Status of Women committee  It's a very good question. The first step would be if the wage replacement rates were higher, for example, if in the rest of Canada we had the same wage replacement rates as Quebec, where the wage replacement rates are 75%. If we started with higher wage replacement rates that

Status of Women committee  Well, it has to be with the same employer, so if you're working—

Status of Women committee  Okay, thank you. That detail slipped my mind.

Status of Women committee  Thank you. I'm a qualitative researcher, so the statistics tend to fall away from me. All I would say is that we look at the numbers and we look at how in Quebec the number of low-income mothers earning less than $30,000 a year are accessing parental leave benefits at a much h

Status of Women committee  I go back to the question about very low-income women, women who have mental health issues, the populations in our country who are not able to be in full-time work over a long period of time. I don't know the answer to the question, but I know that women are not meeting that 60

Status of Women committee  Thank you. That's a very good point. Again, I'd look to Sweden. They were very clear that they didn't want to take benefits away from women because the policy could then fail. The idea is to keep maternity leave benefits in place and to have designated paternity leave. It has to

Status of Women committee  In Canada, most research has been done in those silos. It's been very interesting to see. This is where Lindsay McKay and I realized.... We participated in a book project that was all on child care and we were the only ones writing about parental leave. In the seminar that we p

Status of Women committee  Thank you. That's a great question. The first thing I would say is that the really frustrating thing about studying parental leave is the lack of comprehensive data. When we started working with the statistics from EI we were told that the statistics were for Quebec and the rest

Status of Women committee  I agree with Morna Ballantyne about the need for higher pay for men to be involved in this sector. The other issue for me is that it's kind of a catch-22 in the sense that it's assumed that women do caring, and then nobody wants men in early child care, and then those assumptio

Status of Women committee  There is a provision for self-employed people to choose to pay into EI so they can access parental leave benefits. That's a new provision that was put in place a couple of years ago. The larger question for me is around extending the eligibility of people who have access to par

Status of Women committee  Thank you for this invitation. We did send a brief on behalf of my research team and I want to acknowledge that I'll be speaking today from my research and from my research with Dr. Lindsey McKay and Dr. Sophie Mathieu. I want to make three key points that relate to women's eco