SCYR Committee Meeting

SUB-COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH AT RISK OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT AND THE STATUS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

SOUS-COMITÉ SUR LES ENFANTS ET JEUNES À RISQUE DU COMITÉ PERMANENT DES RESOURCES HUMAINES ET DE LA CONDITION DES PERSONNES HANDICAPÉES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, December 1, 1999

• 1535

[English]

The Chair (Mr. John Godfrey (Don Valley West, Lib.): Let me begin by just saying the suggestion is that next week we not meet at this time, Wednesday at 3.30 p.m., but rather on Tuesday at 11 o'clock, the regular HRD time. The committee is not meeting, and a number of our members have indicated that next Wednesday is a little problematic.

So perhaps we can just take our slot—and we're allowed to do that as long as we're not in conflict with the main committee. We have a fairly full list of folks, and that would also allow us perhaps to have lunch together as a subcommittee—or as many people as wish to join us. It would give us a bit more time to talk about the issues we'll be looking at.

Will that work for you?

Mr. Eric Lowther (Calgary Centre, Ref.): Is this just a one-time thing?

The Chair: Yes. It's just because, by chance, the main committee isn't meeting at 11 o'clock on Tuesday.

Mr. Eric Lowther: That will work for me.

The Chair: Good.

Carolyn, you're not on the main committee, are you?

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul's, Lib.): No, I'm an associate member of the main committee.

The Chair: I don't know what your schedule is for next Tuesday at 11 o'clock.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: There were only three committees I was supposed to be at this afternoon at 3.30.

The Chair: Well, that will lighten the load.

[Translation]

Mrs. Gagnon, we were saying that next week, we were thinking of meeting only once on Tuesday at 11 o'clock, seeing as the main Human Resource Development Committee meeting will not be taking place at 11 o'clock on Tuesday and that a number of the members of the subcommittee will not be able to attend the meeting on Wednesday at 3:30. Would this be all right with you?

Mrs. Christiane Gagnon (Québec, BQ): Tuesday at eleven?

The Chair: It would normally be the full committee.

Mrs. Christiane Gagnon: Yes. Yes that's fine.

The Chair: Okay? There were other people who could not attend.

[English]

I want to welcome Richard Shillington, whose broad shoulders this session rests on.

Just to situate the discussion, the subcommittee is really focused on a couple of deadlines that are interrelated. The one we're most concerned about now is the upcoming budget. We hope to be in a position to be able to say something, before we go away in December, about what elements concerning a children's budget ought to be there. Obviously we can't micro-manage the system, but we need to understand how we can express the income-services blend in some fashion that is also inclusive and not exclusive. Then, of course, we're looking toward the deadline of December 2000 for a deal on the national action plan, as announced by the Prime Minister in the Speech from the Throne.

Today, in order to locate the discussion, we need to ask Richard Shillington, who has been to us before, given what seem to be the possibilities out there, including the social union framework agreement and the announcement on the income side, how a coherent program can be advanced, which contains both the income and the service components, in a way that will actually change things for the better for Canada's children.

I hope that is sort of what you were asked to do. If not, I'm sure you'll do what you were asked to do.

Mr. Richard Shillington (Principal, Tristat Resources): I was asked to come and talk about tax.

The Chair: All right, that's part of it.

Mr. Richard Shillington: It's not part of income and it's not really part of service; it's part of the government's recognition of parenting. In fact I think it really should be appropriately not just “income-service” but “income-taxes-service”.

The Chair: Okay.

Mr. Richard Shillington: I came basically ready to talk about three issues. Also, since I had 24 hours' notice that I would be here alone, I added more in my notes about the impact of the fallback of the child benefit on social assistance recipients than I had previously.

The Chair: We thank you, by the way, for doing all of this for us on such short notice.

• 1540

Mr. Richard Shillington: Is it Monday now when the larger group...? You're going to have much more fun.

The Chair: It'll be Tuesday. It's just that we've been scrambling rather desperately, and we're just delighted you were able to help us.

Mr. Richard Shillington: So I was proposing to talk about three broad issues. First is the tax treatment of families with children. Next is indexation, and I think I can probably just say you already know what I think about that. Then I have a couple of short comments. There's also a third section on the clawback of the child benefit and some data I pulled together that might be of interest on that.

Have the tables been distributed? I'll get to those under the clawback.

Let me begin by talking about taxation. When I talk about taxation for today's discussion, I'm really talking about income taxes. The income tax system in Canada is based notionally on ability to pay. We've used discretionary spending as a way of assessing ability to pay. Families that have the same discretionary spending should pay the same taxes. As families' discretionary spending increases, their tax burdens should increase.

You will all know that in 1992, because of pressures at that time, the federal government eliminated the across-the-board tax recognition for children. Parents with incomes over $67,000 lost all tax recognition for children. They were put in the situation where they were paying the same taxes as their neighbours without children. I'm sure you've read various reports saying this made children comparable to fancy boats.

Various organizations have written about how this is unfair and fairly unprecedented in industrialized countries. It certainly violates everything we've understood about a fair tax policy. It's defensible only in the name of political expediency.

The issue of the tax treatment of one-earner and two-earner families, you'll know, attracted a lot of attention, particularly in the spring. I spent some time over the summer writing a paper trying to understand where that political debate came from—the dispute in terms of the tax treatment of one-earner and two-earner families. I don't think it's a very helpful debate because it tends to be fairly divisive.

The paper I've written, which I've given your researcher a copy of, essentially argues that much of that debate finds its origin in the lack of tax treatment, tax recognition, of children in general. Under the current tax system, families with incomes over $70,000 get tax recognition for the children only if they have child care expenses. That makes the child care expense deduction look like a fairly privileged tax measure. It wouldn't look so privileged if there were across-the-board tax recognition for all children.

I've done some calculations just to illustrate how out of sync the tax system has become. The tax burden for a one-earner family with two children at $70,000 is the same as the tax burden for a one-earner family with no children, because children don't affect the tax burden. But it's also comparable to the tax burden of a two-earner family with an income of $85,000. The advantages of income splitting are such that under our current system, a two-earner family with no children and a tax burden of $85,000 is about the same as a one-earner family with an income of $70,000.

If that two-earner family maximizes their RRSP contributions, they could actually earn $100,000 and pay the same tax as a one-earner family with two children and an income of $70,000—

The Chair: With one earner paying into his or her RRSP.

Mr. Richard Shillington: At $70,000?

The Chair: Yes.

Mr. Richard Shillington: No. The point is that a one-earner family with children making $70,000 is not maximizing their RRSP contributions. Trust me. They might be allowed to contribute $13,500 a year now, but I don't think they're going to be. At $100,000 income, the two-earner family with no children—why would they not be?

The child care expense deduction starts looking like a privileged deduction, as if the government is preferring one family type over another because we don't have across-the-board tax recognition for children.

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I want to point out one interesting point. As I wrote this paper over the summer, I spent a lot of time talking to various players about the tax system. One of the interesting points that was made to me is that part of what's deducted under the child care expense deduction now is custodial care—which enables employment—and most people would say that's a reasonable tax recognition that should be there. Part of what's deducted now in the child care expense deduction is also early childhood development.

So somebody who is using quality child care is getting both custodial care and child development, which is probably a good thing, something that we should encourage, and probably most people don't object to the tax system giving tax recognition for that. But the point is that one-earner families who are using nursery schools or doing anything on the child development side are of course getting no tax recognition for that because it's not enabling income.

So you'll know that, I think, virtually.... Several groups have recently come out and called for an across-the-board tax recognition for children—the C.D. Howe Institute paper and the CPRN. There's an interesting issue here. If you accept that there should be some tax recognition for children across the board, how would you do it for families with incomes over $70,000? One option is to build a floor to the child tax benefit. That is, instead of the child tax benefit hitting zero at around $70,000 of income, there would be some floor below which it wouldn't fall, say $500 per child.

The other way of doing it would be to reintroduce the non-refundable tax credit for children. And if you assume that the government at some time wanted to reintroduce tax fairness for families with children, those are two ways of doing it.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each. I just want to point out that if you build a floor to the child tax benefit, then you've almost gone back to the old family allowance. You're going to be mailing a cheque to every family, and the cheque would be in the name of the mother, generally. The advantage to many people would be that the cheque is in the name of the mother—the only cheque in her name. So we've come almost full circle on child policy, back to a universal benefit for mother's allowance.

The problem with that approach is that you'd be delivering a tax policy recognition through a social program, and many people, when they look at the child benefit, already say, well, this is for families in need. And how would you justify mailing a cheque? You're back to the bankers' wives argument that many of you will be familiar with—you know, why are we mailing cheques to bankers' wives?

We don't have any problem delivering tax equity measures for bankers. Nobody claims that a banker shouldn't get a capital gains exemption—not to my knowledge—and nobody denies that a banker should get an RRSP contribution, but they do wonder why you would mail a cheque to a banker or his family.

The advantage of building a floor to the child tax benefit is that it's paid to the mother but it mixes a social policy with a tax recognition, so I don't think it's as intellectually clean as going to a tax credit. The tax credit would be paid to the major earner in a family in terms of take-home pay. It loses the advantage of paying it to the mother, but it's intellectually cleaner.

My personal preference, if I had a vote, would be to put the floor to the child tax benefit, despite the risks. I still think there's a substantial risk in putting a tax measure in a social program, but I think the advantages of paying it to the mother would outweigh the disadvantages.

I wanted to talk, just for a few minutes, about an issue—I don't think anybody's talked about this in the last 13 years, actually—and that's tax recognition for dependent children who are 18 years of age and over.

Until 1986, there was a tax deduction for children over the age of 17 if they were in post-secondary education or in an institution, and perhaps disabled as well, I'm not sure. It was worth twice the deduction for younger children. It was eliminated back in 1986 as part of tax reform. If you want to ask why there should be a tax recognition for dependent children over the age of 17, to me, you go back to first principles. If you have a child who is 19 years old, do they affect ability to pay? Do they affect your discretionary spending? Do they affect your spending, and is it discretionary?

• 1550

Look at the way Canada student loans are administered in this country. I have two children in post-secondary education. They are not eligible for student loans because the government will tell them that their parents will support them. There's obviously a presumption that I'm obligated to support my children's post-secondary education. I don't object to doing it, but if that's not discretionary spending, then it should affect my tax burden. It's the same as if I had a child who had exhausted EI living with me. That child would not be eligible for social assistance. I'm not suggesting they should be, but certainly my support of that child would not be discretionary.

I went through a report that looked over the tax systems in European countries, and I couldn't find one European country that provided no tax recognition for children over 17. Every country I could find provided tax recognition for children over 17 if they were in post-secondary education, and some of them even went further and said if they were dependent. You all will know of families that have 24- and 25-year-old children who appear on their doorsteps, and they are supporting them.

So that's my discussion on taxation and children. Since 1992 we've ignored tax fairness.

I have one last comment on the impact of ignoring tax fairness for those children. I think it also relates to the two debates on tax treatment of families that are causing some heat. If you turn your back on ability to pay, which we did in 1992—everybody recognizes that a fair tax system would provide tax recognition for children, and we decided not to—then what is the principle that replaces it? And if you don't have a principle that replaces it, then you allow everybody to basically say we think we should have a tax break for one-earner families, because we think that's the preferred model for families; or, we think there should be a tax break for women who are working, because we like that.

I object to the idea of departing from the principle, partly because then you lead to an unprincipled system of taxation that says you can basically argue for tax preferences for the family types that you prefer. And there are enough complaints that families have legitimately about government that they should be drawn together, rather than having families be drawn into battles between them about things like getting rid of the married credit, or the child care expense deduction, because it's too generous.

Turning to indexation, the child tax credit base amount is $1,020. It's been $1,020 since 1991, because that's when inflation dropped below 3%. If you wanted to return the purchasing power of the base amount that social assistance families receive from the child benefit to the level it was in 1993—when the current government took power—you would have to increase it by $81, so it would be about $1,100. If you wanted to take the purchasing power of the child tax benefit base amount back to what it was in 1989, when the House resolution was passed to seek to eliminate child poverty, you would have to increase it by $167 to about $1,187.

We all know that part of the child benefit exercise was that the federal government would provide certain levels of support, and the provinces would shift their level of support in reaction. We also all know that the federal government and the provinces promised that social assistance families would be no worse off as a result of this. The fact that the federal government support is not indexed to inflation guarantees that the federal support is eroding over time, and that the support for the poorest of families, those relying on social assistance, is eroding over time.

One of the reasons I mention it every chance I get is not just because of the effect, because it's only 3% per year, and when inflation is as it is now, it's probably more like 1.5% or 2% per year. It's not a great deal of money, but I think it's the clearest recognition of political will.

On the clawback of the child benefit, you will know that this is the part of the child benefit program that's drawn the most negative reaction from virtually every social policy group and many municipalities.

• 1555

Two UN committees that I'm familiar with have contended that the clawback of the child benefit from social assistance families violates international covenants to which Canada is a signatory.

Why was there a clawback? Well, the clawback was there, you all know, because we wanted to extend support to working poor families to equalize the floor between working poor families and welfare families.

Provinces promised to reinvest their savings in programs for children. I'll return to the provincial reinvestment.

I read the Caledon Institute's proposal from a couple of weeks ago, and in there it says there is a great deal of confusion about the clawback. Indeed, yes, there is. I don't think you can have a clear mind about the clawback and still be opposed to it. But there is confusion.

I want to read to you from a couple of recent government documents. I have in front of me A National Children's Agenda: Developing a Shared Vision. On page 33 it says:

This [the child benefit] provides a higher basic level of income support for children, whether their parents are in the labour market or receiving social assistance. In turn, provinces and territories have adjusted the support they provide to children through social assistance...

The first statement, if I stop there, was just an out-and-out lie. The second statement doesn't really clarify it totally. The document went out of its way to leave the impression, in my mind, that social assistance families are receiving increased income support.

The second report I want to look at is the Sub-Committee on Tax Equity for Canadian Families with Dependent Children. This is a subcommittee of the Department of Finance that looked at the tax treatment of one-earner and two-earner families. This document says:

Provinces that impose these reductions

—that's the clawback—

are expected to reinvest the savings into other programs for low-income families. There is no “clawback” of the Canada Child Tax Benefit by the provinces.

I don't think that's true.

So, yes, there's probably a fair bit of confusion about the clawback.

In the summer I was reading an article in the Toronto Star about welfare and the child benefit, and that article quoted the National Council of Welfare as having stated that roughly two-thirds of poor children are subject to the clawback and about 83% of lone-parent poor children are being clawed back. The article went on to say that officials from HRDC disputed these figures. I don't understand the matter of the dispute because to my knowledge HRDC hasn't distributed any data at all on those figures.

If you look at the table I distributed.... And I gave them all away. Can I have one back? I'm not going to spend very much time on the table. It's just for your information. On side 1 of the table, there are figures I've taken from a National Council of Welfare report, which is the number of children who are living on welfare in each province. If you look in the bottom right corner, you have essentially 1,090,000 children living on welfare. So this is the number of children who are being clawed back.

On the other side of the table is the number of low-income children. Some of us are so bold as to call them poor. There are about 1.4 million poor children living in poverty—sorry for the redundancy of that statement.

So I think it's about two-thirds. I don't see how the National Council of Welfare's figures can be that far off. There are about a million children on social assistance.

I've done some further work, and it looks like the proportion of children in single-parent families who are being clawed back is much higher, because single-parent poor families are more likely to be on social assistance.

I've done some further work. Of those one million children who are being clawed back, it appears about two-thirds of them are pre-school and about one-third of them are infants, zero and one year old. If you think about it, if you're a low-income family with a pre-school child or an infant, it's much harder to get employment because you have to deal with the child care hurdle, which is not as much of a hurdle if your children are school age.

• 1600

So despite the background of discussions about Fraser Mustard and early childhood development, the majority of the children who are subject to the clawback are pre-school children.

Provincial reinvestment. When the child benefit was announced, provinces announced reinvestment plans, and some of us were skeptical to begin with about this. Ontario announced that its reinvestment to the child benefit would be between $117 million and $150 million. Since then, about a year and a half ago, April 1998, Ontario cut the supplement that pregnant women got when they were on welfare. This is $37 per month. Mike Harris expressed the opinion that he was concerned this money was being spent on beer, so he eliminated that. I wondered at the time whether that was consistent with the reinvestment agreement.

Two Fridays ago, Ontario announced several hundred million dollars of cuts in provincial spending, a substantial portion of that money coming out of welfare. In particular, if you know the details about how they're going to cut that program, they're cutting the STEP program. The STEP program is a government program to facilitate earnings for people on welfare. They're going to cut it for people who have been on welfare for more than two years. If you talk to people who work in the field, being on welfare for more than two years effectively means you're a single mother. Reducing the STEP program for people who have been on welfare for more than two years means cutting welfare for single mothers, in fact reducing the employment incentives.

So it looks like the Ontario government's cuts are working at exactly the same policy objectives as the child benefit.

The same week the Ontario government announced these cuts, Alberta made some announcements of changes they were proposing to their hospital plan. Within hours, the federal government was warning Alberta that they were going to be looking at this carefully, making sure it's consistent with the Canada Health Act. I haven't heard a word out of Ottawa about whether or not these cuts to Ontario violate the reinvestment promise.

I know Ontario's reinvestment was to bring in a child care supplement for working families. As long as that program exists, does that mean they're consistent with reinvestment and they can cut everything else and leave that as the one pillar? It makes no sense. The Auditor General should be looking at this, frankly.

So governments promised that welfare children would be no worse off, despite the fact that the federal portion is de-indexed, and there is nothing that apparently prohibits provinces from cutting welfare even further. So that assurance seems not to be worth a great deal.

I'm going to talk about alternatives to the clawback in two ways: were there alternatives and are there alternatives—“were there” because if we had it all to do over again, hopefully we wouldn't have done it.

There was an earned-income supplement that was in place from 1993 to 1996. To my knowledge, it didn't attract the attention of the UN. Nobody was talking about human rights violations because it didn't have this very distasteful giving and then taking away. It didn't have the appearance that reinvestments in provinces were actually being funded by welfare recipients. It didn't play into all the prejudices that we all know exist against poor people, and particularly against people on welfare.

We could have simply increased earned-income supplement, I think.

If we wanted to extend in-kind benefits to working poor families, perhaps the federal government could have simply cost-shared the extension of in-kind benefits—drugs, medical, dental—to working poor families. But that's done. I don't think the federal government's going to admit it was wrong and go back to the drawing board.

So what can we do within the current provisions?

I assume Ken is going to be added Tuesday if he can't be here today.

If you read Caledon's proposal, there are some things I certainly agree with and some things I couldn't disagree with more. Ken's strategy for the child benefit has always been to bring the working poor up to the same level as social assistance families—if you can call it bringing it up to the same level—and then advance both of them towards $4,000.

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An alternative strategy would be to say we're going to advance social assistance families and working poor families, but there's more ground to be covered by the working poor families so we're going to give them more. We could have done something like saying that for every dollar we're putting in for social assistance families, we'll put in two or three dollars for working poor families. It would have gotten them to $4,000 together, without this giving and taking away, this trying to equalize first before the advance.

One suggestion for how to get out of the clawback mess in the future is to simply say there are two aspects to the child benefit: there's the base and the supplement. The base goes to all families with children—income-tested, so not all—but it flows through to social assistance recipients. The supplement is clawed back by provinces. Don't put all of the increase into the supplement, put some of it into the base and put some into the supplement. I'd put some in the supplement as well, because there is a valid social policy objective of closing that gap between working poor and the others, but that shouldn't be the only goal for what we're doing.

If I have a theme, it's that we desperately need a family policy in this country that draws families together and builds on commonalities. We've had a family policy based on preferring these types of families to those types of families. We have had a family policy based on giving to working poor families while denying it to social assistance families. We need to have family policy that draws families together.

Ken's paper had a one-line sentence that said we should get rid of the married credit, the deduction for a one-earner family. There was no explanation why. He just said it was outdated. This is going to set families against each other again. Every family with children needs more support. We shouldn't be denying support to some families in order to increase support for others.

I'll end there.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

[Translation]

Do you have any comments, Mr. Lowther?

[English]

Do you want to mull, or do you want to ask now?

Mr. Eric Lowther: I'll ask one now, I guess.

Richard, I was interested in what you said about tax deductions for kids. Was one of your proposals to put tax deductions in place for all children and still leave the CCTB there? If so, how do we get around the high marginal tax rate problem without going to the base child benefit for all? And you know what I mean. It's that additional dollar going—

Mr. Richard Shillington: First of all, I said there used to be a deduction. If you're going to use the tax side to deliver an across-the-board tax recognition, to my mind it would a credit and not a deduction. It would be a non-refundable credit, just like the personal credit. Do you understand the distinction between deducting and—

Mr. Eric Lowther: Yes.

Mr. Richard Shillington: So it would be a non-refundable credit, not a deduction. The C.D. Howe Institute thinks it should be a deduction, but I think they're wrong. But because it's a credit, if you gave a non-refundable credit to every child, it wouldn't increase marginal tax rates. Every family with children would have its tax burden reduced by so many dollars per child regardless of income, so it would have no effect on their marginal tax rate. And there is a marginal tax rate issue, which we've talked about privately before.

I should point out that if you did this, you'd be giving a tax benefit to every family with children. It would be easy to cost. There are seven million children, almost all of whom are taxable, although there'd be a few who aren't. But if you were to do this at the same time as you were expanding the child benefit, you could take some of this out from not putting as much into the child benefit as you would have otherwise, because this is going to go to almost all families.

Mr. Eric Lowther: Isn't that much the same as just establishing a base on the child tax benefit that applies to everybody?

Mr. Richard Shillington: Yes. If you said we should have a base of $400 for the child benefit—the child benefit never goes below $400—or we should have a non-refundable credit that would deliver $400 to every family—

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Mr. Eric Lowther: Same difference.

Mr. Richard Shillington: The social assistance families would get the base.

Mr. Eric Lowther: Right.

Mr. Richard Shillington: They wouldn't get the tax because they don't pay income tax. That would be the only difference, so it's a very small difference.

The difference really is in the politics. The tax credit is not program spending, right? It reduces government revenue. The child benefit is program spending. So people who measure the value of a society by the level of government spending, in a negative way—government spending is a bad thing—would see quite a difference between those two ways.

But also, as I said in the presentation, I think more important is the politics of.... Suppose you believe in policies for families and you want this to be a program that will last for 10 years. If you put it into child benefit, I'm much less secure that it'll be there in 10 years, because you're delivering a tax recognition through a social program.

So people are going to look at that...and I can show you quotes of Stockwell Day complaining that the child benefit is now too generous because it goes to families with incomes of $100,000—if they have enough children—and they are not in need. So there are people who see the child tax benefit as a program for people.... You can't blame people for seeing this program as a program of need. It's advertised daily as an anti-poverty program. So why is an anti-poverty program sending cheques to people with incomes of $100,000?

Intellectually, I think it's safer to have a non-refundable credit. It's in the tax system. It's like a personal credit, a married credit, RRSPs, capital gains—a tax measure. I think that's its foundation. That's its raison d'être. It's in the tax system.

Mr. Eric Lowther: So why not as just a straight deduction, then?

Mr. Richard Shillington: Instead of a credit?

Mr. Eric Lowther: Yes. You could still have your child tax benefit for the low-income folks who are struggling, but then you have a straight deduction.

Mr. Richard Shillington: Well, when I say a non-refundable credit, I mean it's not income tested. It's like the personal credit—

Mr. Eric Lowther: No, I understand what that is.

Mr. Richard Shillington: Okay. Well, the value of the deduction goes up with income.

Mr. Eric Lowther: Right.

Mr. Richard Shillington: So higher-income people are going to get a greater tax recognition for their spending on children than lower-income people.

Now, they probably spend more on their children—

Mr. Eric Lowther: So that's their reason.

Mr. Richard Shillington: —but their non-discretionary spending may not be that much greater. If a high-income family wants to buy downhill skis and send their child to camp, I don't think the tax system should be subsidizing that.

So what is the basic minimum amount that families are spending on their children? Let's say that's $4,000 or $5,000 per child. We should provide that tax recognition to all families regardless of income.

Now, there's no doubt in my mind that families with higher incomes are spending more on their children, on average, but I don't think it's the business of the tax system to subsidize that. We're subsidizing the non-discretionary spending.

If you go back to the Carter commission in 1960-something, they have, I think, a really good...they basically came down on the side of credits, not deductions, for the personal expense side: the personal credit, the married credit, and the deduction for children.

[Translation]

The Chair: Mrs. Gagnon.

Mrs. Christiane Gagnon: I think we're missing some figures. I'm not sure if we could get them from the Committee on Human Resource Development. How is the National Child Benefit implemented in each of the provinces? You say that some families receive money, the basic amount, that they don't really need. I think that in Quebec, above an income of $70,000, you don't receive the basic amount of the National Child Benefit. There are also supplements for low- income families.

I don't know if in Ontario, for example, it's applied the same way. When you earn $70,000 and have two children, you're not really rich. You earn a decent living, but you're not considered very rich. You earn a good living and you can provide for your family, but I wouldn't describe that as a wealthy family living in opulence.

I have some difficulty following you when you say that we could provide a non-refundable tax credit. I agree with that. I recognize that that would reduce government revenues, but that would go directly to families and it wouldn't be complicated to manage.

On the other hand, how do you help these targeted families, the most destitute families, who have a low income or who depend on social assistance?

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I have two questions. Firstly, do we apply the National Child Benefit the same way everywhere, and secondly, if we vote to support the non-refundable credit, how will we target the most needy families?

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: I think good family policy serves more than one purpose. Just like a health care system isn't going to choose between treating cancer and heart disease—it has to do both—a good family policy is going to be fair to families with children even if they're lucky enough to have an income of $100,000, just on the basis of tax fairness. It's also going to serve some anti-poverty objectives. It should do those well, and it should do those well in a way that includes social assistance families.

If you think of it as layers, you want to have a sound tax policy upon which you can put good social policy. If you have a flawed tax policy, it's hard to build social policy that's going to make sense. Sound tax policy says families with children should pay less tax than their nextdoor neighbours without children, and that should be true if their income is $100,000, $200,000, or $300,000.

If the owner of the Ottawa Senators can cry about tax fairness, families with children should at least be able to talk about tax fairness. Being wealthy is no prevention to claim the right to fair tax treatment. If you're talking about RRSPs, capital gains or dividend tax credits, those are all tax fairness issues. We give those recognition, and I think we should, but we don't do it only for people who are poor. In fact it would have no effect if we had a capital gains exemption only for people who are poor.

As soon as we talk about social policy, things related to families, then people say we don't need tax fairness because they're not needy. I find that a hard argument to follow, so I would argue for either a non-refundable credit that would deliver the tax fairness aspect of the objective, or you could have the national child benefit not going to zero, but instead having a floor. Either of those would serve the same purpose.

On an anti-poverty program, yes, we want an anti-poverty program. We want an anti-poverty program that would include the two-thirds of poor children who rely on social assistance, and I don't think they should wait until we've equalized. Quite frankly, the reason they haven't been included so far is that provinces wouldn't agree to include them. If provinces wouldn't agree in 1996 to include them, why will they agree in 2002?

We should be building the increase in the child benefit into the base as well as the supplement, so that for social assistance families, at a minimum their support will cease to erode. Remember, it's not being held constant, it's eroding, it's going down for them because of the indexation.

Does that answer it?

[Translation]

Mrs. Christiane Gagnon: Yes.

The Chair: Ms. St-Jacques.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques (Shefford, PC): Hello, Mr. Shillington. I would like to hear your opinion on an answer that was given to me by the Minister of Finance on the indexation of the National Child Benefit and also on the clawback for persons who live on social assistance.

In one of his answers, he told me that it would be difficult to justify indexation without re-establishing other fully indexed tax parameters.

So I have to ask myself how we managed to index the old age pension without indexing other things, yet if we wanted to index the child benefit, we would be forced to index the others. So I have a question with respect to that.

Secondly, he states—and maybe you could confirm these figures—that between July 1966 and July of the year 2000, the National Child Benefit payments for a family with two children and an income of $20,000 would go from $2,540 to $3,750, an increase of 48%. This increase is far greater than the rate of inflation.

• 1620

A third point is equally striking. It has to do with the clawback. The governments who participate in the National Child Benefit Program are making the following bet: they hope that by providing the families of low-income workers with a level of support for children that is at least equal to that which families on social assistance are receiving, there will be a large number of parents who will enter the workforce, develop their skills and thereby improve their family's financial situation.

In the meantime, families on welfare would not be penalized financially. I thought they would be penalized because of what had been taken away from them. How can we expect them to re-enter the job market if they don't get any help? There is no support system. We know that families who have been living on welfare for several years have a hard time entering the job market and when they do, it's for minimum wage. It doesn't help that people are working fewer hours. So how can we say that we help them if we do not give them access to support or transition programs?

That's covering a lot in a few minutes, but I would appreciate your telling me what you think about this.

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: No, it's very clear. There were three questions.

Why did we de-index family allowance and not old age security? I'm sure I'm telling you what you all already know. The original proposal in the budget of May 21 or 23, 1985, was to de-index both the old age security and the family allowance.

An hon. member: Was that Charles Gratton?

Mr. Richard Shillington: As you well know—I've forgotten the name of the woman who said “Goodbye, Charlie Brown” to Mr. Mulroney—

The Chair: Solange.

Mr. Richard Shillington: Solange. I'd better write that down.

So the political heat became too great to de-index old age security, so they left—

[Translation]

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: Children don't vote.

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: Yes, and the parents of children are too busy driving them to soccer games and doing everything else they do to fill up Parliament Hill. It was strictly that you wanted to de-index all of these things, but the political price for de-indexing the old age security was to high. The political cost for de-indexing family allowance wasn't so high, so it was done. That's the straight truth of it.

It reminds me that before the child benefit was brought in, as we have discovered through documents obtained under access to information, HRDC did polling on the attitudes of Canadians towards social assistance recipients. You can imagine that the attitudes of many Canadians towards social assistance recipients wasn't very supportive. Why would the attitude of Canadians towards social assistance recipients be important in the design of the child benefit? It was simply to gauge the political cost of the clawback, and whether or not there was a political cost. Of course, there was very little political cost to the clawback.

[Translation]

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: But why do you say it can't be indexed whereas the other things are? That's not right. Perhaps just the benefit could be indexed.

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: No, of course not.

[Translation]

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: No?

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: Of course it doesn't make sense. I'm sorry. For Mr. Martin, it doesn't make sense.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: I make sense, but he doesn't make sense?

Mr. Richard Shillington: No, he obviously could index the child tax benefit and not index the whole tax system if he chose, because he's the finance minister.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: Plus, they already did it.

Mr. Richard Shillington: They did it for old age security.

[Translation]

Mrs. Christiane Gagnon: We will ask him to meet with us.

Mrs. Diane St-Jacques: I asked him, but look what it got me.

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: No, I recall the debates in the House of Commons around your private member's motion—

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: It was a motion, yes.

Mr. Richard Shillington: —to fully index the child benefit. I sat alone in the gallery for each of those debates, and I heard my own words used out of context to try to make it look as if I supported the child benefit as it was in place. They made the same arguments. Of course it's nonsense.

The second question you asked was about the support level going to a family with an income of $20,000 and the fact that it had gone up by some substantial amount of money. That's absolutely true for a working poor family. There's no doubt about that. This is not a condemnation of the child benefit in total. Of course it's been a very useful program and a good program for working poor families. But in the words of the National Council of Welfare, it's been a terrible program, a disastrous program, and a vile program for families on welfare.

• 1625

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: But at the same time, it will be for a short time if there's no indexation. We don't know what's going to happen in two, three, or four years.

Mr. Richard Shillington: The families whose income was just over the amount to get the supplement, just over $25,000, had no increase in support, and in fact they as well have been exposed to the indexing. Of course they've lost more from indexation than welfare families have, because their benefits were affected by the erosion not only of the child benefit itself but also of the income threshold, which has been stuck at the same level since 1990. So in fact they lose more than social assistance families do.

As long as the program is not indexed, you have to adjust for inflation if you want to know its true value. I've seen no government documents that actually adjust for inflation in any of the analyses.

With regard to your third question, certainly children are going to be better off with parents who are employed in good-quality jobs. That's almost always going to be the case, although it may not be the case for children with disabilities. Parents may make other choices then, and it could be difficult. On the whole, yes, but the government is saying to families, we will reward you if you take a job, and that's a bit disingenuous given the child care situation in the country and the unemployment situation in various areas of the country.

I'll remind you, and I know you know this, that the child tax benefit is clawed back on reserves as well. So with regard to Indian reserves in Canada, you can imagine the government saying “There's a problem here. Too many people rely on social assistance. So what we're going to do is provide a working supplement for those of you who can find jobs”—as if the major reason there's less employment on reserves is because of welfare.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: On the desire to do the early childhood development parental support piece, are you recommending that in families where just one parent works outside the home the expenses for early learning playschools and co-op nursery schools should be tax deductible?

Mr. Richard Shillington: Yes. I haven't thought much about the details, but for families that aren't eligible for the child care expense deductions—and this is not recognizing an employment-related expense—we could allow some form of tax credit, rather than a deduction, for a set of nursery school costs. When I got my pilot's licence, I was allowed to deduct that. One of my children just took an English as a second language course on the weekend, which is an eligible education deduction. It's not much of a stretch to make the fees for nursery school a form of education deduction.

The Chair: Providing you're teaching them how to fly.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: Maybe you would have some words on children with disabilities and tax.

Mr. Richard Shillington: I'm totally unprepared.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: But you're knowledgeable.

Mr. Richard Shillington: Three years ago I wrote a report on the tax treatment of disability for Andy Scott's task force on disability issues. One of the issues that comes back to me now is the medical expense tax credit. First of all, the medical expense tax credit is very ungenerous because you can only deduct the medical expenses to the extent that they exceed 3% of your net income. For a lot of families you're not going to get 25% of your costs back; you're going to get 10% of your costs back. Even if your costs are outrageous, you'll never get more than 25% maximum.

• 1630

So I'm sitting there, and I'm trying to buy drugs. I'm self-employed, so I have no drug plan. I have a child who, for whatever reason, needs some incredibly expensive drugs. I get the medical expense tax credit, so I'll get maybe 25%.

When an employer provides a drug plan to their employees, that's tax deductible to the employer. It's not a taxable benefit for the employee. So if you have a drug benefit through your employer, you would get 80% or 90% of the cost of your drugs covered. It's not a taxable benefit. Half of the money is coming out of your employer's pocket, and half of it is coming out of the taxpayer's pocket. People who are unorganized and don't work with major unions are stuck with 25%.

The proposal I remember making, despite how inadequate it was, was that the medical expense tax credit work with a prescribed list. Here are the things you're allowed to deduct. If it's not on the list, you can't deduct it. I remember recommending that there be a description of the types of costs you can deduct.

Something came through the courts just at that time where someone with, I think, cystic fibrosis won a tax issue so that they could deduct the cost of air conditioning, which was actually necessary for their mobility. But they actually had to go to tax court and deal with all of those issues.

The tax system is designed with the assumption that people are crooks and that people with disabilities in particular are crooks, since we have to have a set of rules—let me think—to prevent people from making....

Obviously these issues are not as big for the people who are setting tax laws, because they take care of themselves very nicely. I'll just tell you a very quick story. I was at a meeting with some people who run the drug plans. They were defending the fact that there are deductibles for the drug plans they administer in their provinces. These are the public drug plans. I asked this official from a province—and I won't name which province—is there a deductible for your drug plan? They said “Yes, we administer a program that has a deductible.” I said “No, for your drug plan, the plan you buy drugs on.” “Oh, no.” So the provincial officials had a drug plan for themselves that had no deductibles, but they had just finished arguing how deductibles were important to prevent abuse of the public drug plan. It's based on the assumption that those of us who design these programs for ourselves are honest and trustworthy and those who benefit from public programs are dishonest and untrustworthy.

The national child benefit makes no provision for any additional costs for children with disabilities.

If I had had a day's warning, I would have done better on the answer to that question.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: We'll have you back.

The Chair: I'd like to get back to an issue that was revived in conjunction with our noting in the all-party resolution the passing of the 10-year mark. It was interesting to get the detailed analytical response of the Premier of Ontario when he was confronted with the new poverty figures, which was: “Hogwash.” That was exactly what he said. That was all he said.

As you know better than anyone, there are at least four recognized ways of measuring child poverty. You've used one, for example, in producing your chart. I don't want to get into the virtues and merits of any particular system over another, except that obviously one can yield 20% of the population and the other can yield 5%, depending—

Mr. Richard Shillington: You can get it down to 3%.

• 1635

The Chair: The one thing I was going to ask you about child poverty, or poverty generally, was this. Given the fact that we had this ten-year framework, do some of the four or five, or however many measures there are, have a long enough and consistent enough life over a ten-year period that you could say, well, whether you're working off a 20% base or a 3% base, if you go back ten years and chart in a consistent manner, some of those measures are at least able to give you a trend, however much we might dispute the actual number or which measure you'd choose?

Mr. Richard Shillington: If you go back ten years, I don't think there's going to be much difference in the trend.

The Chair: Or I guess I'm saying the measures being in place. Where they there ten years ago too?

Mr. Richard Shillington: Well, if you take current measures and go back retrospectively—

The Chair: Yes, okay.

Mr. Richard Shillington: I know Campaign 2000 is releasing its Ontario report card today, and because of the hogwash comment—

The Chair: Yes.

Mr. Richard Shillington: —I'm going to emphasize, okay, if you don't like our using low-income cut-offs, that the number of children in families below $20,000 has tripled in the last decade in Ontario. Everybody understands—

The Chair: The number of children below $20,000.

Mr. Richard Shillington: The number of children below $20,000 a year, the $20,000 being adjusted, if we are allowed to do that.

The Chair: Right.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: You said they tripled?

Mr. Richard Shillington: Tripled.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: In Ontario?

Mr. Richard Shillington: In Ontario.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: Do you know about Quebec?

Mr. Richard Shillington: I don't have that in front of me. My apologies.

So that was part of my advice.

The Chair: Your advice was to pick a ten-year measure?

Mr. Richard Shillington: Well, no, the ten years is because of 1989—

The Chair: Right.

Mr. Richard Shillington: —but it was to use less than $20,000, because everybody understands less than $20,000. No reasonable person is going to argue that a child living in a family with an income of less than $20,000 has the same opportunities as a child in a family with an income of $40,000, $50,000 or $80,000. That is at least constrained.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: Richard, what about the people who said that's because of immigration or because the overall numbers are up?

Mr. Richard Shillington: Tripled? We haven't had that much immigration.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: I know that, but what's the difference in the denominator?

Mr. Richard Shillington: I'm the worst one to ask that. I have no interest in trying to say that this is another feature.

The one issue to keep in mind, and it's a valid point—

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: I just mean, can we get the number as a percentage?

Mr. Richard Shillington: Sure we could, if I had in front of me the report card that was released today. That's one way of handling the hogwash comment. But not—

The Chair: You're amongst friends, so we're looking for helpful suggestions here.

Mr. Richard Shillington: I think the one legitimate point in all of this public dance, if I can use that term, around poverty issues is that there are those who have the legitimate belief that the obligation of government is to feed, clothe, and shelter children and that is essentially the end of the obligation of government—and to educate. But, you see, I think the poverty line should measure whether or not we're meeting our commitments. So I'm interested in how children in low-income families are doing compared to other children.

That comes from a very personal motivation that says I think every child in this country should have as many opportunities as my children have. My children might disagree with that and think that's an awful thing to wish on the children of Canada, but it's basically found in the equality of opportunity. If you believe that equality of opportunity is the goal we're trying to assess here, then it's a relative measure. You're saying how well are poor children doing, and that will be relative over time.

Certainly if you go back 40 years, in any absolute sense, poverty rates have gone down. I hate saying this, because I know it's going to come back to haunt me, but I'll say it: Using today's absolute measures of poverty or the standard of living, the majority of families were poor right after the war if you just take today's low-income cut-off and do an inflation adjustment back. Right after the war, nobody expected families to have microwaves.

So on the debate around the low-income cut-off, Campaign 2000 keeps on being told that we are costing ourselves mightily by keeping to the low-income cut-offs, that we should basically surrender—Sarlo won—and move on.

• 1640

I don't mind moving to another poverty measure, as long as it's a poverty measure that is relative, that compares children at the lowest extreme to the norm. As you know, the market-basket measure being proposed for the government is not relative. It says here's a basket of goods, and over time it will be adjusted for inflation only, not for the norms of income or consumption. I wouldn't mind it so much if it actually were adjusted for average family incomes, but it's being adjusted for price only.

It's a statement that says we owe low-income children in this country a basket of goods; we don't owe them a share of the pie. So on principle, I wouldn't agree with a statistical measure that puts into place that kind of statement of obligations.

The Chair: I'll ask just one last question before we move on.

One of the constant criticisms of the national child benefit has been the clawback and also the lack of rigour in monitoring what the reinvestment framework is all about. As we move towards some kind of national action plan at the end of next year, and if that is to mean the creation of an early childhood development services fund or something like that, we obviously have to respect the primacy of the provinces and services and all that sort of stuff. I realize this may not be your preferred area of expertise, but do you see ways in which we could avoid the looseness on any kind of reinvestment framework? Are there ways we can do it without being—

Mr. Richard Shillington: Sure. We can do a better job than what we've done with the child benefit by having a baseline. We could have baseline information on how much provinces are spending through specific programs for which the major beneficiaries are children. Is Ontario spending more on low-income children now than it did three years ago? We have no way of knowing, because we don't know what they spent three years ago.

The Chair: It's knowable information—I mean knowable in the sense of if they wanted to.

Mr. Richard Shillington: Even then, if you want to do it interprovincially, there are lots of programs that one province will deliver through community services, and another province will deliver the same program through education. You can't just add up the education budget with the community services budget. To try to get it in any systematic way would require a fair bit of work.

If you're going to give money to the provinces for investing in children without knowing what they currently spend on children, then you really have no way of knowing if they are not just moving money from one pot to another.

Mrs. Carolyn Bennett: Depending on which one's being counted at the time.

Mr. Richard Shillington: Yes. You hear anecdotal rumours—and I don't know if these are true or not—that the Ontario government has been moving many programs into health so that it can say its health spending hasn't gone down. In a similar way, with social assistance, we say they have reinvested as long as they have this child care supplement, but if they're taking money out of other programs, the children aren't any better off.

The bottom line is we're supposed to be trying to make these children better off than they would be otherwise. So what you really need is some kind of baseline data.

[Translation]

The Chair: Mrs. Gagnon.

Mrs. Christiane Gagnon: There is a situation which is not denounced enough, namely the cuts to provincial transfer payments. Provinces cannot meet their obligations anymore and have had to reduce services. As a result, some people are worse off than before. I think that the before the government even thinks of taking over from the provinces by offering national services or implementing national programs, it should fix things which broke down in several sectors five or six years ago. We should begin by tackling issues such as the Canadian Health and Social Transfer, employment insurance, and indexing the GST and taxes for low-income families.

There's a cat and mouse game going on here. Is the federal government trying to outsmart the provinces? We must be vigilant since we all know how expensive overlap can be.

Many social groups have told me that the government is toying with them, and that it is also toying with the problem of child poverty.

• 1645

The reason there are poor children is because there are poor families. We have social policies, but the provinces are not receiving any funding anymore and the federal government is not meeting specific needs. The federal government should help the provinces. It's a little frightening to think of how the federal government has magically taken money from the provinces to give itself more leeway.

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: Yes. The federal government put some money into the child benefit over the last few years, and it's arguable that the cuts to federal transfers to the provinces had far more effect on low-income families. I've forgotten how many billion dollars were transferred from CAP to CHST, and there was the move replacing unemployment insurance by employment insurance. We do tend to think too much in terms of children as if they're isolated from their families. Obviously a child who has parents who are worried about their jobs and know that if they lost their jobs they wouldn't be eligible for employment insurance is not going to be insulated from those effects.

So certainly the federal government can't just point at the provinces. In fact it comes to my mind more and more that we didn't realize as much as we should have that when we went from CAP to the CHST, the importance of dropping the regulations, the requirement to meet needs regardless of the cause of the need.... We kept residency, the appeal process, and I've forgotten the other one. I gather there are still talks going on, where the federal government and the provinces are coming up with common objectives, which aren't quite standards, for the CHST.

I mentioned the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and Canada is signatory to the international covenant. In article 11 is the obligation to provide basic needs. It's absolutely clear that without the conditions in CAP, Canada is not compliant with that international covenant, unless you believe that section 7 of the charter, regarding security of the person, requires the provinces to meet needs. And all the lawyers for all the governments of Canada agree that section 7 only implies that police can't beat you to death, but if you're starving there is no obligation to help you.

So the conditions of CAP are absolutely critical, and they're gone and, I assume, won't be coming back.

[Translation]

The Chair: Madame St-Jacques.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: As you know, I co-chaired a committee on poverty which travelled across Canada. We heard from all kinds of people and realized that the problems were vast and deep-seated. When we draft our report, we will surely try to find short, medium and long-term solutions. Since these problems have been going on for a long time, they won't be solved overnight.

Do you have any suggestions on how to tackle child poverty? Could you give us some short, medium and long-term solutions? Or is that too much to ask?

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: Yes.

[Translation]

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: Are there any short-term solutions which might easily solve certain problems?

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: Well, there are just so many things that are critical. There's child care. It's $5 a day, from what I understand of what Quebec is doing—without federal money, I understand. Obviously other provinces could be doing the same thing, and maybe the federal government has to bribe other provinces into doing that.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: Can I stop you on that? Are you in agreement with a big national day care, or provincial, where each province is able to deliver each program of day care?

Mr. Richard Shillington: I don't think the children care.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: Maybe the children won't care, but it will be hard to arrive at a big national day care instead of provincial day care.

Mr. Richard Shillington: Well, I know. I just hate facing the reality of how this federal government has got itself so hamstrung on social policy. It's almost hopeless, frankly.

• 1650

If it has to be provincial child care, then you have to look at what the federal government can do to bribe the provinces into doing it. We all know that medicare was introduced without the immediate acceptance of Ontario and other provinces. They had to be bribed in with money. And medicare is clearly a provincial jurisdiction. But those were different times.

What you really need to make all of that happen is political leadership and political will. Canada has on occasion done things because it's the right thing to do, even though it's not politically popular. I think of bilingualism, despite my own limitations, and of capital punishment. I think we all know that the politically easy thing to do in both of those would be the contrary. But we've done things on occasion because of political will to do the right thing. So sometimes you have to have people saying, we're not going to leave social assistance out of this program, even though we know the politically easy thing to do is to leave them out.

The Chair: I have just one question. From almost a negotiating point of view, do you think it would be helpful in the upcoming budget for the federal government to put some money on the table—I'm not talking about the income side—first to help recognize and compensate Quebec for its leadership role in things like child care, which is costing them money because they can't make the child care deductions, and also to encourage the others to move faster? Do you think that's a good strategy?

Mr. Richard Shillington: I'm really not an expert in those areas. I don't know what's good strategy. As a similar answer, I'm not a politician and I don't know what it would take to have the provincial governments cooperate on this issue. I suspect the children don't care at all.

The Chair: I suspect you're right.

Well, if there are no further questions, I want to thank you very much on behalf of the subcommittee for coming before us. I think you've given us a wonderful start, and you've reminded us of the basic fundamentals on the tax side. It's been a most clear exposition and, as always, a treat to have you.

Mr. Richard Shillington: Thank you.

The Chair: We thank you, as a friend of the committee, for coming out and taking the whole thing.

[Translation]

Mrs. Gagnon.

Mrs. Christiane Gagnon: Mr. Shillington, I thought I heard you had written a paper on the study you did. Is that true or did you only prepare a brief?

[English]

Mr. Richard Shillington: Yes.

Mrs. Christiane Gagnon: May I have it?

Mr. Richard Shillington: No.

I wrote a document over the summer on the tax treatment of one-earner and two-earner families. I gave a copy to your researcher. If he wants to have it translated, then you.... It's a public document. It's going to be published in a journal, but you're free to share it; it's not at all confidential.

[Translation]

The Chair: We will have it translated and will distribute it to you in the language you prefer.

Mrs. Christiane Gagnon: In the language of Shakespeare.

The Chair: In the language of your choice.

[English]

Okay. I'll see you on Tuesday at 11 o'clock, hopefully. We'll give the details...and we hope lunch will be involved.

The meeting is adjourned.