I think the people who were trying to help us in the Service Canada office didn't know exactly how it all worked. That was our problem at the same time. I remember holding these forms and trying to figure them out and I had these very mundane questions like date of death and date of birth. He died on December 9 but he was born on December 10. What do they want me to enter there?
I was sitting there not knowing what to do. We didn't know when the maternity leave could start so we asked various questions. At that time we had obviously already informed my wife's employer that she wouldn't come back on the Monday but we only went to the office later so she was put on sick leave. Then we were informed by Service Canada that maternity leave has to start immediately after birth so all of it had to be undone. The sick leave needed to be reverted and she would need to go on the support payment from the employer, the top-up, expecting that the EI payments would start on that Monday.
Then the employer issued the record of employment up to the Sunday, although my wife doesn't work on Saturdays and Sundays. They said they were paying her until Sunday, but then five years later, Service Canada explained to us, “Oh, we thought it had been issued until the Sunday. This pushes our start a week out because our week starts on Sunday and you can't have your first payment on a Monday.”
Ultimately we received the 15 weeks of payments that we were entitled to, but because of this change of the start date that we didn't pick up on, they sent us all these letters, “Here's a debt invoice. You need to send back this amount of money.” It took numerous phone calls and multiple supervisors to tell them what had happened and that we don't know why the date was adjusted and they said [Inaudible—Editor]. There were a lot of unknowns in how to deal with the situation.
To make it better I would love to see a dedicated team of people who are especially trained on these types of cases. I think it would be very ambitious to think that every Service Canada employee can get all those situations right. I think it's unfair to the employees as well because they are emotionally affected by those situations as well. I think they should receive proper training, how to support parents in those situations and know all the proper procedures at that time so they can give the right information when they talk to parents.