Bill C-220 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Canada Labour Code (compassionate care leave)

This enactment amends the Canada Labour Code to extend the period during which an employee may take compassionate care leave.

Canada Labour Code

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the member touched on the question of the EI compassionate care leave. I am wondering whether, in his negotiations with the government, he has any kind of update for the House in terms of what they may be planning to do to complement these changes to the Canada Labour Code, if they pass, to ensure that people can take this time and be able to access their employment insurance benefits at the same time so that it is not only people who already have the resources to afford that time away from work who can benefit from this expanded bereavement leave.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Mr. Speaker, that really has been the key question all along, about getting that next step, the EI benefits, to follow the bereavement leave. The member for Elmwood—Transcona has been supportive throughout this process and has also asked those key questions throughout in trying to get this to the next stage. I have no updates on my end, unfortunately. I hope we will see something soon, if not in the budget, but I hope we will be able to move that more quickly. The member is right that it is a logical next step that needs to happen, EI supports to follow along the bereavement supports.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague for Edmonton Riverbend has been absolutely exemplary in terms of this private member's bill. When people watch question period, they often get a very false sense of what politicians do, who we are and the way law-making works. This bill is a tremendous example of how people can cross party lines, work together and create a good piece of legislation. It is an important testament to how committees of the House work. It is an important testament to how the Minister of Labour and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour can work with a member who sponsored a private bill, and how people from all parties can combine to improve that bill.

I want to thank the member for Edmonton Riverbend because he never made this a bill about himself. He never made this a Conservative bill. He made this a Canadian bill.

I want to thank the Minister of Labour who worked so closely with us, in terms of understanding that when a private member's bill comes to Parliament, members should not reject it because it comes from somebody from a different party, but rather should work with that member to see how we can create better legislation.

I also want to thank the member for Elmwood—Transcona, who has been a constant champion of this issue and who is always a pleasure to work with.

I would also like to thank the member for Thérèse-De Blainville, a colleague with whom we can always work to improve legislation.

Today, we are studying a good bill, one that will meet the needs of Canadians across the country.

The member's original bill talked about caregivers. Especially during this pandemic, we have all seen the heroic role of caregivers who, after seeing family members become sick with COVID, have taken care of them in a way that puts themselves at risk. We have seen people take caregiving leave for years to help family members with cancer, heart conditions or other illnesses that are profoundly difficult to deal with. These people are heroes. The idea that our current law would send them right back to work, in the week when the person who they were caring for died, seems heartless. The member listened to groups across the country who said people need more time when a loved on we are taking care of dies. People not only need to plan a funeral or, if one is Jewish, to perhaps have a shiva, but to take care of the will and consoling other loved ones like children who, maybe for the first time, have experienced death. People need more time psychologically to deal with this before going back to work.

After speaking to the Minister of Labour, she and I agreed that this was an incredible idea, but it should apply to more Canadians. People who have been on bereavement leave up until now have five days, three of which are paid and two of which are unpaid, to deal with a death of an immediate family member. That is not enough. When somebody who is so close to a person passes away, that person needs more than five days to deal with all of the things surrounding death.

My dad passed away last year after having COVID and then having a stroke. For the first time in my life, I had to deal with things like going with my mom to purchase a burial plot, to arrange a funeral, to make sure that my brother who is in Toronto could get back to Montreal for the funeral, to make sure that the will was notarized and in a place that we could access, and to deal with bank accounts and all kinds of things. While I am not really in a job where I can take time off, it would always be nice to know that I could. I sympathize so much with those incredible groups that the member for Edmonton Riverbend brought to the committee to talk about this issue.

When someone has a sudden death in the family or while taking care of a loved one, they need more time. The end result was that we talked to the member for Edmonton Riverbend and we talked to our colleagues in the other parties. What we decided is that everyone should get 10 days, whether for loss of an immediate family member under bereavement leave or whether someone was on compassionate care leave or leave related to critical illness in terms of taking care of someone. Everybody should get those 10 days.

The HUMA did excellent work. Everyone talked to one another and everyone collaborated. Our chairman, the member for Charlottetown, did a fantastic job chairing the meeting and we were able to bring a bill to Parliament that deserves unanimous support. It is a bill that should get to the Senate as quickly as possible and it is one that should be adopted by this Parliament before it finishes, whenever that happens.

I am in strong support of getting the bill to the Senate as soon as possible. Again, I want to thank all the members who restored my faith in the way Parliament can work.

Once again, I would like to thank my colleague from Thérèse-De Blainville, my colleague from Elmwood—Transcona, the member for Charlottetown and especially the member for Edmonton Riverbend, who did an extraordinary job with this bill.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to reiterate that my party, the Bloc Québécois, will support Bill C-220.

I was not able to listen to the colleagues who spoke before me, but I think the bill's sponsor had two goals in mind. First of all, the bill is meant to recognize workers who take compassionate care leave to care for a loved one, under either employment insurance or the Canada Labour Code. Second, and most importantly, the bill makes it possible for workers to keep their jobs when they have to miss work to take care of someone.

Pursuant to the Canada Labour Code, workers have access to 28 weeks of compassionate care leave. Through the EI program, eligible workers can take 26 weeks of compassionate care leave. In both cases, workers can access these leaves only if the person they are caring for is expected to die in the near future.

In these situations, people often provide care for weeks at a time and sometimes provide end-of-life care. In some cases, the person receiving care may die long before the end of the leave. The rules of the Canada Labour Code are clear and require the individual to return to work after the death of the person receiving care.

Imagine someone who has had to support a sick family member and even drained all their savings doing it. This often happens to family caregivers, if I can use that as a general term. They give their time to support a loved one, which is very demanding, but as soon as the loved one dies, they are forced to go back to work. We do not think anyone should be forced into that situation. The change proposed in the bill is intended to ensure that each of those caregivers is granted additional leave to give them time to grieve without losing their jobs.

The member who introduced the bill had an opportunity to appear before the committee, and I think he also raised this issue in his own province. With the amendment we proposed, we set a new bar by increasing bereavement leave to 10 days, while of course setting out a time frame to bring the agreements in line with the Canada Labour Code. This proves that we value workers who go back to work and ensures that there is no arbitrary treatment and no layoffs or dismissals when the worker has to go back to work following the death of the sick person they were caring for. We changed the number of weeks and days that will be allowed.

We also had a chance to hear from another witness whose name I cannot remember. We spoke about bereavement. It is true that this is something we do not talk about a lot in our society, but the grieving period is very important. It is a period we must go through, so it should happen under the best possible conditions.

It is important that we make sure caregivers have this 10-day leave in the event of a death. It will give them time to make all the funeral arrangements, but it will also give them time for themselves, time to process what happened. That will be allowed, and no one will have to wonder whether they need to return to work early. Caregivers will be able to decide how much time they need before going back to work, depending on their situation.

That was the objective of this bill, which did not require major legislative amendments to the Canada Labour Code. However, deciding to change the rules is an important change for all those concerned, so I invite all parliamentarians to support it.

I believe that we, the committee members, dealt with this bill very efficiently after it passed at second reading. We studied it quickly and came back with a recommendation that is entirely favourable.

I also want to talk about what is going on with caregivers. Even though we raise awareness about this during national caregiver week, we tend to forget that, in Canada alone, 30% of the workforce are caregivers, which is quite a lot. The majority of these caregivers—54% in Canada and even more, 58%, in Quebec—are women.

These people are family members and friends. They decide to give their time to support someone and, as I said earlier, that takes a lot of energy.

We could take a more comprehensive look at the rules around compassionate care leave and how those rules are written, but I think the main purpose of the member's bill was not to change the number of weeks of leave, but to improve conditions for grieving caregivers. We needed to fix things so that people were not forced to return to work as soon as the loved one died, and that is what we have done. This bill will improve the situation by amending the Canada Labour Code.

The important thing to remember is that the caregiver will keep their job if the sick person dies, and they may need a few extra weeks, even if they have not used up all the weeks they were given. There is no way of knowing if or when the sick person will die. We hope it will not happen, but often it does.

The pandemic has highlighted this reality and given us an opportunity to debate the issue of caregivers. We have been able to look at how these people who are being asked to do so much, who generously give their time and want to help others, might need to be supported through various other programs. During the pandemic, we saw how difficult it was for them to manage.

Even though this is a modest contribution that we as parliamentarians can make to improve the Canada Labour Code, I should note that for the person who came to testify at committee, it was one more step in the right direction, a way of recognizing that caregivers also need time to care for themselves and to properly mourn their loss with dignity, just as they cared for people with dignity.

I may not have used all of my speaking time, but I just wanted to make it clear that it is important to unanimously support this bill to amend the Canada Labour Code.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, work is what makes the world go around. Work produces buildings, buses, tools, a great meal at a restaurant or a concert. These are all ways that people improve the world around them. It is work that clothes and feeds children and takes care of our elders, whether it is in the home or in personal care homes. However, there can be a tendency to value work, particularly paid work, to the point where we forget about other important things in life, like the relationships we have or the effect of the loss of a loved one in the case of Bill C-220.

It is a lesson that the pandemic has very much taught us when we consider some of the culture around going to work when sick, for instance, in the pandemic. We have a tendency to put paid work up on such a high pedestal that other important things like not spreading a virus to members of our communities suddenly do not get the priority they should. As a society, we sometimes have a tendency to put paid work on such a high pedestal that we neglect the other important things in life, whether it is the health of our friends and colleagues in the workplace or ensuring that our colleagues, friends and ourselves take the time we need to grieve in the event of losing somebody really important.

The great virtue of this bill is that it creates a little more space for that kind of humanity to enter into the Canadian economy, to recognize that work is very important and paid work is also very important, but there are other important things in a human life that need to be given their proper due with the time it takes to give them that due. We heard some examples earlier in the debate of the kinds of tasks that have to be accomplished, the kind of work that needs to be done when we lose loved ones as well as the importance of taking the time to grieve and appreciate both the loss of loved ones and the gift they gave in their time with us.

That is why New Democrats are quite pleased and proud to support this initiative. We look forward to follow-up from the government to ensure that the employment insurance compassionate care leave is modified appropriately to ensure that this gift of time for those who have suffered loss is not just a gift for the wealthy, those who can afford it and those who already have the resources to take the extra time without worrying about their rent or putting meals on the table. That is why following up on those employment insurance reforms is going to be very important.

I hope that some of the non-partisanship around this issue, which recognizes the need to take a step back from a sometimes frantic work culture to recognize important things about the human experience, might equally be applied to an effort to get 10 legislated days of paid sick leave for Canadian workers in the same spirit of recognizing that sometimes paid work is not the most important thing. Even though it continues to be important, it is not always the most important thing, and our economic structure has to allow for people to take that time out.

I look forward to this kind of non-partisan co-operation and collaboration and some leadership from government when it comes to the EI sickness benefit, which currently is only 15 weeks. The House of Commons has stated its intention very clearly on a number of occasions, including once by unanimous consent, that the period ought to be expanded to 50 weeks. It was a campaign commitment of the government to expand it to 26 weeks. We need to move forward with that.

What we have seen in the context of this bill is what it can look like when parties come to the table in good faith, recognize some of these things and try to move the ball forward. We wish to see that same spirit of collaboration and swift passage when it comes to other important reforms that may not be particularly about bereavement, but are part and parcel of what I take to be the most important insight behind this, which is that, yes, paid work is important, but it is not the only thing that is important.

We need an economy that recognizes those other things that are important, and we need to give some space and room to those things so people can live a life that recognizes the importance of all those other things and the kinds of work that happen in our society that are not paid but are nevertheless very important to people's lives and to the communities we all live in.

It is in that spirit that New Democrats have collaborated in order to have this bill go as far as it can under the existing rules of Parliament and to try to get it through as quickly as we can so this change might take effect before this Parliament expires.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to speak on this very important bill. Bill C-220, an act that would amend the Labour Code regarding compassionate care leave is one that, if passed, would make a major difference for so many Canadians at one of the most difficult moments of their lives.

Most Canadians have been a situation where they have lost a loved one or have experienced grief due to the loss of a loved one. Anyone who has experienced knows there is no way of getting around certain things. At the very moment one loses someone so important to them, who has likely been a major part of their life for so long, one has to take care of arrangements one hopes one would never have to make.

It goes without saying that work is the last thing on one's mind when they are going through the death of a family member. There is no way to be productive when one is experiencing such a loss, at least not so soon, and yet grieving employees often return to work before they are ready. Doing so only has a negative impact on their work performance, productivity and careers. We are talking about absences, career interruptions and unplanned resignations.

Our government can do more to support grieving employees. One thing we can do is provide time off so that employees can deal with the stress of losing a loved one. Bill C-220 could provide more time. In fact, this piece of legislation was strong in the beginning and is even stronger now with the amendments that have been adopted.

What is compassionate care leave? Allow me to explain. Compassionate care leave is unpaid leave under part III of the Canada Labour Code that allows an employee to take up to 28 weeks of leave within a 52-week period to provide care and support to a family member who has a serious medical condition with a significant risk of death within a 26-week period, as attested to in a medical certificate.

Employees on compassionate care leave could also be eligible for corresponding employment insurance compassionate care benefits for up to 26 weeks. Currently, compassionate care leave as well as corresponding employment insurance benefits end on the last day of the week in which the person being cared for dies.

Our government recognizes that we have a role to play in providing workers in federally regulated workplaces with the support they need following the death of a family member.

The government provides this assistance mainly under part III of the Canada Labour Code, which provides for a number of types of leave and other support measures for employees.

For example, part III of the code provides for up to five days of bereavement leave, including three paid days for employees who have completed three consecutive months of continuous employment. This leave may be taken during the period that begins on the day on which the death occurs and ends six weeks after the latest of the days on which any funeral, burial or memorial service of that immediate family member occurs.

Next, there is personal leave of up to five days, including three paid days for employees who have completed three consecutive months of continuous employment. It can be taken for various reasons, particularly in case of an emergency, such as the death of family member.

There is also up to 17 weeks of leave without pay for medical reasons if the employee is unable to work for health reasons, including psychological trauma or stress caused by the death of a family member.

Also, there is a right to request flexible work arrangements, which allows employees to request a change to the terms and conditions of their employment related to the number of hours they work, their work schedule and the location of their work. Employees who have completed six months of continuous employment with an employer are entitled to make this request.

Let us get back to Bill C-220 and its amendments.

Bill C-220, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code with regard to bereavement leave, is now stronger and more equitable, and that is thanks to some important amendments. These amendments were recently passed at the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities. The amended Bill C-220 would extend bereavement leave by five days, for a total of 10 days, as opposed to extending compassionate care leave, as the bill was originally drafted. This would ensure that all federally regulated employees can get additional time off if they lose a loved one, regardless of whether they are on leave at the time.

The adopted amendments also ensure that a broader group of employees would be entitled to take bereavement leave. Employees on compassionate care leave or leave related to critical illness who are caring for a non-immediate family member who passes away would also be entitled to the 10 days of bereavement leave. This secondary amendment was necessary because those employees concurrently only take bereavement leave when it pertains to an immediate family member. This is not the case for compassionate care leave or leave related to critical illness. The definition of “family member” under bereavement leave does not include non-immediate family members, whereas under compassionate care leave and leave related to critical illness it does. Without the adopted amendment, employees who take compassionate care leave or leave related to critical illness in respect of a non-immediate family member who passes away would not be entitled to bereavement leave.

As amended, Bill C-220 would support all employees in dealing with the loss of a family member, not only those who are on compassionate care leave. This is in line with the government's commitment to provide leave for those who need it most. No Canadian should have to choose between grieving the loss of a loved one and working.

We are very pleased that the amendments were accepted, as they make Bill C-220 more equitable and more consistent in how the government supports employees who experience the death of a loved one.

Thanks to the amendments we adopted, Bill C-220 will give federally regulated private sector employees who lose a loved one more time off to grieve and attend to practicalities, such as making funeral arrangements and sharing the news with family and friends.

This is why it is really great to see that all parties seem to be in support of this bill. Like my colleague before me, I am very happy that our Conservative colleague who came forward with this bill did so in such a non-partisan fashion. I am glad that all parliamentarians are working together to make sure Canadians can properly grieve, have the chance to grieve when they need to, and not be negatively impacted in the workplace.

With that, I invite my colleagues to vote in favour of Bill C-220 as amended so we can support Canadian workers from coast to coast to coast.

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege for me to have the opportunity to participate in this debate. This is my sixth year as the member of Parliament representing the great people of Nepean, and in these six years, only a few times have I seen members of all political parties, belonging to various political spectrums and with different ideologies, come together to work as one collaborative team. We did so to produce this legislative product, and I am so privileged to participate in the debate today.

We all agree that losing someone we love is very difficult, to say the least. Time is necessary for grieving and for taking care of things such as planning a funeral and contacting banks and service providers. Having to deal with all of this can make things even more difficult, especially if one has to think about returning to work. To quote Kelly Masotti, vice-president of advocacy for the Canadian Cancer Society, “Imagine being a caregiver every day to your loved one, managing their day-to-day care and, following their passing, being expected to return to work immediately afterwards”. She also said, “Family members, potential recipients of compassionate care leave, may need support as they grieve the loss of a loved one and try to manage numerous strains and stresses on their mental health.”

It is our responsibility as the government to continuously work to make sure that our labour standards reflect our country's evolving workplaces. It is our responsibility to provide workers with the support they need when they need it.

With its adopted amendments, Bill C-220 now has the potential to provide workers with more of the support they need when they lose someone they love, and we are not the only ones to think so. To quote Ms. Masotti one more time, “The proposed bill does just that. It amends the existing framework to better meet the needs of Canadians, to be more practical and to address grief and bereavement.” Moreover, as Mr. Paul Adams from the Canadian Grief Alliance said, Bill C-220, “will create a right for a significantly large number of Canadians to a more generous period to grieve, to collect themselves and to rejoin the world of work.”

In recent years, the government has made several changes to the Canada Labour Code to modernize labour standards. Some of these changes include improving existing leaves and introducing new ones to better support grieving workers. Part III of the Canada Labour Code now provides for a number of leaves that employees can use following the death of a family member. For example, we increased bereavement leave from three to five days. An employee can take this leave during the period that begins on the day on which the death occurs. The right to this leave ends six weeks after the latest of the days on which any funeral, burial or memorial service of the immediate family member occurs. The first three days of leave must be paid if the employee has completed three continuous months of employment. All employees are entitled to five unpaid days of bereavement leave, regardless of their length of service.

We also introduced a new personal leave of up to five days, of which three days are paid for employees with three months of continuous employment. The employee can take this personal leave for various reasons, including in the event of an urgent situation such as the death of a family member.

Finally, employees have access to an unpaid medical leave of up to 17 weeks. The employee can take this leave if he or she is unable to work due to health reasons, including psychological trauma or stress resulting from the death of a family member. We made all these changes to make sure that federally regulated private sector employees have access to a robust and modern set of labour standards.

As for employment insurance, since 2015 we have made substantial legislative changes to better support families. We made changes to make EI benefits for caregivers more flexible, inclusive and easier to access. We also amended the Canada Labour Code in order to ensure that employees have access to job-protected leave when they avail themselves of the enhanced EI benefits.

In 2017, we introduced a benefit that allows eligible family caregivers to receive up to 15 weeks of income support to provide care for an adult family member who is critically ill or injured. In addition, immediate and extended family members of children who are critically ill now have access to up to 35 weeks of benefits that were previously available only to parents.

There is also the compassionate care benefit, which provides up to 26 weeks of benefits to individuals who are away from work to care for or support a family member who has a serious medical condition with a significant risk of death in the next 26 weeks.

As I said earlier, it is our responsibility as the Government of Canada to continuously work to make sure that our employment insurance benefits and labour standards reflect our country's evolving workplaces. To do so, we have always worked with all of our partners.

The bill before us today represents an opportunity for all of us together to provide workers with the support they need when they need it. Now Canadian workers need this bill to pass. For over a year now, too many Canadians have been losing loved ones to COVID-19. Too many Canadians have been grieving, while at the same time trying to deal with the economic hardship and all of the practical business that comes along with that.

We are making sure that all federally regulated employees can get additional time off in the event they lose a loved one, regardless of whether they are on leave at the time of death.

[The Deputy Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Before we go to the next speaker, I will let him know there is about six or seven minutes remaining in the time for private members' business. I will let him know when we get close to that time. Of course, he will have the remaining portion of his 10 minutes when the House gets back to debate on the question.

The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank all of the members who have spoken today. It certainly is rewarding to see so many people from across the aisle not just work in the bipartisan fashion we have seen through this piece of legislation, but be extremely complimentary of each other in their ability to do that. I think it was the member for Elmwood—Transcona who said in his remarks that he hopes that it serves as an opportunity to see beyond partisan lines sometimes so that we can continue in the spirit of moving legislation forward like this.

It is an honour for me to add some remarks to this piece of legislation as well, particularly with what has been going on over the last year with COVID-19. I lost my father-in-law in the late fall of 2020. Losing a loved one is incredibly difficult right now, given the circumstances, if that person is in the hospital suddenly toward the end of their life. It truly has been a struggle and there is not a better time for a piece of legislation like this to come forward than right now, given everything that has been happening.

I think that we can all agree that workers who experience the loss of a loved one can feel shock and grief in addition to having their well-being and effectiveness at work impacted. Quite often the amount of time that people are expected to receive off, or are expected to rebound in, after the loss of a loved one is extremely short, in terms of what is expected of people and based on what we know that people get. We can all agree that more time is quite often needed.

I would point out that our government has taken steps to ensure that workers who experience a tragic event have supports in place for them. We brought in a number of leaves and other protections for employees in federally regulated workplaces, as some of my colleagues have said, following the death of a family member. These included extending the bereavement leave to five days and introducing five days for personal leave. Of course that is with respect to federally regulated workplaces.

That is one of the unique circumstances that the federal government finds itself in. Through acts of Parliament, we are responsible for so many people who work for the federal government: for making sure they are given the resources that they need from a human resources perspective and from a support perspective. We are also responsible for putting forward and implementing legislation that impacts people who are beyond the scope of being directly employed by the federal government.

Although the measures that I just mentioned were brought into place by the federal government, this piece of legislation seeks to fill a huge gap in terms of the workplace outside of and beyond the federal government. To that end, I applaud the member for bringing forward this piece of legislation.

The efforts that we did introduce together, collectively, were the recent changes provided the right to a request for flexible work arrangements in the existing 17 weeks of unpaid medical leave. These demonstrate our commitment, in my opinion, to protecting Canadian workers when they experience a tragedy. However, as I indicated, there is still more work to be done, and it is for that reason that the government supports Bill C-220, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code (bereavement leave).

The amendments that have been spoken about today help to ensure that caregivers who have suffered a loss have more time to grieve and focus on practical necessities, such as funeral planning.

I mentioned earlier that in the fall of last year, my father-in-law passed away. It was not sudden. It was several months coming, but nonetheless, the planning and everything one needs to do at that time can truly become overwhelming. Therefore, it becomes extremely important to make sure that time is given and people have the resources they need in order to go through that process without worrying about what it means to their employment.

[The Deputy Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands will have four minutes remaining in time for his remarks when the House next gets back to debate on the question.

The time provided for the consideration of Private Members' Business has now expired and the order is dropped to the bottom of the order of precedence on the Order Paper.

The House resumed from April 13 consideration of the motion that Bill C-220, An Act to amend the Canada Labour Code (bereavement leave), be read the third time and passed.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to be the first to speak tonight.

First of all, I would like to note that International Workers Day was celebrated last week. In light of that, I take great interest in Bill C-220, which we are debating today, because it is part of the labour movement's long-standing struggle for the right to take leave to care for a sick family member.

To give a little background, this is an issue that concerns me for two reasons. First, when I was working in the—

[The Deputy Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

I will just interrupt the hon. member briefly to ask him to check something. I do not think the microphone on his headset is on. I think he is using the microphone on his computer.

Now that he has fixed the problem, I will ask him to continue.

The hon. member for Lac‑Saint‑Jean.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

This is an issue that concerns me for two reasons. First, when I was working in the film industry, I was very active in the union movement as a representative of the Association québécoise des techniciens et des techniciennes de l'image et du son and as an elected member of its board of directors.

Second, in my immediate family, we had to care for a sick loved one. I know the reality of families who are struggling to get by because they want to provide quality of life for their sick or dying loved ones. This Parliament has a duty to act for workers.

I just want to take a moment to thank the hon. member for Edmonton Riverbend. Going against some of his colleagues took some courage. I support the spirit of this bill, which I understand is intended to give caregivers more time before they have to return to work after the death of a family member. This would be done by amending the Canada Labour Code to allow people who take compassionate care leave to postpone their return to work by a few days after the death of a family member. The additional days would be provided based on the period between the start of the leave and the death of the family member.

The Bloc Québécois believes that it makes sense to let workers have a healthy employment relationship and not to have to choose between two bad situations. Taking care of a sick family member is already extremely hard. When that person dies, the caregiver may be torn between relief, guilt and sadness. It should never be acceptable in a country like Canada to be forced to choose between one's job and caring for a loved one who is ill.

This bill applies directly to caregivers providing end-of-life care for a loved one. The Bloc Québécois has always believed family caregivers play a central role both in the lives of the people they support and for society as a whole. Many groups are calling on the government to recognize the importance of their role. One of those groups is Quebec's L'Appui, which believes as we do that recognition of family caregivers results in better access to resources and improved quality of life.

In Quebec, more than a quarter of caregivers work and are therefore especially vulnerable because they have to make sure to bring in at least some income while caring for their loved one. According to a survey by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Canadians, and I would add Quebeckers, who help care for a loved one spend an average of $430 per month performing caregiving responsibilities. Three-quarters say they have no choice but to make financial sacrifices. According to the Regroupement des aidants naturels du Québec, caregivers spend an average of $7,600 per year on the person they care for, regardless of their initial income level, and 20% of caregivers are financially insecure.

According to L'Appui, in Quebec alone, 1.5 million people reported providing at least one hour of care a week, and 2.2 million people provided care or emotional support for a loved one or helped them go to medical appointments, shop for groceries, get around or fill out paperwork.

One of the main problems is that about one-third of caregivers who provide at least one hour of care a week do not recognize themselves as caregivers. The same is true for 20% of caregivers who provide more than 10 hours of care a week. Most Quebeckers and Canadians are not aware of the resources available to them. They are easing the burden on the health care system without even realizing it. It is only right that we take action to recognize that reality.

My colleagues will find all my figures a little annoying, but they are important, so here are some more. According to the Regroupement des aidants naturels du Québec, no less than 85% of elder care is provided by family caregivers. This means that if a person needs 22 hours of care, the family caregiver will work 16.5 of those hours. Our neighbours, friends and constituents who give so much of themselves for their loved ones have to contend with a lack of resources for in-home services, wait times for residential spaces and fragmented care.

As a quick aside, I would like to point out that the only reason this problem exists in social services in Quebec and the provinces is the lack of resources. The lack of resources exists because one of the two levels of government responsible for the well-being of our constituents is not doing enough. No one will be surprised to learn that the problem is right here, in this very Parliament.

Right now, there is nothing more important than supporting the health care system. For the federal government, this means increasing health transfers. We are grappling with a health crisis, and the government must collaborate, as the House called on it to do in a motion moved by the Bloc Québécois last December. Health transfers also help provide effective and adequately funded services to improve the health and life expectancy of people who are ill, and to support the invaluable work of family caregivers.

I actually have some more figures to support that. To cover the hours worked by family caregivers would cost between $4 billion and $10 billion, and 1.2 million full-time professionals would have to be hired. Basically, these dedicated people are saving the health care systems of Quebec and the provinces astronomical amounts of money. That is the end of my little aside.

Getting back to the bill, I have noticed that, rather than improving the employment insurance program, federal governments prefer to lower premiums, which just diminishes any leeway that would have allowed for improvements.

These lower premiums do more good for big companies than for small businesses and workers. Should Bill C‑220 pass, we will have to monitor how it affects the fund. While generous social programs are always welcome, we as parliamentarians have a duty to future generations to ensure that these generous programs are sustainable. I am sure that the government will be able to make sure of this in due course.

I want to share a quote from a speech I made this past fall:

Millions of people expect us to do our utmost for them. They want us to do our job better than ever, and they do not expect us to give lessons to anyone. Doing our job means reforming EI to fix the flaws we have been criticizing for so long. Doing our job means encouraging people to go back to work while reassuring them about their financial future, giving seniors what they need to make ends meet, providing the promised aid to farmers, and giving Quebec and the provinces the health care money that is rightfully theirs. Doing our job means respecting the democracy that has brought us here and providing enough time to do our work.

I think this still rings true today.

As my time is almost up, I want to come back to one last point. It is the question I always come back to. The question we must ask ourselves is: Who do we work for?

That is what really matters. We work for the people who put their trust in us to represent them and to manage their hard-earned money. As members of Parliament, we must ensure that the treatment of vulnerable people and their caregivers constantly improves. That is part of the reason many people in the House went into politics.

I commend the sincere commitment of my colleague from Edmonton Riverbend, who, as we know, has been fighting this battle for many years. To all the caregivers, I hope that the House will make the right decision and move forward with the bill.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to rise tonight in this virtual Parliament to talk about Bill C-220 on addressing the issue of compassionate care, which is a huge issue. In 2014, I pushed a national palliative care strategy and spoke with people across the country on its importance. We had all-party support. We are still waiting to see the Liberals actually follow through on some of these key promises.

We are talking about the most vulnerable part in the lives of any Canadian family, and the death of a loved one is a life-changer for those who are left behind. It can be traumatic or it can be healing. It can be a real moment of tenderness and it can also tear families apart. I have seen families in my office completely stressed out, almost broken, over economic insecurity. Then when I start to ask them questions, I realize it is because the woman has had to leave her job to look after a dying mother or sister and the stress on family is incredible.

There have been changes to the Canada Labour Code that allow Canadians to take job-protected leave of up to 28 weeks, but the way the code is written, if a person someone is looking after dies then the leave period ends on the last day of the week in which the death occurs. It means if a loved one, a husband or a child dies on a Friday, a person is expected to report back on Monday. That is not good enough because we know some of the real trauma after a death is having to make arrangements and dealing with the finances. It is enormous for whoever has to take that on.

This bill would give up to one or two extra weeks, and we support that as New Democrats. The failing of this bill, though, is that it would fall then to people who can afford to take unpaid time off. We believe we have to change the EI provisions so people can be compensated if they have to take time off to look after a loved one.

I think of my sister Kathleen. The table at a restaurant where the laughter was the loudest is where Kathleen was. When we knew it was really time to go home, Kathleen would be asking for one more song to be sung or say that we should have more drink or tell one more story. Kathleen had a fire for life, but I have never seen someone thrown over the cliff of death so many times. She crawled back determined and faced death down with the determination that would have made Doc Holliday weep. She never blinked, and she had it really rough.

Kathleen, as tough as she was, needed people there with her at key times. I tried to be a good brother over the years, but I did know Kathleen would not call me when she needed someone to go to the hospital with her. She called her sister, Mary, and Mary would drive over 500 kilometres to be there at those meetings with the doctors because these issues cannot be heard alone, especially when one is facing stage IV cancer. Someone needs to be there to help make sense of it.

My younger sister Mary missed an enormous amount of work. When Kathleen was dying, we had a big enough family that all of us took time and all of us were there. My brother came off the subways to be with her. I took time. We were at the hospital around the clock with her.

A lot of families cannot afford that. In my work, I have seen the stress it causes and often it is stress on the women caregivers. I will just say it, men just do not seem to be quite as comfortable and women take on this work. Women are the ones who are somehow expected also to give up their work time to do this because it is a family obligation.

We need to find ways to make it possible for people to look after their loved ones and be there in that stressful moment. Watching someone who is dying is so emotionally intense that there is almost a strange silence, a shock. A person is actually in shock but does not realize it at the time. It is just a feeling one has after having gone through something so intense. Coming out of that shock sometimes takes a lot of time.

The idea that someone's loved one could die on a Friday and yet the person is back at work on Monday is really problematic, especially if this is the person in the family who has to start making the arrangements, trying to figure things out, calling relatives, dealing with the funeral home. There are all manner of issues in terms of the funeral, the finances, dealing with the banks and all the forms. Someone has to take on that work. It falls very hard on the person whose responsibility it is.

Bill C-220 is a good bill. It is a good start. We need to look at making sure that people can be compensated through changes to the employment insurance compassionate care benefits so that they can actually step out of their work life to take on this responsibility and not suffer financial penalties. I have seen families that simply could not afford to do both and it had enormous negative impacts on them.

The issue of dealing with end-of-life care is something we really need to look at. We saw how quickly the Liberal government was ready to move on the assisted dying bill. We have a bill where people have the right to die in Canada, the right to die for all manner of reasons. The government has allowed the Senate to change those rules. However, people need to have the fundamental right to live out their dying days in dignity. That means a national palliative care strategy. We have to start talking about letting people live out their life in dignity, with the proper supports, the proper home care, with a home care vision that allows people to be looked after and not feel they are a burden on their family. It is a horrific thing for people who are suffering and who know the financial stresses on their family or their loved ones.

We need to make sure that we have palliative care available. In many provinces in this country, it is simply not there when it is needed. Some areas have incredible palliative care programs. I have seen them in action. They are really transformative. They make it possible for a family to heal. However, where people do not have access to palliative care, it can be a terrible, stressful time.

This is something that is above partisan politics, because death is something that comes to us all. All of our families have gone through this. We all know what the issues are. I am not speaking to people who have not experienced it. People of our age, here in Parliament, have probably seen a loved one pass. It can be a healing thing or a very traumatic thing.

Bill C-220 is a step in that direction. I think it is a good step. We do need to look at the employment insurance compassionate care benefits. However, we need to talk about the larger issue of a proper palliative care strategy, especially with the really disturbing changes that have come through MAID, which are being pushed through the unelected and unaccountable Senate. The fact that it could actually hijack legislation of such importance and put its imprimatur on it without public input is really letting us down.

We need to reassure the Canadian people that we want families to be able to have those final moments in healing and with support, and all the rights they are entitled to as citizens of this country. That would mean a proper palliative care strategy, available to every single family across this country, whether in a rural or urban area, whether new Canadians or indigenous. We are all facing the same thing in those moments, and we need to have a holisitic approach to give families and the people who are dying the support they need.

I appreciate having the chance to speak.