Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand in the House and defend our opposition day motion that opposes the government's regressive proposal to bring in income splitting, a proposal that will not benefit the vast majority of Canadians, a proposal that will help turn the clock back on women's equality in our country.
Canadians need a break financially. My constituents tell me this often. They work hard and they try their very best, but at the end of the month they still struggle to pay their bills, or afford adequate child care, or afford the rent and sometimes to put food on the table and clothes on their kids' backs. The bottom line is that we must do more to make life more affordable.
The median income in my riding is $45,961. That means half of the people in my riding in Northern Manitoba earn more than that and half earn less.
I represent many people who live in poverty and people who live in communities with chronic and historic unemployment.
The reality is that the Conservative income splitting scheme will not put even $1 back into the pockets of most of the people who I represent. In fact, 62% of Manitobans will not benefit from income splitting one bit.
Income splitting would not be a gift from the Conservative government to taxpayers. It would be a gift to their wealthy friends. It would cost Canadians billions of dollars to implement the income splitting plan and every Canadian would be paying for it while the same could not be said about the benefits. The question that New Democrats are asking is, how is this possibly fair?
The New Democrats know that we can build a robust economy that will bring shared prosperity to all Canadians. Income splitting reveals, yet again, that the Conservatives only want to give tax breaks to their wealthiest of friends.
As the critic for status of women and as the member of Parliament for Churchill, I would call the Conservative income splitting plan nothing more than a smoke screen. It would not help lower income families, single parents or the majority of first nations and Métis people across our country. Not only would it not help the majority of women, it would have the potential to damage gender equality in our country.
I will discuss the many ways that income splitting has the potential to hurt the status of women in our country.
First, income splitting would not help single parents or single people. We know that many single parents, particularly many who live in poverty, are women. In some ways, income splitting would reward married people and punish single people, divorced couples, lone parent families and intergenerational families, meaning families that raise their children with the help of grandparents and other relatives.
In my experience in my visits across my constituency, I meet many kinds of loving, supportive families. The last thing that non-nuclear families need is the federal government promoting a thinly veiled moral bias against them in the form of bad policy and regressive taxes.
This tax break effectively tells people that only if they are married and only if they are in a marriage where one spouse earns considerably less than the other, do they deserve a tax break.
Many days in the House we wonder, given the policies put forward by the government, if we are going back to the 1950s or the 1850s. In the case of the income splitting proposal, the Conservative government is putting forward the classic vision of the 1950s family, one that might be modelled on June and Ward Cleaver. Earlier in the House I heard talk of Don Draper.
The reality is that Canadians have moved on from the 1950s. It is 2014. The reality of the Canadian family is not that of the 1950s. We should be looking at what we need to do to support today's Canadian families rather than imposing a moralistic view of how the government sees families now.
Furthermore, 88% of lone-parent families are headed by women, and women, on average, earn 19% less than men, so when we talk about who benefits from income splitting, we are not only talking about wealthy people, we are often talking about men who are wealthy.
As I mentioned, income splitting will cost the Canadian public $3 billion each year and will deliver no benefit whatsoever to 85% of Canadians. This is a kind of reverse taxation system, where the large majority will pay their taxes into the pockets of the wealthy minority. As well, it would cost our provinces a further $1.9 billion every year.
I have one major question for the government. What else could we possibly be spending that money on? For starters, there could be a national child care strategy that would see every child in Canada receive high-quality, affordable care that could be established for a fraction of what the government wants to spend on income splitting. A truly national early learning program would cost $5 billion over four years.
Child care is currently costing the average family between $900 and $1,200 a month, a debilitating cost that too many Canadian families in this day and age cannot afford.
Let us think of what it would be like to put most of that money into the pockets of Canadian families. Let us think of what it would mean for women to truly have the choice to continue their careers and care for their children as they saw fit, without economic duress being a contributing factor.
I raise this example, because income splitting is not a take it or leave it program. With its price tag, it is either/or. We could either have our government spend our money on income splitting for the wealthiest, or we could have a national child care program, university tuition subsidies, a national housing strategy, or increased health transfers. Indeed, for the price of income splitting, we could have a bit of all of these things, and each one of these factors would contribute vastly to people's individual finances, their family's well-being, and the strength of our economy as a whole.
We know that increasing women's equal participation in the labour force has a multiplier effect on the economy that would increase our GDP by billions of dollars. Child care is not only the right thing to do to give parents choices but is the economically smart thing to do for our communities and our country.
Income splitting would hurt the status of women in other ways the Conservatives do not want us to know about. When higher income earners, mostly men, transfer a larger portion of income to a spouse, it makes it look as if the lower-income person is actually earning more than they are. Statistically, as I noted earlier, in Canada, due to the gender wage gap, this would likely be the female spouse. Income splitting would work to artificially inflate a woman's income. This would give us a false sense of data. We would lose sight of the persistent challenge women have in this country: earning equal wages. It would get even worse. When a couple broke up, it would seem as though one spouse earned more than they did throughout the partnership. This could have an effect on how much alimony or child support they would earn and could also have an effect on their child tax benefit once they were single. I can see this placing thousands of women in financially precarious situations, brought to them entirely by the government's plan for income splitting.
For these reasons and more, I am proud to stand alongside my New Democrat colleagues in opposition to the government's plan for income splitting. We want our taxes to work toward the collective good and for the health and prosperity of all Canadians.
Conservatives, it is clear, want a system that benefits the few, not the many, and I believe that Canadians understand fundamentally how unfair that is.