Madam Speaker, the second petition I would like to present has to do with women and parental leave under the Employment Insurance Act.
Under this act, women, who are already at a disadvantage in the labour market due to injustices and inequity, are still the ones to assume more family responsibilities. It is women who take nearly all the weeks of parental leave following the birth of a child. However, under the act, as currently written, if they lose their job during or very shortly after maternity leave, they are denied regular employment insurance benefits.
This inequity affects some 3,000 women a year. It would be fairly easy to fix by amending the Employment Insurance Act so that the benchmark is extended over a longer period of time to ensure that these individuals, the vast majority of them women, are not penalized by the current legislation. That is what the hundreds of people who signed this petition are calling for.