Mr. Speaker, I was not digging for a compliment, but I appreciate it. I was simply looking to increase the visibility of adoption as an issue in this House.
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today on Bill C-31, our government's budget implementation act, to speak about the importance of the budget that we put forward for Canadians. Obviously, we are focused, as a government, on the economy, creating jobs, growth, and long-term prosperity for all Canadians. We do have the strongest job creation record of any country in the G7, with over a million net new jobs, with over 85% of those being full time and in the private sector. I am proud of our government's record.
We have been able to keep taxes low while we are growing the economy, maintaining or increasing transfers to our provinces on an ongoing basis. That was not the Liberal record back in the 1990s, where the taxes went up and the transfers went down. We have been able to do both and grow the economy.
We have also made difficult decisions. Budgets do not balance themselves. They do take time, especially post-recession. To bring the government's budget back into balance, it takes some tough decisions. We have been making them. We are on track to balance the budget. That is good news for Canadians because ongoing structural deficits, like those they have in Ontario, lead to tomorrow's taxes. We do not want to see that situation. That is bad for the economy. In fact, our tax increases save the average Canadian family about $3,400 a year, and that is very good.
Obviously, we recognize that for economic recovery the outlook remains fragile, when we are looking globally at the G20 and beyond. Growth among these countries continues to be uneven, as it is here in Canada. We must continue to do more. That is why this budget and the implementation act become very important to us.
I do want to highlight a few of the items that I think were really critical, with respect to what the government is doing on its budget, including the significant investments in a new international crossing between Windsor and Detroit. We put $631 million down over the next two years as cash to begin to really accelerate projects to bring that into reality.
We heard recently that the Coast Guard in the United States, only yesterday or the day before, gave the final permit for that bridge to move ahead.
Obviously, we would have a binational authority to oversee the project, which would be populated with important Canadians and Americans, to move that project forward. We look forward to that development.
That initiative, though, would build upon the tremendous record of this government, beginning back in 2006, with the gateways and border crossings fund, with a significant down payment in 2007 on what is now the Rt. Hon. Herb Gray Parkway. That was a $400-million down payment. There were investments to begin purchasing land on the Canadian side of the border for a plaza, a customs inspection plaza, connecting to that Rt. Hon. Herb Gray Parkway. There was the Bridge to Strengthen Trade Act, which came in a prior budget in this House, to insulate the DRIC from further lawsuit on the Canadian side. We have done our best to move that forward. This will be a P3 project that would be very significant for our region, not only in terms of construction jobs when it comes, but for the long-term business investment that Windsor-Essex county needs, not only for the auto industry, but for every other industry in the region to continue.
That was also fulfilling an important component of our national auto strategy that we announced in 2008.
Both Bill C-31 and our budget, also, would take important next steps with respect to the Regulatory Cooperation Council and our beyond the border action plan, another part of our auto action plan strategy in 2008, where we could see greater harmonization of standards particularly important for the auto industry, where they now produce a North American car, so to speak, instead of cars for various balkanized regulations across North America. That is important, in terms of the productivity and the forward-looking projections for that industry. This is an important component that we had to have, and we would make further progress on that in Bill C-31.
Our budget also included significant investments for rural broadband. I know that, just since the announcement, our Essex County Council has already been working hard to update its strategy for not only extending broadband to its last remaining regions but for upgrading the speed on that.
There is nothing more important, in my humble estimation, if I want to speak to an issue of real passion for me in Bill C-31, than the adoption expenses tax credit.
In 2008, I brought forward Motion No. 386. It was calling for a study at the human resources committee, where we would take a look at the supports that were available on the federal side for adoptive parents and adopted children. That laid the groundwork, with its ultimate hearings and report, and a solid foundation for us to begin to look at it in a systematic way, to see what we can do from the federal side to improve adoption outcomes across Canada.
Anybody who has been paying attention to the adoption issue will know there are some important things that need to be done. One is baselining the actual number of children we have and what forms of temporary care they are in across Canada. The provincial and territorial systems report very differently on these matters, but we know that there is an emerging crisis in child welfare across the country, if we look cumulatively at what is happening.
From that, we know that there are an estimated 30,000 Canadian children who are at the stage where they are ready for adoption permanence, but there is no plan for adoption permanence for them.
When we looked further, in our study, we looked at areas where maybe the federal government could help. One of those is financial supports. The process for adoption, unless one goes through a public agency, can be very expensive.
I remember my interventions with then-minister Jim Flaherty in pre-budget consultations for budget 2013. He asked what we could do, and I suggested that the first thing we needed to do was expand the eligible criteria to more accurately reflect the range of costs that parents would face if they were choosing adoption.
Prior to that, the adoption expenses tax credit only covered the post-placement costs, those costs that are incurred once a child is placed and going forward. We note, for those who have to incur a home study, for example, that they can be very costly. In Ontario, people have to undergo what is called “PRIDE training”, important courses to understand the types of transitions that parents and children are going to go through in the situation of an adoption or a foster-to-adopt. Those can be very expensive as well.
That was the first thing we did with economic action plan 2013. Our government, to its credit, knew that there was more to be done. It did make a commitment in the last throne speech that it would do more to help with respect to adoption. That is why, in our economic action plan 2014, we would raise the adoption expenses tax credit from just a little over $11,700, where it has currently risen by way of index. Now we would raise that to $15,000, and it would remain indexed over time, as well.
That would apply to adoptions that are finalized, beginning in 2014 and going forward. That should be encouraging news. We do know that the cost of adoption is one of the two major financial obstacles.
The other, of course, is the environment that happens in the provincial and territorial systems, which we cannot touch from the federal side, and that is the process of adoption and how the child welfare systems work. I certainly would hope that at some point the Council of the Federation will speak of this issue in a structural, ongoing way that they need to have more adoption outcomes as a result of their system.
Currently, they only conclude cumulatively about 2,000 domestic adoptions a year. Meanwhile children are continuing to go in the front end in alarming numbers in crisis intervention, so they would do well to encourage themselves to target an increase in the number of adoptions that they finalize over time, and to monitor their improvement over time, as well. I certainly hope they do that.
These are some of the aspects I spoke of last spring in my national adoption action plan in this House. There is so much to do on this particular issue, and I am proud to say that our government is doing its particular part. Those financial obstacles are a very fundamental key, one of the two keys that parents will face in a decision about whether to adopt.
The more we can bring that a lot closer to affordability for them, the more chance that these children are going to get into permanent, loving, adoptive families. It is critical they do. What we know from kids who age out of the system is that they are more likely to end up in poverty, more likely to end up homeless, more likely to have poorer educational outcomes and poorer relational outcomes over time, including intergenerationally. We know that they are more likely to end up either in the mental health stream or the criminal justice stream. Society is paying for this on the back end. We are looking at ways, obviously, over here where we can pay a little bit on the front end to help get them into situations that are a whole lot better.
I think that is worthy, and I think it is something all members of this House can support.