I can speak, again, about some of my clients who have fallen ill during parental leave. One client, Ms. Rougas, was diagnosed with breast cancer in about week 32 of her parental leave. What that means, when you're diagnosed with breast cancer, like her, like another one of my clients, Ms. McCrea out of Calgary, is that sometimes you undergo treatments that make you basically incapable of caring for yourself and your children. There's a kind of false situation when they can't take sickness leave and they have to stay on parental leave. We're paying these individuals to care for children when they're barely able to care for themselves.
Ms. McCrea in Calgary, for instance, was diagnosed with breast cancer in about week 20 of her parental leave. She was in the hospital for a week or two, and she couldn't lift anything after. She was not permitted to lift her own children. From her perspective, it just seemed kind of false when the commission decided last year that she could only take parental leave, that she could not take sickness leave in addition. The sickness leave, in her situation, would have enabled her to rest easy if she had known that there was an expanded period of time during which she could say, “Okay, you know what? I'm here to care for myself. I'm going to care for my children when I'm better.” That would have given her that kind of peace of mind.
Those are the kinds of people I'm encountering who benefit from a sickness benefit, whether it comes just at the start of a parental leave, the middle of a parental leave, or at the end of a parental leave, absolutely. I do want to stress again that these are individuals who should already be receiving that benefit, notwithstanding Bill C-44.