Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this bill, which introduces adoption expense deductions.
I am surprised at the argument from the Liberal member across that categorizes this as a personal expense. I think adoption is probably one of the most impersonal expenses anybody can put forth. People will be adopting a child of parents whom they do not know. They will not know the child and they will not know if the child is going to be troubled. If it is an international adoption the child could have been denied love, stimulation and care. They will be facing the problems of integrating that child into their home and their community. They could be adopting a child that has fetal alcohol syndrome or other problems as a result of the parents' actions. So it is an incredibly impersonal expense that a family makes when they decide to adopt. We are talking about families and the incredible struggle they go through to adopt.
I have seen some of my friends go through five years of trying to adopt. What they submit themselves to, no biological parent has to. They have to do a home study in which they are asked the most personal, intimate questions one could ever imagine. No one would even want to answer them, but they have to answer them because they want to adopt a child.
They need letters of reference so they have to go to different people of good standing in the community and ask if they would consider them to be good parents and then get them to write letters for them. They need psychological assessments which at a minimum are probably about $90 an hour. Their religious standards are scrutinized. Their income is scrutinized. Their age, are they too young or too old. Their health, are they healthy and what their family history is when it comes to mental health. I was certainly never asked those questions when I was young and having children. I have four children.
My big expense of having children was to buy a crib that lasted for all four of them. If I had to pay out $20,000 or $10,000 or even $1,000 per child at that age, I certainly could not have done it. However, we are expecting these people, who will be making a contribution to our community and who will be raising other people's children as their own, to do so without any kind of break.
I am again really disappointed at the Liberal approach of categorizing adoptive parents' desire to have children as a personal expense. It is shocking and hurtful to anybody who is willing to go through the expense and the gruelling ordeal of adopting a child.
As has already been mentioned, there are public and private adoptions in this country but they both involve huge expenses. As I have said, the family has emotional expenses as well as financial expenses to go through. I do not think we should promote this bill just because it would save the government money. I think we should support it because it is the right thing to do. We should support it because it would support families and it would be a good addition to any children's agenda.
If we are going to put forward something seriously it is critical that we recognize parents who are willing to adopt. Not everybody is capable of adopting or of seeing those children through all the years of adoption. It is not always easy. These families are different.
I was just talking to a woman today who has adopted three children. It was an international adoption. It is difficult for families to adopt a child who may come from a wartorn country and has been traumatized. Adopting families do not know the child's history or what life holds for them. I do not have to face those questions with my children but we are not willing to give people who adopt children from anywhere, who look after them, love them, care for them and do all the things that we would do for our own children, a leg up or a boost, even in this small way of recognizing the initial financial costs of an adoption.
In a lot of ways we can not ameliorate or lessen the psychological and emotional impact an adoption has on people. It is a gruelling test of their character. Anyone who does adopt should be applauded rather than penalized.
This is a private member's bill that is worthy of support by all MPs in the House. They should stand and say “Yes, we will support you in every way we can because your struggles are different than ours”. It would be another addition to our criteria as a family and there is just no way that what they do could ever be considered as just a self-serving personal expense because it is not self-serving. They have been serving other people for decades by including adoptive children in their families.