Finance committee  Yes, exactly. The International Monetary Fund's new research speaks exactly to these risks. I apologize, Mr. Boulerice, but I'm going to switch to English. You asked for comments. I started advocating for child care when I was pregnant with my first son. He and his partner jus

Finance committee  Let's wait for the round, and then I can make a final comment.

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'm pleased to represent Canada's umbrella child care advocacy organization. Our mission, which we've been pursuing now for 35 years, is to work with all levels of government to make high-quality, affordable early learning and child care availabl

Finance committee  Our position—and it's set out in the brief—is that the changes that should be made are to bring the employment insurance program in line with the one in Quebec. It makes no sense that citizens and workers in one province would have superior benefits to those in the rest of the co

Finance committee  First, on your comment about being a stay-at-home father, one of the big advantages of the Quebec employment insurance program is that it actually gives paid leave, under the EI program, exclusively for fathers. That's another improvement that we would want to see in the EI progr

Finance committee  On the question about Quebec's child care program, I would suggest that the changes made to that program were not as much a result of fiscal constraints as opposed to fiscal choices. The Quebec government chose to reduce the amount of public funding for the universal child care c

Finance committee  We actually consider these changes to be negative, because they will create a situation in which some parents have access to longer leave, and most will not. We cannot see how a reduction in the benefit level under EI could be a positive development. We also think that although

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to be here with you this afternoon. I'll try to get through this before the bell rings. There is no longer any dispute that parents in Canada with young children are in desperate need of greater gove

Status of Women committee  I would echo that. I think it would be really helpful for governments to contribute to or put in place systems that would allow for paid parental leave without individual employees and employers necessarily shouldering the cost. You will get that, if, as Ms. Doucet said, you

Status of Women committee  I think Martha Friendly raised this as well in her testimony. What child care advocates have always said is that child care can only be one part of a broader support system for women's equality, for the welfare of children, and for the benefit of families. It's interesting beca

Status of Women committee  I'm glad you pointed out that we should not be starting from scratch. We've been talking about this issue for too long. Actually, I think in many ways the document that is most instructive is the Katie Cooke task force report. She was appointed by prime minister Trudeau senior in

Status of Women committee  I don't know how much to add except that it's not just an issue of pay. There's a problem of pension coverage, for example. Also, we have a huge problem, and this is recognized everywhere, related to pay, related to benefits, related to working conditions of retention. We have a

Status of Women committee  I'm by no means an expert in federal-provincial-territorial relations, but there are a lot of examples where the federal government has used what is known constitutionally as its spending power to be able to help direct what provincial and territorial governments do in areas that

Status of Women committee  I could probably go on and on trying to dispute the evidence you just made reference to, but instead what I'd like to do is just maybe clarify what we mean by a fully publicly funded system. For us, a publicly funded system does not mean one type of day care only. A publicly fund

Status of Women committee  There are two ways to answer that. One is to talk about a quality system, and the other is to talk about quality care. There's all kinds of evidence and research that's been done on what good quality care is in terms of the provision of care to children. We know what that eviden