Mr. Speaker, later today, the House will consider the federal budget. Ahead of that, I appreciate the opportunity to highlight the constructive proposals Conservatives have put forward with respect to reforms to make life easier for families, particularly to support families in the context of trying to balance work and family life. We have proposed various reforms, mostly to parental leave in order to offer families more flexibility, choice and control over their own lives. I want to highlight five different proposals we have made over the last few months.
The first is more flexible parental leave, allowing a person to pause and then resume their parental leave. Right now, in Quebec's system, because Quebec has opted out, people can do this, but in every other province, they cannot. Once their parental leave is stopped, they cannot resume it. We are proposing more flexibility within an 18-month period, and with negotiation with an employer, to allow a parent to pause and then resume their leave. We need to get the government out of the way so that people can structure their leave in a way that works best for them and their families.
The second is to allow learning on leave, in every case to say that a person is able to study, take courses, pursue higher education, etc., while they are on their leave.
The third is that we proposed a caregiving exemption for parental leave income, that when parents are on parental leave, they can also earn caregiving income to further supplement their income, and that is completely compatible with caring for a child. If parents on leave are watching their own children, they can also receive an income to watch a neighbour's child at the same time. This is very reasonable and compatible with what parental leave is all about. These were three initial proposals we announced.
Just last week, we proposed a further change to allow both parents to claim the CPP child-rearing dropout for the same period of time. Right now, parents are allowed to increase the average lifetime earnings for their CPP by removing years that they spent outside the workforce raising a child, but only one parent can do that. This does not take into consideration the fact that often there are two parents both making work sacrifices at the same time, so we are proposing that time spent with their children should not negatively impact their retirement income, and that is why we think both parents should be able to claim the child-rearing dropout at the same time.
We have also been championing the extension of leave when a parent dies, so that if a person who has paid into the system is on parental leave and passes away, that leave should continue to be available to their family. We should not cut off that family that has already paid into the system when they are in the midst of dealing with that tragedy.
These are five very constructive proposals, ones that we would like to see the government include in today's budget: more flexible parental leave, learning on leave, a caregiving exemption for parental leave income, allowing both parents to claim the CPP child-rearing dropout and the extension of leave when a parent dies.
On that last proposal, by the way, we just got costing from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. It would cost less than $1 million a year, in total, to protect the leave income when a parent passes away. It is an extremely low cost in the scheme of federal spending and very reasonable.
I am proud that my party is playing a constructive role in putting forward policies that would make life easier for families and support that flexibility and choice in integrating work and family life. We have repeatedly asked the government what it thinks of these proposals and whether it would like to work with us on implementing them, and this budget would be a good time for it to say yes to that. Later today, will the government have good news for us, will it implement all or some of these constructive proposals to make life easier for families balancing work and family life? Will it implement these good ideas?