Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First off, I fully support this motion, and I appreciate the Member for bringing this forward. I think we’ve all seen experiences around us where cases haven’t worked out as they’ve dreamt upon, where sharing children hasn’t always worked out through the courts and they’ve deemed that one parent should have rights over the other parent. I truly think it’s unfortunate that that’s happened.

I think every parent has a right to have access to their children. Every parent — willing, of course — has the right to make sure they’re there in the lives of their children. For one reason or another, I can’t imagine that being the first thought: trying to decide where the children should go and separating access as a normal philosophy or formula for doing business.

You don’t have to look too far to see the struggles that parents go through who don’t have that type of access to their children. It’s demoralizing; it probably leads to depression and probably to a whole school of things. The fact is, they deserve the right to their children. Now, for the children’s sake, equally they deserve the right to the other parent who has been stolen from them.

I don’t think in any way that the courts may have been thinking it was probably better this way or that way, but the question is: who is putting the children first? That needs to be the principal question every time this situation comes up. I think that relationship is stolen from any child when they’re fostered in the situation by saying they go with one parent or the other. They lose that.

Mr. Speaker, the model designed by the courts by pitting parent against parent causes such a caustic atmosphere. They’re struggling and saying things maybe they don’t mean or shouldn’t say or didn’t need to say, and in the end they’re just fighting for control over the child so they have access. What model is that for the child or children to see? That’s not a model we need to be raising our children under.

We need to have a system that says both parents will always have equal rights, both parents will always play a role in the child’s life and both parents are recognized as critical to the fabric of their future. That engagement needs to have intervention right at the highest level, and that is our courts, to make that decision early on.

Mr. Speaker, as a parent who shares love for his child with his wife, we struggle very hard to ensure that everything’s a balance. As we who are parents all know, in the sense of trying to make life work, it’s a struggle on a good day. Can you imagine taking those rights away, and now one parent has to live somewhere else, fostering that relationship? It almost becomes both unbearable and difficult to comprehend. Like I say, I really can appreciate the struggles these parents who don’t have access must be going through.

Again, I’ll be supporting this motion. I want to thank Mr. Ramsay for bringing it forward and, of course, Mr. Abernethy for seconding it, because it speaks wholeheartedly that these Members, as well as probably others, are fully committed behind those principles of equal and shared parenting of children. I certainly am.