Status of Women committee  Thank you for inviting me to speak on this timely topic of women's unpaid work. I am speaking as the Canada research chair and project director of a new seven-year partnership grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This grant is focused on policies, especially child care, parental leave and employment policies that support families' paid and unpaid work.

Status of Women committee  On good-quality care, are you talking about child care in particular or just more broadly?

Status of Women committee  If we look at the different policy domains and start with child care, we need well-paid child care workers. In the same way COVID-19 revealed the problems with marketized private elder care homes, where the care workers were moving between sites and were not supported, it's the same with child care.

Status of Women committee  Thank you for the question. Absolutely, to care is a human capacity. I would just make that point again. Thank you for picking up on it. I've studied stay-at-home fathers, single fathers and LGBTQ fathers or gay father households. When men leave work to care, they face the same disadvantages as women in some ways, but one of my colleagues, R.

Status of Women committee  Statistics Canada has been collecting the time use surveys, the time use studies, and has received high praise for doing that really well. It has been doing it for decades. Certainly since the 1995 Beijing platform for action, it has been accelerating on this. It's only every five years.

Status of Women committee  I think we already have a carers day in Canada. There is one day devoted to carers. Is that correct, Nora?

Status of Women committee  That's a very good point. Volunteer work is a very, very important part of unpaid work. We've seen it through the pandemic. It's an important part of caring for our neighbours. I think with the climate crisis, the work that we need to do, the volunteer and community work that we need to do to care for our planet is going to become more important.

Status of Women committee  To build on what Nora said, as you know, there are special benefits under EI—maternity and parental, compassionate and leave to care for a disabled family member—but as Nora said, the pandemic has demonstrated that we need a broader suite of special benefits if we're thinking about public policy.

Status of Women committee  The mental health dimensions of unpaid work are not looked at enough. I would go back to the issue of measurement and data. Time use studies have looked at people's stress in terms of time. Again, if we did follow-up qualitative work, we could tap into people's stresses around time pressures and not being able to get through everything they need to get through in the day because of all the demands on them.

Status of Women committee  Thank you for raising the issue of fathers and paternity leave and highlighting how well Quebec has done on that front. You're absolutely right. More than eight out of 10 fathers take leave in Quebec, and one in 10 fathers in the rest of Canada. What we can learn from Quebec is that the parental sharing benefit the federal government put in was a great move, but it didn't go far enough.

Status of Women committee  They should definitely sign on to the ILO convention. Thank you for raising that point. On the basic income, as you know, through COVID because of CERB there's been a really rich conversation. There's a UBC study that is about to come out soon, which looks at about five different models of the basic income or a minimum acceptable income.

Status of Women committee  Well, you need both. The child benefit increases were so widely praised and accepted. It's a very important initiative, especially for low-income families and single-parent families, but it doesn't replace a national child care program. They need to go hand in hand in the same way that we need to improve and enhance our parental leave system.