Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the hon. member's honesty in allowing her radical ideology to show. Essentially what she is saying is that the state must intervene to take kids out of the home as early as possible to teach them in a way that parents cannot do themselves. She said that it should be at age three. Why not age two? How early does she want to go?
What I hear in that comment is the shrill ideology of a radical point of view which says that the state and the institutions of the state know better how to educate children than parents themselves. I, and I believe the vast majority of Canadian parents, believe that the first and best school is at home and that the first and best teachers are parents and not the state.
She said that $1,000 was not enough. We proposed a $3,000 tax credit per child per family. For a family with three young children, that would mean $9,000 per year. That is considerable.
However I agree with her on one point. That is not enough. That is why we need to restrain things like this multibillion dollar child care boondoggle, which will simply increase the tax burden on families that are trying to raise their kids at home or who would like to have the choice to do so.
I find it profoundly offensive that the member is anti-choice. She is not willing to allow parents to make the right choices for their families, for their kids and for their values. I believe in parents having the right to choose what is best by their kids. If parents want to pay for out of family day care so they can be raised in the early childhood learning out of home environment that the member loves, then they should have the right to do that. I fully honour and respect that right. However if parents think they can do a better job raising young kids at home, then, by golly, we should give them that choice. It is called freedom.