Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to rise on Bill C-246, proposed by my colleague from my part of the world, the hon. member for Prince George--Peace River.
I certainly share his sentiment. He wants a tax policy that would help Canadian families adopt children and which would recognize some of the big expenses incurred.
I come from a family of 12 children. We get together quite often. Every five years we have a huge reunion of several hundred people. It is a great time. My wife and I have four children and nine grandchildren. We have family events which we enjoy. In fact we were skiing last weekend at our little cabin. Something like 30 people were there and it was wonderful.
Some people cannot have a family because they have difficulty conceiving. The extra expenses involved in adopting children should be recognized. We want people to share the same joy in having a family that the rest of us do.
Many people adopt children even if they have their own. People do it for all kinds of reasons, for example, to help a child from a third world country who would not have the opportunity that the child would have here in Canada. I know couples who have gone to Russia and Kazakhstan to do exactly that and have incurred significant expenses.
We have to recognize that we want to share the joy of families with other members of society who are unable to have children. Because of the huge expenses involved in adoption, the bill put forward by my colleague today is an excellent piece of legislation. It recognizes that the family is the cornerstone of society, whether the children have come into the family through adoption or real birth. We need to encourage people to have children and to adopt them if necessary.
Canada's demographics are changing, which is something that no one has talked about yet. With our aging population, 20 years from now there will be a huge problem. There will not be very many people to pay the bills. A lot of people will be retired. People are living longer and the birth rate is continuing to decline. The replacement for a couple right now is 1.2.
If it were not for immigration right now, Canada would be sliding backward. Unfortunately it will only get worse according to the projections for the next 20 years. Immigration will play a bigger part, which we welcome, but we will be competing for immigration. In western Europe the birth rate is even lower than it is in Canada. Countries there will be competing as well.
Why would we want restrictive policies that would discourage people from adopting, especially adopting outside the country where the expenses are the highest? I simply do not see it.
The parliamentary secretary said that we should not discriminate but in fact we discriminate already. The government's policies on taxation for families does exactly that. Single income families have an advantage over dual income families. In many cases one parent would like to stay at home and raise the children but the family may not have that option because both parents need to work. However, if two people are working in the family, they pay higher taxes than a single income earner. That should be corrected. It is a serious error which discourages families.
I am very much in support of my hon. friend's bill. He is suggesting that we recognize this important principle in law and give fair tax treatment to what people can write off for these adoption costs.
I know of one family where the parents have one child of their own and they recently adopted a child in Ukraine. They had to make a couple of trips to Ukraine. They had to stay there for quite a while as things do not work quite the same way that they do in Canada where procedures can be followed very carefully. When they went to Ukraine, they found that a lot of what they thought was in place in terms of rules and regulations were off the rails, so they had to start all over again. They had to incur extra expenses. The expenses can easily be in the $40,000 to $50,000 range. It finally resulted in their getting clearance to bring their daughter home.
Their daughter is a wonderful little child. She has been given an opportunity that she certainly would not have had otherwise. Some of the orphanages in the eastern bloc countries are in a deplorable condition. It has taken this poor little girl quite a while to adjust. I can just imagine what she went through in her life until she was two years old. Whether it will be a proven impact or not, I do not know, but I do know that she has loving parents who want her. They are giving her an opportunity that she probably would not have had otherwise.
My colleague also talked about foster parents and the fact that there are a lot of children that do not get the opportunity to be adopted even here in Canada. I think he talked about 20,000 people or so that go through the foster parent system. I have a serious problem with that in that if there are people who would like to adopt those children but feel that they cannot because of the economics of it, the deduction would really help. Again it would provide a badly needed opportunity to children in the foster care system.
In many cases the children that go through foster parent homes end up in institutions like our jails. It is really sad. They feel unwanted and that becomes part of the reason that they rebel. I suggest there are a lot higher costs involved with that result than there would be with the $7,000 deduction my friend is talking about in order to write off adoption expenses.
Let us adopt a family friendly policy. After all, the family is the cornerstone of our society.
My sister and her husband adopted a child many years ago and that child now has children of his own. They celebrate together. They are all one family. I know the rewards that they have reaped. My sister and her husband had three children afterward, but I have seen the rewards that they have reaped from having adopted their child.
The children are all the same. In fact, my children went to the same high school as my sister's and her husband's children, but they had not gone to the same school before that. We were in a parent-teacher interview one day when our oldest child was in high school and one of the teachers said, “Can I ever see that your daughter is Stephen's cousin. They are exactly the same”. This was the adopted son of my sister.
Maybe it does work out that we become what our families are in mannerisms and many other ways, but that is the kind of fit we see in families with adopted children. In many cases they fit in perfectly and are wanted. This makes perfect sense.
The government and the parliamentary secretary talk about the need to make sure that we do not discriminate. We could start, as my colleague from Prince George—Peace River said, with this family friendly policy and see where it leads from there. I suggest that it also needs to pertain to the dual income family versus the single income family. That would be a big help as well. There are policies that are needed. Let us start with this one and see where it goes.
I am in full support of Bill C-246 and I hope it comes to fruition.