It's not the government's place to tell you when you're ready to go back to work after infant loss. You are the only one. You and your family members, your loved ones, are the only ones in a position to say, “Now's the time. I'm ready to go back.”
What this legislation does is acknowledge and recognize that no two families are alike and no two grieving processes are alike. It's very different when we're talking about a return to work after a broken leg. We know exactly how many weeks it takes for that bone to heal. Grief and loss of an infant.... It's not the government's place to say when is the right time to go back.
By enacting Evan's law, we will be in a position to say: “You're not invalid. You have access to all the benefits you would have had access to. We're here. We support you.” Those messages ripple, not just within those individual families but also within all of the other families in our communities. The more clear the message is that you matter, that we care, that we can't imagine.... We've heard that hundreds of times since this debate began decades ago: “You can't imagine it.”
What we can imagine is what it would be like for a family to know that their benefits are going to be deposited into their bank accounts as expected, that nobody is going to claw them back, and that they don't have to relive their story over and over again. That, we can imagine. That, we can control. The people in this room, at this committee, in Parliament and in the Senate can make this happen and can do this quickly and expeditiously. We can move this through so that it doesn't get lost again, since the nineties. We can get this through now. This is important.