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 wa

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

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 differen

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 ti

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 abo

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 fiv

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

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 sam

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 s

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,