The Hamilton Spectator

A missed opportunit­y on family care reform

THE SPECTATOR’S VIEW

- Howard Elliott

If you’re a young person on the verge of becoming a parent, you might be enthused about the federal government’s announceme­nt that it is making Canada’s parental leave programs more flexible.

That’s unless you have looked at the fine print. Then your reaction is more likely to be: Thanks — not for nothing, but for nothing much. The sad fact is that the more you scrutinize these changes, the less they look like meaningful reform, and the more it seems they are little more than window dressing. Here’s why.

First, the changes apply only to federally regulated employers — banks, telecoms, public service and transport companies. The remaining 92 per cent of workplaces are not federally regulated, so these changes won’t help those workers. Instead, because this is an area of shared jurisdicti­on, workers in those areas will have to wait until their provincial or territoria­l government decides to follow suit.

Second, although the changes will allow parents to take up to 18 months of leave payable through Employment Insurance as opposed to the current 12-month limit, there is no new money here. Under existing rules, a parent can receive only 55 per cent of their salary up to a maximum of just under $550 weekly. The same amount of money spread over 18 months works out to about $325 a week.

Running a household with that much less income for a year is difficult enough for average middle class families. Doing the same with even less for 18 months will be next to impossible for families other than the very affluent.

What about parents working part-time, or on contract, or in other forms of precarious employment — the only kinds of employment showing consistent growth? Often they have trouble even amassing the 600 hours over a year needed to qualify for employment insurance. Sorry, you’re left out. Again.

Quite simply, these changes, although they are better than nothing, do very little for anyone who is not in a very narrow economic and demographi­c group of working Canadian citizens. As broad-based meaningful society reform, they’re a bust.

What should the government have done? It could have looked at expanding Quebec’s model which offers much richer benefits through its Quebec Parental Insurance Plan. Prospectiv­e parents can pay into the plan and save money that way rather than relying on employment insurance benefits, which are more inflexible and not really designed for this purpose.

It could have looked at Nordic countries, where parents typically get about 80 per cent of wages while on maternity or paternity leave.

Alas, it didn’t do either of those things. Instead, these changes, while not an outright failure, are certainly a missed opportunit­y.

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