Thank you.
Like the previous speaker, I thank MP Blake Richards for supporting motion M-110 and the committee for having given us the possibility to speak today on this important topic. I would like to share my own story with the committee as well.
In 2010, my wife Kerstin and I decided that we were ready to start our family and extend our family. We meticulously planned everything. We researched all the dietary requirements and nutritional information for my wife. We completed an infant CPR course. We attended new parent workshops. We attended breastfeeding sessions, and so on. We looked up cribs, nursing equipment, and all those kinds of things. We felt really prepared when we found out that we were expecting a son in March 2011.
The pregnancy was uncomplicated and my wife carried him until the 41st week. We had built a social circle of support at these events that we attended with other soon-to-be parents, events such as prenatal yoga.
However, it all came very differently than expected when Marlon, our son, did not get oxygen during delivery. He suffered severe brain damage and his prognosis was dire. The doctors told us he might live for a few hours. Despite all the courses we had taken and all the research we had done, we felt completely and utterly unprepared. To this day, we are grateful to a doctor who made a referral for us to Canuck Place Children's Hospice here in Vancouver. We moved to their facility a day after Marlon was born and spent another day at the facility with him, making memories before he passed away in our arms.
Looking back, I cannot stress enough how important the support we received from Canuck Place has been for us. We got to spend time with Marlon. We got mementos. We got pictures taken. We got hand and foot moulds, and so on. All these items helped us later in our grief, during which we were supported by the bereavement team of the hospice.
I'm telling you this in particular because of the other witnesses who have other stories, because I realize how lucky we actually were to get the support and how important it was for our grief during our healing. Without Canuck Place, we would not have been given any information about what to do. There would have been no counselling or any chance to speak to other bereaved parents. My heart breaks for families who do not get to spend time with their children, have no one to talk to, or have to figure out all the formalities for themselves.
In fact, we tried for several months to get specialized support in other ways and it was incredibly hard. In my mind, there is a huge gap in the system for thousands of parents in situations such as ours, and the existing support system feels like the wrong way around. If our son had lived, we would have had all our own preparation. We would have had all the connections to other parents to talk to and ask questions. We had relatively easy access to various services such as lactation consultants, occupational therapists, sleep specialists, or counselling in cases such as postpartum depression. When the unthinkable happened and our son died, there was very little outside of the help we received from Canuck Place.
With Marlon, my wife had already been on maternity leave and no further interaction with Service Canada was required. My employer was extremely supportive and I was able to take time off. We both had extended health plans that would later cover some counselling for us, but not for bereavement, only for depression. Again, not everybody has these extended health plans.
Over several months, we managed to get some sense back into our lives and tried again to have another child. We were pregnant again and were considered low risk. Our second pregnancy went without any complications until one morning my wife woke up and couldn't feel the baby move. On December 9, 2012, our son Tobias had died in the womb at 35 weeks' gestation.
As other parents have mentioned, in the weeks to follow the deaths of our children, we were not in any position to think clearly and take care of the most mundane tasks. Our social connections to other parents were not of much help. They were all-too-drastic reminders of what we had lost. We wanted to hide from the world, as seeing a pregnant woman or a family with children was torture. It meant that going shopping, for example, was out of the question. We had no appetite anyway. I can tell you that I've lost friends as a teenager and I lost my dad to a brain tumour, but this type of grief was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Our world had completely fallen apart.
After Tobias died, we had to make arrangements with Service Canada to organize my wife's maternity leave. During this difficult time, we had to leave our safe home where we could hide and venture out into the world to file some paperwork. We had to stand in the open-plan office and explain our situation. Not only that, but several years later—in fact, two years ago today—we received a letter from Service Canada stating that we had claimed too much money. It took multiple phone calls and letters over several months to clear up with staff that we had not committed any type of fraud for this overpayment. We had simply requested the time to start immediately after Tobias' death, which was on a weekend, and my wife did not go back to work on Monday.
Due to some system settings, the EI system automatically adjusted the start date from the Monday that we had requested to the Monday of the following week. We didn't pick up on it, and my wife's employer started the week we had requested, so there was this one-week gap. We then had to explain over several months that we were entitled to the 15 weeks but that there was this discrepancy.
In 2014, our daughter Thea was born. Given our history, we delivered her four weeks early and spent nine days in the NICU with her. She is now a healthy four-year-old and we enjoy every day with her.
In 2015, we tried for a final time to grow our family but experienced an early miscarriage at seven weeks.
Having personally experienced miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death, it is important for me to encourage this committee to look at pregnancy and infant loss holistically. It affects a lot of Canadians in very different circumstances. One of the committee members said earlier that the rules often apply in black and white, without grey areas. Unfortunately, these tragic situations are anything but black and white and require compassion and empathy to help parents get back to being functioning members of Canadian society.
Thank you for allowing me to share our story. Like the previous speaker, I fully support the suggested proposal of giving parents 12 weeks off and automating the process to simplify it and not have this undue necessity for them to follow the paperwork.
Thank you.