Mr. Speaker, in a book I once penned supporting a private member's bill, I tried to define what I would suggest was real love. I defined real love in the book as a situation where one puts the interests of the other ahead of one's own.
We have to presume that parents have real love for their children and that they will put the interests of their children ahead of their own interests. In some cases that may mean for a family that a parent will give up on that paycheque and stay at home because the parent wants to be with that child and the parent will decide when that child is ready to go into some third party care arrangement.
It may also be that the parent has to get the child into a third party day care arrangement because the parent is not a good parent. The parent does not have a good home for the child to be stimulated properly. The parent could be distracted totally with everything else in his or her life and maybe real love would be demonstrated by putting the child into child care immediately.
Those are the extremes and we have everything else in between, so it is a truism that one solution will not fit all.
We have heard a lot today from the members who have participated in the debate about the mechanics, about the $1,200, that it is universal, and why will the government not be transparent and say it is not really $1,200 because concurrently with introducing this, the government is also proposing to eliminate the young child supplement under the Canada child tax benefit. That is $249, so all of a sudden $1,200 a year is less than that for those who qualify for that benefit. On top of that, it is taxable, in the hands admittedly of the lower income earning spouse of the family, if there are two parents in the household.
The Caledon Institute basically found that the lowest income Canadians would get the least benefit because the tax shelter of their personal exemption, which they would transfer to the earning spouse, would be reduced by the amount of $1,200 and they would lose the young child supplement. They would also get a lower GST credit.
Cumulatively, it sounds peculiar that low income earners would lose more than the high income earners, but when we think of somebody making $200,000 getting the $1,200 for a non-working spouse, all it does is marginally reduce the transfer of the personal exemption by $600 and the tax on that is about $150. In fact, someone making $200,000 with no income for the other spouse will actually get $1,100, according to the Caledon Institute. I have checked the numbers.
This should not be about numbers. Every government has choices to make. This was a political strategy simply to attract votes and the Conservative Party made that choice.
The other aspect was the tax credit that will be offered to businesses, some $10,000 a year. In the first year we are talking about $250 million to create 25,000 spaces. There are some problems because non-profit organizations cannot use a tax credit. How do we have a not for profit child care arrangement that will also benefit and create spaces? The $1,200 per year for each child under six will not create a child care space. The spaces the government is referring to are coming as a consequence of the tax credit, so there are people who have been left out.
On top of that, if companies take up the option of having the tax credit of $10,000, they may say that they will incorporate it into their current buildings. Maybe they have a few spare rooms and they can do a little something with them, paint them and put up a few pictures, maybe make some places for the kids to sit and play. This is not early learning child care. It is not regulated child care.
In fact, there are no provisos at all for there to be any rules or regulations guiding this operation. What it really means is that it is babysitting. It is absolutely going to be babysitting. We should be concerned about that as legislators.
Members will recall that the OECD, in doing a major study of day care around the world commented on Canada's situation, with some exclusions relative to the Quebec situation. Canada's day care facilities as they exist were characterized as glorified babysitting.
I believe it was the parliamentary secretary who said that he had never been to a day care, that they did not have to consult with them about what they wanted, that it did not matter. When we consider the needs of children, we also have to consider how this fits into the whole scheme of things. I must admit this unregulated situation is not dealing with the fact that today's child care, as the OECD says, is glorified babysitting and is not even early learning and development. Kids are not in stimulative care.
Many years ago there was a study called the Perry Preschool Project. They went into a black ghetto in the United States, an area where the outcome of those children was terrible under any criteria. They picked some kids and put them in a group. High powered, well trained child psychologists and behaviouralists worked with them for years. They followed these kids through their development and found that lo and behold, the kids performed much better than the kids from the ghetto who were not in the program. Well, duh, go figure.
That is where the statement about a $7 benefit for every $1 investment came from. We have to take the most bizarre and extreme case in the worst case and compare it to what can be done when dealing with a totally losing situation.
These arguments can be used to spin this early childhood learning any way we want it, so I do not want to play that game.
I do want to make reference to Dr. Fraser Mustard. The first week I was on Parliament Hill I had an opportunity to sit down and talk with Dr. Mustard. He has been before various parliamentary committees and has talked to many members of Parliament about the importance of the wiring of the brain.
Bonding with a child begins before birth. The fetus hears the mother's heartbeat, the words, the sounds of the family members. It hears the singing and all of the movements and the patterning. What we are doing in fact is patterning the brain. There are these things called synapses. As the stimulation and input to the child happens, the brain begins to get wired in response to these inputs. That continues on during the first year of life, which is the most accelerated period. Dr. Mustard calls the period up to age one as dynamite. That is where it happens in terms of wiring the brain.
My interest would not be so much where I could find an early childhood learning program. All I know is that the experts have said that a secure, consistent attachment to an engaged, committed adult is the best scenario for a newborn child. It has that consistency of involvement with someone. A mother could do it, but another person could also do it. It does not say parent. It says an adult, someone who can provide that consistency.
There is a lot of information about raising children. Parents do have to make choices. The $1,200 puts money into pockets but there is going to be a price to pay when those people file their income tax returns, because it is a taxable benefit and because lower income Canadians are going to have a loss of other benefits and will have to pay tax on it. For instance, someone making $40,000 a year will be faced with a tax bill of about $700 when filing a tax return. The example was given that a person will spend the $1,200 by investing in an RESP. I hope that the person does not invest the pre-tax amount because a lot of that money is going to have to go back to the government simply because it is taxable.
This is an issue of transparency of all the facts, of all the details. Without transparency there is no accountability. The proposals that the government has made in fact do not meet the test of transparency or accountability.