Government's New Family Care Policies Offer More Flexibility, But for Whom?
By Sarah Kaplan
Last week, Jean-Yves Duclos, the minister of families, children and social development, announced new family care policies designed to increase flexibility for people needing to care for children and other family members. The new policies increase parental leave from 12 to 18 months and offer caregiver benefits of 15 weeks for sick or injured adult members of families and 35 weeks for sick or injured children.
There are many appealing features of these plans, especially the caregiver benefits, which are now extended not just to parents but to other family members providing care and also allow for a broader range of medical professionals to certify the claim. This makes it easier for families to rally around the needs of family members.
However, it is unclear if these new policies solve the problems they were meant to address, especially when it comes to parental leave.
First, the goal is to provide families with more flexibility upon the birth of a new child. One of the reasons this flexibility is appealing is that some parents would like more time at home to bond with their children.
On the other hand, many people need time at home to extend to 18 months because daycare programs do not accept children under that age. In this sense, we are using parental leave to substitute for more adequate child-care options.
It is unclear how many parents would avail themselves of pre-18-month daycare if it were more widely available. Extending parental leave should not be put in place to solve the problem of lack of available daycare options.
Second, the current plan allows parents to share parental leave but does not specify which parent takes what portion of the leave. Evidence suggests that, in the case of heterosexual couples, when the option to share leave is offered, men are unlikely to take much advantage of the program. Only when "use it or lose it" parental leave is implemented do men actually go on leave.
Full (paywalled) op-ed in the Toronto Star: Government's New Family Care Policies Offer More Flexibility, But for Whom?