Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our witnesses. I love all this discussion of children. My wife is the youngest of eight. Her father is now a grandfather to 56, and more are on the way. This is good--14 kids--but I'm getting sidetracked.
Ms. Lewis, thank you for helping me completely unravel here on this side of the witness table during your testimony.
I have a few things I want to try to get to in a very brief amount of time, so I'll ask you to keep your responses brief, if possible, and I will try to keep my questions brief.
There's one area that I think needs a little bit of exploration here, and it is around the transitional measure for adoption--transitional leave, or some sort of benefit.
Within the employment insurance system, parental leave deals with issues of attachment and care of the children, and it can be shared among caregivers, the mother and father. Maternity leave was given as something unique, recognizing, as the courts have said, the physiological aspects of giving birth and the need for recovery, for example. That's why biological mothers who give their children up for adoption get maternity leave but not parental.
In establishing some sort of transitional leave or adoption leave benefit, or whatever it's going to be called, I'm presuming, from my vantage point, that there needs to be some kind of substantiation of why that should be offered to adoptive parents or caregivers, as opposed to being lumped into the parental issue.
Ms. Lewis, I think some of your testimony has gotten to this already.
Ms. Eggertson, I don't know whether you have biological children as well as your adopted children. What is different from the parent's vantage point? What are the unique challenges you face as a parent, perhaps on the psychological side of things, that you didn't experience with biological children? If you can, plumb the depths of that a little bit for us.