Mr. Speaker, I was listening to the debate. My wife and I will be attending a couple of weddings in the next couple of weeks. We attended weddings over the summer, as I am sure many members present and many Canadians watching did. As we are talking about amendments to the Divorce Act, running through everyone's mind are weddings that they have recently attended or perhaps a wedding of their children or of a niece or a nephew. Many of us at our stage in life are going through this. It seems they come in batches.
I was struck by the fact that maybe we are closing the barn door after the horse has already escaped. Perhaps we should be discussing a new marriage act. Perhaps, as many of us have said to others or to ourselves in admonition, it should be a whole heck of a lot harder to get married. Perhaps we are putting our emphasis in the wrong place.
As we look at our society, as other speakers before me have very rightly pointed out, the foundation of our society is built around family. If we look at families or at particular societies such as religious or ethnic societies which place a very strong value on family, on commitment and on the responsibility to comes from that, we find that the divorce rate is substantially lower than it is among the general population.
I am not standing before the House and Canadians pontificating from a holier than thou perspective. I stand here as a person with considerable experience in these matters, having been twice divorced. My mother was divorced. Carrying on a long line of family history, my grandmother was divorced in 1932 in Alberta. That was not a small feat in those days.
I have said many times than it is better to be from a broken home than in one. However, I do not in any way diminish or denigrate the importance of family and how much better it is for children to be raised within a strong and supportive family. There is nothing more important in a child's life. Having said that, we know statistically a good percentage, perhaps even a majority, of marriages are going to end unhappily in divorce. The product of that unhappy circumstance will be children who will suffer in varying degrees from the effects of the divorce. Some children, depending on the maturity, wisdom and good faith of their parents, will suffer significantly less and, in fact, may benefit.
From time to time as members of Parliament we deal with constituents who come to us because there is nowhere else to go. Many of these people are single parents who are struggling to support a family. Some are non-custodial parents who feel grievously wronged because although they have lived up to every aspect of their agreement, they find themselves not able to be with their children. This legislation does not address that. In my opinion, that is a grievous error.
When we delve into the reasons for which families break up or why we have such acrimony over visitation, very often that is driven by retribution. Very often it is the chicken or the egg. If the non-custodial parent pays support regularly, he or she will get visitation rights regularly. In my experience, the amount of money that is awarded to the custodial parent is perhaps not as important as the consistency of receiving that money. It is important, but it is not nearly as important as the custodial parent being able to depend religiously on receiving that money every month.
That brings me to my perspective on this particular debate. I come to this perspective from the position of having paid maintenance payments virtually all of my adult life. There has not been a month that I have not made maintenance payments for as long as I can remember. Having made those payments, I was able to subtract from my income, which was generally speaking higher than my ex-spouse's income, the amount that I paid in support and my ex-wife paid the tax on it. This created a fairly big problem for her at the end of the year. She did not pay tax on it when she received it and the net result was that at the end of the year she had a tax bill she had to pay.
I discussed the matter with her and asked what she thought was the best way to handle it. Should it be taxable for her, should it be taxable for me or should we split it in the middle? We decided the best way to do it was to arrive at whatever the payment was going to be and I would pay tax on half and she would pay tax on half.
That is not what is going to happen with this bill. The non-custodial parent will be paying the tax and the receiving parent will not be paying the tax. It will not affect maintenance agreements that are already in effect. I am sure that the courts will take into account who will be paying the tax when they make their judgments.
This legislation envisions a grid. The grid is a schedule of the amount of maintenance payments per child that will be paid to the custodial parent, usually the wife, based on the income of the non-custodial parent or generally speaking the husband. That is not necessarily a bad idea. However, it does not allow for judicial discretion. In my experience, very often family break-ups come as a direct result of financial pressures. When the family breaks up there is not a whole lot of money to go around anyway. Very often the father pays support to a family where the custodial parent, the wife, has remarried and has a standard of living far beyond anything that the ex-husband has.
These things are not black and white. We tend to make these laws based on our experience with the extremes. Very often the extremes are horrid. The fact is that if a husband is not going to make support payments, no amount of legislation in the world is going to force him to do it. He has to do it because he accepts the responsibility and it is the right thing to do.
I guess this is where our society has kind of become unglued. When a couple makes the decision to get a divorce, when did it become their right to absolve themselves of the responsibilities that were incurred in the marriage and they brought children into the world? When, because I decided to be divorced, did it become someone else's responsibility to be financially responsible for my children? If I am divorced, for whatever reason, and I cannot afford to look after the financial responsibilities that I incurred of my own free will in my first marriage, it does not give me the right to take on new responsibilities in a subsequent marriage and then claim poverty and say: "I can't afford to look after my first responsibilities because I have taken on a second batch of responsibilities".
When we make decisions we have to be big enough to accept the responsibilities that come with those decisions. We are not saying not to do it but are saying: "Having made the decision, for goodness sake, be big enough to live up to the responsibilities that you have".
I would suggest that because the receiving spouse is depending on the maintenance payments, it is entirely appropriate that the government, representing all of the people, take whatever steps are prudent to enforce maintenance payments. We understand that maintenance payments are legislated federally and are enforced provincially. It has to be done with a foundation of fairness. If someone is going to have his or her wages garnisheed, certainly notice should be given. I do not know about other folks, but as an employer when I saw a garnishee notice coming for anyone who worked for me, it raised an eyebrow.
What happens if the person who is on the receiving end of the garnishee is living up to the obligations but is involved in some sort of a messy dispute?
Not all lawyers get up in the morning and ask, "how can we do the right thing?" It is possible that some of them do not have a clue because they did not do their homework. Some of them might decide they are going to make life miserable for someone and do not use due diligence before they issue a garnishee notice. The notion of being able to garnishee without notice is wrong.
Similarly, I have real difficulty with the ability to go back into tax records subsequent to a divorce. In my view the only reason for this could be in order to try to have the amount of maintenance payment increased.
When people decide to divorce, it seems to me that should be that. Each spouse should know the income of both spouses to determine what fair support should be. After that has been concluded, why should either party have the right to open the closed files five years down the road? It does not make sense to me.
Some of the criticisms of this bill, both constructive and positive and negative criticism, are that it takes the judicial discretion out of the awarding of payments. It does not necessarily consider the ability of the non-custodial parent to make the payments that have been determined, nor does it take into consideration the financial circumstances of the custodial parent.
Although the vast majority of divorces end with the female being the custodial parent, it is possible that the husband is the injured party in the case. It is possible that the female who ends up with custody is also the one who initiates the divorce. There are circumstances where in such situations the female goes from one marriage almost directly into another. I know of some that have resulted in the wives not having any negative financial consequences whatsoever. However, the ex-husband has been out of house, home and hearth in order to support the new marriage.
I am really nervous about setting arbitrary rules that do not allow for judicial discretion. That is why we have divorces that go before judges.
Another concern about the guidelines is this. Are they to be a ceiling or a floor? What about the situation where a parent is capable of paying a lot more?
Third is the notion of reopening cases which have already been closed.
In 1977 Betty Jane Wylie, author of Beginnings: a book for widows , wrote that in the dim dark dark days before antiseptics women often died in childbirth and it was not uncommon for a man to outlive two or three wives. A man can still have two or three wives today but it is because of a thing called divorce. It is a lot more messy and a lot more expensive. There is absolutely no question it is far more expensive to get a divorce than it is to tough it out.
I will conclude my comments in the debate with the notion that it is perhaps much more important for us as a society to put our emphasis on the marriage and making it more difficult to get married rather than making it easier to get a divorce. Sometimes, and I speak from personal experience, the tougher thing to do is to work through the problems and tough it out. Therefore, the notion of a unified family court, the notion of arbitration and mediation and a proactive effort would be a very worthwhile exercise for Parliament to consider.
As the great Canadian Charlie Farquharson said, statistically two out of five marriages end in divorce; the rest of us stick it out until the bitter end. Therein might be a pearl of wisdom all of us might learn from. As we discuss the ramifications of divorce and family law on children, there is absolutely no question that those Canadians who are able to tough it out to the bitter end are probably going to find that what they have done for their family will pay great rewards in the long run.
