I have three suggestions. One thing that needs to be considered is the idea that a woman could choose to wean herself back to work. The way our EI system works is that either you're using it or you're not. When it comes to pregnancy and maternity, we need to maybe consider a program in which you could partly participate in at work. Restricting a person's ability to make money and their efforts to further the ambitions of their family makes it really difficult to plan for a family when you aren't allowed to wean yourself back to work and better your situation.
Another suggestion I have is to consider, most especially in single-parent families.... I was only allowed to have a 50-week file. I did eventually get that three-month extension, but my son, as a person who only has one parent, didn't get a full year of his life on EI with a parent. The EI benefits were my rights and I had to take some of them early in my pregnancy, but my son, as a citizen of Canada, didn't get a year with a parent. Maybe tackling it from the child's point of view, especially in situations of single-parent families when the second parent can't step in and scoop up the rest of the year, or maybe exceptions could be made for those kinds of families....