Evidence of meeting #120 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was parents.
A video is available from Parliament.
10:40 a.m.
Founder, Hazel's Heroes Society
Parents don't want to leave work, or ask to leave during the workday, or leave early, because it doesn't look as if they're being a good employee, but they can't do it after work, because they have other children or other things to attend to.
I think counselling is so important, and I think doing some of that grief work is important, and we don't have that time to do that if we're back at work. Two years sounds like so long. I think when people hear that Gillian was off for two years.... Those two years flew by. As I said, I was busy doing a lot of that grief work. There wasn't a moment that I was just feeling like I was on vacation.
10:40 a.m.
Liberal
10:40 a.m.
South Surrey—White Rock, Lib.
Thank you.
Certainly, hearing the testimony as we've gone through this process has taken us to a lot of different places emotionally, in terms of dealing with it.
Professor Dyregrov spoke to us in earlier testimony, and talked about his dissertation and the studies that they followed through, looking at some people going back to work, and felt that some of those responded much more effectively to the emotional challenge they were facing.
We've seen a lot of different responses. There is certainly an acknowledgement that we all respond differently to these types of initiatives.
Ms. de Montigny, you made reference to the need for some quantitative research. All we seem to have had so far is qualitative, and that's very emotional. Is there any quantitative research being done? Is there any data that we have that actually would look at some of the baseline principles that might be coming out as we gather the subjective emotionality and the issues and tie that into them? Is there anything out there? Is there any research being done in a quantitative—
10:40 a.m.
Director, Centre for Studies and Research on Family Intervention, Université du Québec en Outaouais, As an Individual
There's very little internationally. We submitted a project five times to the health research institute, looking into quantitatively following parents over a period of three to five years. We were told, since the stats were not really good, that there were only about 100 people a year who were bereaved from the death of a child, so we wouldn't have the parents who we wanted to follow. We had to demonstrate that miscarriage is also an important factor, and we have published on the impact of miscarriage on mental health in mothers, up to two years after miscarriage, that they still carry this problem.
I think we really need to be looking at parents—from their trajectory of grief, their trajectory of services, the repercussions on their lives, and going through the next pregnancy and the growth and development of those children afterwards—to see how we can best help those parents. We put all kinds of measures of support in place, but they're not always evaluated.
Chantal and I did four-hour workshops with nurses in emergency rooms. We were able to improve the care of those nurses 100%, not only with parents who were bereaved from the death of a child, but every patient who came in with a mental health problem was greeted differently after this workshop.
It's not a really big investment—four hours—to touch 100 nurses who are going to touch 4,000 families a year, only with the bereavement, and all the others. Sometimes putting the money in the right place, training people correctly, evaluating the results of this training, the projects that we did with Movember that you can see, with the DVDs and things that are online and available.... These are all things that are helping parents and are available.
One thing I wanted to say was that the 20 weeks I mentioned before—ideally we would have a year, but we have to be realistic—needs to be flexible. I think some dads might say they're okay to go back to work after a couple of weeks, but maybe they'll be caught up six months later and find that they have less energy and less productivity. As their spouse is getting better, the dads get worse, and they are surprised at that.
Having access to bereavement support in the work area is also a way—not only psychological support, but bereavement support, naming it: the cat is a cat. Bereavement support, for fathers, for men, might be more agreeable to them to go get that kind of help than to go get psychological support.
10:45 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bryan May
Thank you very much. I do have to step in. We are out of time, but I want to thank all of you for being here by video conference and, of course, here in Ottawa.
For my colleagues, there are just a few things for future business that I need to address before everybody packs up.
On November 1, we are once again going to be talking about Motion No. 110, meeting with witnesses. That one is not going to be in here. It's going to be in room 268 of Valour.
On November 6, next Tuesday, we're going to have a committee business day, also in 268 Valour.
We're going to be starting clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-81 next week. We really have only one day for this in the schedule, so I'm recommending that we add, as we did last week, a clause-by-clause study from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in this space, room 415. That would be on November 7, the Wednesday of next week. That will give us two solid days to do the clause-by-clause study. I think it's necessary given the number of amendments we expect to come to us with regard to C-81. If anybody has issue with that, we can talk offline.
Thank you very much.
The meeting is adjourned.
