Thank you.
Mr. Chair and members of the finance committee, I'm Andrea Doucet. I'm a Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care, and I'm a Professor of Sociology in Women's and Gender Studies at Brock University.
My brief comments today on Bill C-86 are focused on one key issue: parental leave benefits, and specifically the introduction of a new EI parental sharing benefit in the amendments to the Employment Insurance Act, which is in division 8 in Bill C-86.
The EI parental sharing benefit, which will be available as of March 2019, is the newest addition to Canada's current package of maternity and parental benefits. It provides an additional five parental leave weeks paid at 55% wage replacement, or eight weeks paid at 33%, to parents who share EI benefits. This includes adoptive parents and same-sex couples.
The initiative was partly modelled on the Province of Quebec's parental insurance plan, QPIP. Specifically, three to five weeks of parental leave are designated for fathers and second parents, and this has led to almost 80% of Québécois fathers now claiming parental leave. Meanwhile, outside of Quebec, only 12% of fathers are using parental leave benefits.
Gender equality at home and at work are clearly stated goals of this new benefits practice. They are laudable goals that connect more broadly to the gender equality goals of the the so-called gender equality budget, but there are two significant problems and two key differences between this policy and the Quebec policy, and they centre on wage replacement rates and issues of eligibility.
In terms of wage replacement, the wage replacement rate of 33% to 55% is too low. The Quebec rate of 70% to 75% is a successful model that is in line with international research, especially from the Nordic countries, which shows that designated leaves for fathers and higher wage replacement rates increase the number of fathers who claim parental leave.
In terms of eligibility, many couples will not qualify for the new parental sharing benefit. It is only available to two-parent families where both parents qualify for benefits. My research, with Dr. Lindsey McKay and Dr. Sophie Mathieu, published in the Journal of Industrial Relations in 2016, leads me to make the following argument.
We believe that more than one-third of all families will likely not receive this benefit. This argument is based on three important claims from our comparative analysis of mothers access to leave benefits in Quebec versus nine other provinces. We used Statistics Canada data. There was no data on people living on reserves or from the territories. It was from Quebec and the nine provinces.
My three points are the following. First, outside of Quebec, 25% of mothers do not qualify for benefits because they do not have the required 600 insurable hours in the 52 weeks prior to giving birth. Women can work their entire lives paying into EI, but if they do not have those hours in the year before birth, they don't qualify.
Second, 36% of all mothers outside of Quebec do not receive parental benefits. This is due to a combination of their ineligibility and the limitations of provincial employment standards and entitlements.
Three, over half of mothers—56%—in low-income families in these nine provinces are excluded from leave benefits. In Quebec, only 15% of low-income mothers are excluded from leave benefits.
I'll conclude with two final points.
A broader GBA+ analysis demands that we look more closely at who is excluded from the new EI parental sharing benefit. Notably, many low-income families will be excluded, and lone parents will be excluded.
Finally, my work with McKay and Mathieu argues that this new extension of parental benefits, without attending to issues of wage replacement, eligibility and access, will lead to a growing divide between what we refer to as “parental leave-rich” and “parental leave-poor”, or “care-rich” and “care-poor” households.
Thank you very much.