Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan.
I thank the opposition parties for supporting our motion and also for the qualified support of some members on the government side. I know this is an important issue to many members.
I also want to salute the work of my colleague for Calgary Centre who has done an outstanding job in supporting families and bringing light to this issue. It is an extraordinarily important issue for people across the country. It has not had the light that it deserves.
In a quick rebuttal to my colleague from Broadview—Greenwood, many people who have come before the finance committee over the last several years have pointed to this issue. They have said it is a problem. The Reform Party has pointed that out in minority reports. Sadly, it is never reflected when budget time comes around.
The whole reason this debate is happening today is because the Reform Party made this an issue. We made it an issue, partly in response to comments that came from some government members in the last week, but really because we believe that this issue simply has not had the scrutiny over the last several years that it deserves.
We underline the tremendous value of parenting in Canada today. Reformers believe that the family really is the basic social unit in society and that we need to find ways to support that unit if we want to have a strong civil society in Canada. Whether it is a one parent family, a two parent family, a dual income family or a single income family, we have to find ways to support those families. In doing that we end up supporting children and ensuring that they have a healthy environment in which to grow.
Reformers believe that there is probably no more important job in the world than being a parent. I have done a lot of hard things in my life. I have had to get up at four in the morning to go to work. I have had to hire people and let people go and do a lot of tough things, but I can say, and I think a lot of parents would bear this out, that the hardest job in the world is being a parent. A parent has to know and try so many things. They have to be a teacher, a health care provider, a bit of an amateur philosopher, a psychologist, a social worker and the family historian. A parent has to do a million different things and there are no guidebooks. It is extraordinarily difficult and it has always been so.
Today I would argue that it is even more pronounced because people have to work so extraordinarily hard just to get by. There are all kinds of polls saying that families are completely stressed out. Both parents work today, oftentimes not because they want to but because they have to. One parent has to work just to pay the taxes because in Canada we punish our citizens through our tax system. Our taxes are extraordinarily high. They have to come down. That would help not only single income families, it would help dual income families as well as individuals.
I had a young woman phone me today at my office. She and her husband are both in the paid workforce. She said “Monte, please make the point that when we go to work we would like to have a better quality of family life as well, and the way to do that is to find some creative ways to allow us to spend a bit more time at home, maybe work from home”. She said that if they were not taxed so heavily maybe they could work at home. They would not have to put in as many hours, but they would still have roughly the same amount of money because the taxes would be lower.
She pointed out that some companies in Canada are doing things to help people because they recognize that in a lot of cases women with extraordinary skills are being forced out of the workforce because they want to spend more time with their families. In a lot of cases it is women, but not in all cases.
There was an article in Maclean's recently about the Royal Bank allowing flex time for its employees and Deloitte & Touche doing the same thing so that they could accommodate the needs of the people who want to stay at home with their families and at the same time keep their expertise.
I believe that the government has an obligation to do that. Maybe it could do that in its negotiations with the public service. Maybe there are ways to do that for its employees.
A way to help everyone in Canada would be to start cutting taxes of all kinds. The debate has been a little limited today, but we need to cut taxes for dual income families. We need to cut taxes for individuals and, of course, for single income families.
The way this debate arose today, the catalyst for it, were the remarks that came from the junior minister of finance earlier this week. Maybe unintentionally, he disparaged the work of parents who stay at home with their children. He somehow suggested that they really do not provide a great service. I would argue that they provide the most valuable service that can possibly be provided. To raise and nurture children is extraordinarily important. Any parent or anyone who has been raised in a family who reflects back on what it was like for their parents understands how difficult a job it really is.
What do we do about this? The first thing we have to do is change the attitude that we are seeing from the government. The minister apologized and I appreciate that, but the minister is not the only one.
We heard from members of the finance committee last fall in Calgary. The member for St. Paul's chastised groups who came forward to argue for fairer treatment in the tax system for families. She chastised them, saying they were a bunch of elite white women telling us what to do. She dressed them down.
The member for Vancouver Kingsway said “Being a single mother, I do not quite see. Most people can combine career and family life. We know it is very difficult. A lot of times people just take the easy way out”.
Going home to be with family and to raise children is not the easy way out. It is the hard way. It is a tremendous sacrifice to forgo an income to spend time with sick children and to help children get through the difficult times in their lives. That is not the easy way out. It is extraordinarily difficult.
Anyone who is a parent will know that if there is something wrong at home nothing else in the world really matters. When someone is at work and the children are sick or they are struggling in school, whatever the problem, nothing else matters.
I say it is a great sacrifice to stay at home to be with the children. I honour those people who make that decision. Whether it is the male in the relationship or the female, it is a great sacrifice.
Let us first change the attitude on the other side. The second thing we have to change is the system. In last year's budget the government actually made worse the discrimination against single income families in the tax system. My friend opposite who has done a lot of work on the family issue must acknowledge that.
The government increased the child care deduction, but that only applies to people who make the choice to look after their children in day care. If they choose to do that, that is fine. But we are saying, let us give people the choice. If they choose to use someone else, maybe a relative to look after their children, or if they choose to look after their children themselves, they should be treated equitably.
Why is this government making an ideological value judgment that day care is the best way to go? Let parents make that choice. Parents know what is best for their families. Let us leave it in their hands. Let us give them that choice. I think that is extraordinarily important.
Too often we see the government, the nanny state, saying “We think it should be done this way, or that way”. We reject that. Leave the money in the pockets of parents and they will make the best choices. No one cares more about their families than they do; not the government, not the heritage minister, the finance minister or anyone else in government.
We encourage the government to pay serious attention to the motion which simply asks for an end to discrimination in the tax system against single income parents with children. It is not a motion that covers all eventualities, as my friend across the way has pointed out, but it goes a long way to dealing with a bone of contention, something that is very important to many people in Canada today.
I encourage my friends across the way to consider this carefully and to do what is right for Canadian families.