Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak to Bill C-22. It is certainly a complex bill. Thousands of people in Canada, and a good many in my constituency, fall into the situation that I am about to describe in terms of exemptions and qualifications.
I refer to what happens to a young father who finds himself in a divorce situation. I draw the attention of the House to two such cases as they relate directly to the exemptions in the Income Tax Act. Dan and Valerie were married for 12 years. I do not know what led up to the divorce but they went through a divorce. The responsibility, and rightly so, is for Dan to support the children.
I will not accept for a moment, as is generally thought across Canada, that all these men are deadbeat dads. Dan agreed to pay his wife $1,000 a month for the upkeep of his children. At the end of the year that upkeep costs him $1,200 a month. Aside from the cost of the divorce and the loss of his house, he does not get to claim that $1,200 as an exemption. His wife does not have to claim it as income and receives a tax credit. That is wrong. No matter which way the cake is cut, it is wrong.
I have other examples on file. We do not know why suicides come about, but all these dads are not deadbeats. Many of them work overtime to make ends meet, only to have to pay more money. They are finding it more difficult to pay up each month. They want to carry on their responsibilities, but the situation is getting worse.
The last example I have on file is a shocker. John married a girl by the name of Janet and she had one child from her previous marriage. He accepted that child and together they had two more children. That union divorced and, believe it or not, Janet married her former husband. The oldest child from the former husband then went back to the original parents. John was ordered by the court to pay support for three children, even though the one child he assumed from the previous marriage was back with the original parents.
I could go on and on. All kinds of people have written to me from across Canada. In many cases there is no fight between the former wife and husband, but in many cases these young men simply cannot make it. What I am saying is that the monthly support payment should be an absolute deduction.
We seem to say at the present time that all divorces are the fault of the men. There is no question about that. One only has to look at the tax laws and the exemption entitlements. Hundreds of young men under 40 escape by running away, by taking on new names, and some by committing suicide. We sit here and allow it go on year in and year out. No one has the stamina and the courage to say that it is wrong. If members ever talk to some of these young people, they should talk to a man of 38 years of age who lost his professional job through no fault of his own. Watch the tears roll down his face because he cannot meet those obligations, and he was never credited for it as a tax deduction in all those years.
I say to the House and I say to all Canadians, it is time we faced up to this. It is time that we said no, that not everyone is a deadbeat dad. If we look at the statistics most of them are not.
I have dealt with many cases individually where men have had to suffer extreme hardships in order to meet the requirements of the courts. Then the income tax comes, they make a huge payment and have no deductions whatsoever. Their income tax is deducted at source because they are once again a single parent.
I wish that somehow the finance committee could sit down with the other departments involved in this to bring this atrocity to an end, to bring some fairness to the situation and to bring some fairness to what happens with a court ruling. Maybe they will. However if they do not, there will be more and more young men who will mysteriously disappear from the landscape and we will not know the reason for their deaths.