Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to both witnesses.
This is to the Company of Women witness, Ms. Day.
I want to talk a little about parental leave as it intersects with women doing well in the economy. The parental leave changes announced in the budget two weeks ago seemed like a good thing, but it looks as though they lead to a penalty for women. With the new changes, a woman can take 12 weeks before her due date as well as up to 18 months of parental leave with her child.
The problem, however, is that women would need to take time out from the workplace, because the government didn't include the dropout clause with the Canada pension plan calculation for new mothers, the expansion of CPP. That means that there's a CPP penalty for women who use the full time allocated to them for maternal leave. It ends up, in effect, being rather clawed back. At the elderly time of their life, they are again going to have that compounded problem of not having the benefit of all that time in the workplace.
We heard from Professor Kathleen Lahey back in February at this committee. She said that the government should have included a provision for women who take time out to care for children and that it wouldn't have been an expensive or difficult change to the expanded CPP.
Do you agree that women should not be penalized for taking that leave?