Mr. Speaker, I want to applaud the member for bringing this issue before the House and giving us an opportunity to talk about issues around equality for women and their unborn children.
The NDP supports the intent of the bill to amend the Labour Code to allow a pregnant or nursing employee to avail herself of provincial occupational and health and safety regulations.
When I talk about it being an equality issue, I am going to go back to the royal commission report of 1984 on equality in employment to talk about the fact that this does remain an equality issue in Canada for women. It is important to understand that when we talk about a definition of equality, then Judge Abella, now Justice Abella, said, “sometimes equality means treating people the same despite their differences and sometimes it means treating them as equals by accommodating their differences”.
She goes on to say:
Ignoring differences and refusing to accommodate them is a denial of equal access and opportunity. It is discrimination. To reduce discrimination, we must create and maintain barrier-free environments so that individuals can have genuine access free from arbitrary obstructions to demonstrate and exercise fully their potential. This may mean treating some people differently by removing the obstacles to equality of opportunity they alone face for no demonstrably justifiable reason.
This is very much an issue for women who are either pregnant or nursing in the workplace. There should not be barriers to their participation in whatever way that they are able in the workplace. When they need to withdraw from the workplace, they must be able to access adequate support systems that allow them to have a liveable kind of condition.
Justice Abella goes on to say, and I think this is a really fundamental piece of this:
For women, equality in employment means first a revised approach to the role women play in the workforce. It means taking them seriously as workers and not assuming that their primary interests lie away from the workplace. At the same time, it means acknowledging and accommodating the changing role of women in the care of the family by helping both them and their male partners to function effectively both as labour force participants and as parents.
That quote gets to the heart of this bill.
In our country we talk about the importance of children. If we are talking about the importance of children, we must be talking about the importance of their mothers. It seems when we have systems set up that do not look toward protecting pregnant women or women who are nursing their children, we have systems that are failing the children and families of our country.
One of our challenges, and I am sure this is part of the reason this has come forward, is we have an employment insurance system that fails many women. Significant numbers of women no longer qualify for employment insurance as a result of changes in 1995. We have fewer and fewer women who can even qualify for regular benefits, let alone maternity.
We have a shameful condition in our country where no matter what the unemployment rate is in any given area, women still need 600 hours of insured employment to qualify for maternity benefits. This precludes a number of women from accessing a support system when they are most in need of it.
We have provincial areas that provide a much more generous approach. We have heard others talk about regional disparities and how this somehow would not be fair. It seems to me that what we really need to be talking about is ensuring that all women have access to the kinds of progressive systems available in some of our provinces, such as Quebec.
I have heard members talk about getting the bill to committee. This would be an opportunity at committee to ensure, when we look at the bill, that we talk about all women in all provinces having access to those kinds of supports.
One thing we know is that when women are pregnant or nursing, they are very susceptible to a variety of environmental conditions and these are very important to a child's development. We often put too much pressure on women to change their behaviour in terms of pressuring them to stay in a particular job or in a particular workplace, with little attention to ensuring they have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink and that they are not exposed to pollutants that not only impact them but also their unborn children, or to have access to mothers' breast milk.
As well, in the workplace we often find employers would rather women look to leaving the workplace rather than changing the environment to make it safer for them. Women should not have to face a financial penalty for needing to withdraw from dangerous work while they are pregnant.
The Canada Labour Code does not go far enough on these issues. Although we are hearing about a commission that is examining the Canada Labour Code, we need to move faster than that. We often wait for these commission reports and then they gather dust somewhere without any substantial changes to what is happening in the actual workplace.
Although I applaud the member for Shefford looking for an alternative and seeing that many provinces have better protection for pregnant and breast feeding workers, it really raises the question about what is happening in other provinces and why women do not have access to the kinds of protections afforded in the province of Quebec.
That is why I appreciate the provisions in the bill that would provide women with almost a full replacement wage if they are pregnant or breast-feeding after pregnancy so they will not be forced to leave their jobs and suffer those financial consequences.
This brings up another subject. Many workers are not covered if they are self-employed or contract workers. Quebec is certainly moving ahead in this vein to ensure that self-employed workers do have coverage. However, currently nowhere in the rest of Canada, under the existing employment insurance system, do self-employed workers have access to maternity and paternity benefits.
The Women's Network of Prince Edward Island has been doing an extensive amount of work on this issue, closely looking at the Quebec model. Parental benefits and before that maternity benefits were never a good fit with the unemployment insurance system or as it is now called, employment insurance. Having a baby is not like losing a job or being laid off. Every parent knows that being a parent is a full time job.
Today, when we emphasize more and more the importance of early days in child development, it seems less and less sensible not to fully support parental leave for all Canadians, not just those who have met the strict eligibility requirements for employment insurance.
We have been hearing from women from all over the country about what it means for them to not have that safety net when they become pregnant. It seems to me it is a failure in the system to address this very critical need. Again, I suggest that we look to Quebec for its progressive model around providing wage replacement to self-employed workers.
The Women's Network of Prince Edward Island recommends that we extend eligibility for maternity and parental benefits by allowing self-employed individuals the option to pay into the employment insurance program. Although the Women's Network of Prince Edward Island is suggesting that it would be optional, many people feel it should not be optional and it should be part of the requirement so all women who are self-employed have access. It also recommends that the federal government extend eligibility for maternity and parental benefits by enacting a 360-hour qualification requirement regardless of regional unemployment rates.
I spoke earlier about the fact that so many women are shut out of the employment insurance system despite the fact that they pay into the system. We have women paying into a system from which they cannot collect. Many would argue that these women who are often part time seasonal workers are subsidizing the full time full year workers. They pay in but have no way of collecting.
The Women's Network of Prince Edward Island also has asked that eligibility be extended by allowing an option for parents to reach back hours over a three to five year period prior to the birth of a child.
These are all extremely important steps to take. They show, as the bill of the hon. member for Shefford does, that working women still need some action to ensure that there is equity in the workplace.
Earlier I mentioned equality and equity. I would like to close on that note. We have so many items that demonstrate women still have not achieved equality in our country. Women are still fighting for pay equity. They are still not eligible for the employment insurance benefit. We see this disparity when we talk about women who are pregnant or breast-feeding.
Equity does not mean that all people are treated the same, but that accommodations ensure that all workers have the same opportunity in the workplace. I urge all members of the House to support the bill and send it to committee for a fuller discussion.