Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for coming.
This has turned into a very interesting piece of work that we've undertaken here. I hope some of you have had the chance to be following some of the testimony we've been receiving.
There are a whole number of questions that have come up about Canada's, specifically the federal government's, role in adoption. Some interesting points have come up. I want to get a sense of whether any work has been done by departments, not just in terms of what this committee's been hearing but about adoption overall in the last few years.
One of the issues that comes up a lot, and this would be for Mr. Paquette, perhaps, from Human Resources and Skills Development, is the whole issue of parental leave or adoptive leave in the EI system. One of the things that's come up is that it might make sense to have a whole new category instead of trying to emulate parental or adoptive leave. We might just want to have an adoptive leave, period, so that they would be equal, but it would be separate, as opposed to trying to gerrymander an existing system.
I wonder if you or your department have had a chance to have a look at that and any idea of what the implications might be.