Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you to our witnesses for appearing.
We appreciate, of course, your very compelling testimony today. I think your personal experiences lend some very valuable guidance to this committee in terms of the successes or challenges you face in your own journey.
I want to start for just a quick moment on EI, which has been the focus of a lot of presentations before this committee from other panels before you. I presume there are two ways to look at this. We've had some recommend that we raise the number of parental weeks to 50 weeks, which presumably would mean there would still be a maternity benefit payable on top of that--parental being for care and attachment issues with children. It would have to be available to both adoptive and biological.
Or there's the other way, which is we have parental at 35 weeks, as it exists now, and a maternity benefit for 15 weeks, and some sort of a transition leave for adoptive parents that would be equivalent to maternity, which would equalize everybody out at 50 weeks. Presumably, though, you'd have to lay the intellectual rationale for why there should be a transition leave that's not focused around the attachment of children. That would be parental.
My question is you've spoken a lot about the attachment issues that are related to children. Ms. Kowalko, we'll start with you and go down the panel this way. Talk about some of the psychological or other challenges for mothers who adopt children and why the additional time is necessary for you, why a transition leave would be important for your own benefit--things that may be specific to challenges that adoptive moms face that biological mothers might not face.