, most dramatically for the bottom 30% who depend heavily on social programs and suffer most because of unemployment, while only the top 10% of families saw a significant increase in income, up $5,000 to $138,000.
Billions of dollars have been cut from social spending since the Liberals came to power and increased targeting of programs has meant that some children are deemed more worthy than others. We only have to look at affordable day care and decent day care options to know that this is more and more difficult to find. Affordable quality child care would ensure that children of parents who work outside the home are given the necessary early education and care despite their parents' incomes. High quality care and early childhood education are critical components of an integrated strategy to meet the needs of families but unfortunately the government has chosen to renege on its promises and it is the children who feel the impact.
We also know that the tax burden for low and middle income families has also been on the rise. Instead of increasing tax credits in the last budget for lower and middle income Canadians who have been badly hit by cuts to social assistance and UI and the growth of insecure jobs, the finance minister chose to deliver significant tax relief to high income earners.
Most important, families are under stress and Canadian kids are suffering because too many government policies and policies the Reform Party advocate are too narrowly targeted to favour some families over others. Even Tom Kent, a former Lester Pearson adviser and one of the architects of Canada's social infrastructure, blasted the finance minister last week for failing to better the situation for all Canadian families.
What has been the result of all this targeting and discrimination that has been designed by public policy into the system? What has been the result of reducing everything to the fiscal bottom line? The investment that parents make when they raise their kids seems to be treated like any other expense and kids become treated like any other commodity, like a company car or a business lunch. That was not always the case.
As a society we did not always favour one child over another because of how parents spend their days. We did not always say that kids on social assistance did not deserve the same consideration as kids whose parents were among the growing ranks of the working poor. We used to have a system tied to universality where there was a basic understanding within governments, within public policy, that the responsibility for raising children was seen as a collective and a community responsibility as well as a responsibility for parents.
We recognized that the well-being of children has a direct impact on the well-being of all of us. We used to have a family allowance for example that was universally accessible and was tied to support for children, not the working status of parents. Instead what we are left with in the nineties is a child tax benefit system that actually discriminates against the poorest in society because it was designed, not by accident, not to apply to families on welfare.
People on welfare do not qualify for the child tax benefit. While the funds will initially be distributed to every child below a specified income level, provincial governments will deduct that amount from current welfare payments. That means that most welfare poor children have gained absolutely nothing from this plan. It is a system like so many others that is structured more to reduce welfare rolls and subsidize low wage jobs than to combat poverty and help children.
Rather than alleviating the poverty of the working poor and the non-working poor, the benefit is designed to push poor women to leave welfare and it does not recognize the value of the work parents do in the home. Most jurisdictions now have rules forcing single parents on welfare to look for work once their youngest child has reached a certain age. Those ages can range anywhere from 6 months to 12 years. This age is actually going down as some provinces become harsher with people on welfare.
As a result, single parents on welfare are forced to take low paying jobs even when it is not in their best family interest and not in the interest of their children. The result is the percentage of children in low income families has increased from 15.3% in 1989, one in seven children, to a staggering 21% in 1995, one in five children. Since 1989 the number of low income children has increased by close to half a million or by 45%.
Like the policies this motion refers to, the child tax benefit is discriminatory. It discriminates against the poor and it discriminates against an increasing number of children who live in poverty in this country.
Women who have children are also subject to further discrimination with maternity benefits. They receive only a percentage of their salary for the time they take off with their children, making the economic liability of child rearing that much heavier to handle. Like any worker, if they do not meet the stringent demands for hours worked they get nothing.
My colleague for Acadie—Bathurst has advocated eliminating the new entrant requirement for workers who have left the labour force to care for children or family members as a first step in providing fairer coverage for women. Once again it is a policy that discriminates against some families while favouring others but in the process does a disservice to all children.
What we need is a much broader approach than the one advocated by this motion. We need to make children the centre of family friendly policies that benefit all families in all their derivatives, be they dual income, single income, lone parent or extended low income or middle class. We need a plan that recognizes the importance of all parents, all families, all children, not just some.
We support this motion because it does deal with one aspect of discrimination but we must go further. We in the NDP will continue to advocate for a broader approach hinged on equity and fairness in our tax structure. We will continue to fight for plans that do not discriminate some families over others because they are poor or on social assistance. We will continue to advocate an approach that recognizes that it is children who are important, not just the working status of their parents. We will continue to champion the fact that child rearing is a responsibility all society must share in.