Canada stands on the brink of economic upheaval, buffeted by soaring tariffs and mounting global instability. To those who think that further investment in childcare is a luxury we cannot afford in these times, they would be wrong. A robust care economy will be Canada’s best defence, building resilience, boosting productivity, and ensuring our nation’s inclusive future. Most importantly, it enables women—who still shoulder a disproportionate share of caregiving—to fully participate in the labour market, closing long-standing gender gaps in income, leadership, and opportunity.

Public investment in care infrastructure is often framed in terms of helping women join the paid labour force, with the resulting increased returns to the economy. Indeed, a recent estimate of the unmonetized value of unpaid household activities is about $860 billion. That would be more than 37 per cent of GDP if it were counted. Yet, while the evidence is clear that policies creating more affordable and accessible care will help the economy, making care accessible doesn’t just help people join the paid labour force. It is crucial to help dependents live healthy lives, to help children learn and grow, and to ensure older adults age with dignity.

The care economy—the economic sectors that involve paid and unpaid care, including childcare, elder care, and health care—is one of the fastest expanding economic sectors globally. But the complex work involved in this crucial sector tends to be poorly understood, undervalued, and unprioritized. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought an increased focus on care, highlighting how the lack of support for care sectors and the increasing trend of financializing access to care have placed equality and health on fragile grounds during this crisis. This report highlights key policy and research insights on addressing the challenges in the care economy.

The pandemic has exposed how care work is essential labour on which the economy depends. It has also shown that care work is devalued, disproportionately falling upon women, people of colour, and immigrants, and that risks are absorbed by vulnerable and precarious care workers. It has accentuated the existing global labour shortage in care. Care policies as well as care infrastructure have proved inadequate to address the needs of both caregivers and care receivers. Addressing the importance of care work as our society recovers from the pandemic is an opportunity to capitalize on changes needed to create a more equitable and sustainable economy. 

When policymakers worry about how investments in child care might correlate with voter intentions, it leads to three kinds of policy errors. First, it underestimates women and their solidarity with one another, among families and between generations, especially grandparents. Second, it asks people to rank a policy option that most didn’t have the benefit of experiencing and can’t fully imagine—regulated child care is only available for 27 per cent of Canadian kids, and its quality and cost vary widely. Third, as Canadians, we tend to undervalue, under-resource and under-recognize care. Unpaid care work is not counted in the GDP, and paid care work is poorly compensated.

Economic policy-making has, over the past hundred years or more, stripped out caring from our understanding of what makes the economy tick. Caring – for children, for elders, for the planet – sounds to many like a distraction from the main attraction, especially during the pandemic, when what we need are jobs and robust economic growth. But as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the global economy to a grinding halt, locking down working parents and idling activity in many sectors, it became clear that if we don’t put caring back into the economy, we can’t achieve economic recovery. The pandemic has revealed economic fault lines that must be addressed. We can’t “get back to normal”; we need to create a better normal. And we certainly won’t be able to build back better without making the caring economy a critical component of federal recovery plans.

In Canada, the COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts on women, Two-Spirit and gender diverse people, particularly those who are low-income, people with disabilities, are members of the LGBTQ+ communities, belong to Indigenous, Black, or racialized communities or are newcomers, refugees, immigrants and migrants. More than half of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Canada have been experienced by women, yet at the same time women have faced disproportionate job loss, an increase in domestic violence due to lockdowns, and an intensification in unpaid work. YWCA Canada and The Institute for Gender and the Economy at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management have partnered to create a Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for Canada, which proposes a new path forward for Canada’s economy – one that focuses on changing the structures and barriers that have made some groups more vulnerable to the pandemic and its fallout than others. The report highlights 8 pillars for recovery with a focus on supporting the care economy, investing in social infrastructure and supporting women-owned businesses.

Discussion is turning to how we get out of the pandemic-induced recession. We believe the tragic inequities in the impacts of COVID-19 also give us insights into how to achieve a robust recovery. The pandemic has put the care economy in the spotlight, and investing in this crucial aspect of Canada's social infrastructure will be at the core of any response to the crisis. The economy will face an unnecessarily slow recovery if women who have lost their jobs, or have been forced to leave them due to caregiving duties, cannot return to paid work because of the lack of access to safe, affordable, and high-quality care.

While people in the Western world often assume that extended families in developing countries are oppressive to women who marry into them, family support can actually enable women to take on paying jobs outside the home.

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.