There has been some really important progress at the federal level in terms of changes to the parental and maternity leave regime. Since 2018, there has been the introduction of an additional “use it or lose it” second caregiver leave that was made available. Drawing from the experience of Quebec, that can be a really important incentive at the very early stages of couples becoming parents in thinking about how we distribute the work of care. We know that up until the point when couples become parents the distribution of unpaid work tends to be more equal in households. This completely changes when couples become parents and when people get locked into gender roles and gendered responsibilities. Therefore, that has been an important step.
There are some challenges with that. One of them is that both parents have to qualify for EI leave to be able to take advantage of that, so it's not a stand-alone second caregiver or paternity leave. If I was to say what changes we could make to the parental and maternity leave regime in Canada, we only need to look to the Quebec parental insurance plan. It covers far more people, it's much more generous, it has much greater uptake, and it has also transformed the gender division in caregiver leave.
For lots of reasons, including being more generous and including many more mothers, especially, in leave programs, I think we can look to Quebec in both child care and parental leave for some good examples.