Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Many people know too well that the poverty trail has many paths and once a person does start to travel down those paths, whether they’ve been born into it or they quickly found themselves in this torrent, it’s quite a difficult challenge if not almost impossible to get out. It’s like swimming through quicksand. The more they struggle, the more they find how difficult the challenges can be. Often these challenges can be lonesome. But when you are the person trying to
take care of your family, the struggle becomes more than just the road less travelled.
Poverty is not an adventure people look fondly back to and recall and think of themselves as the journey of, boy, I can’t recall a better time. These are journeys where the heavy struggle is carried by the children as well as the parent, often in some cases single of parents such as mothers.
The government has done many good things to help, but I think they can do much, much more. It has many tools within what I would call its grasp, or certainly what we would define as their toolbox of options. As we look around and we look at some of the options that we use to help alleviate the throes and punishment of poverty, because no one wants that type of thing, poverty is something that we must help others get out of.
But we must enact better resources, such as our maintenance enforcement orders. I’ve often called these folks deadbeat dads, and that’s who they are sometimes, and the system will define them as debtors. Often deadbeat dads avoid making payments and they think they’re punishing their former spouse. That may be true in some form, but truly the bottom line is they’re punishing the children that belong to them. This is a terrible step where they think that there is a means to the end. They’re punishing their children and keeping them in poverty situations.
We must be doing everything within our grasp, within our toolbox, to ensure that we track these folks down and get them to pay. We keep these families struggling and, if anything, we’re supporting the poverty cycle that they live in by not fighting as hard as we can for these families.
Sometimes we find these deadbeat dads working and then we run into the struggle as wondering why they’re not tracked down and maintenance enforcement orders implemented as quickly as possible. I’ve seen people avoid $100 payment orders and I’ve often wondered why. Again, they think they’re punishing their ex-spouse, but really they’re punishing the children that they should be loving them and doing everything they can for them.
In closing, I will certainly have questions for the Minister later today, but I’ll be talking about the Ontario government’s website. It says www.goodparentspay. They also have wanted parents' posters that point this out, but all of that will be revealed in my questions later today. Thank you.