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How can Canada better support working parents?

Catch up to other countries with flexible hours and parental leave, a think tank says.
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Working parents need both affordable child care and flexible work arrangements, experts say.

Every day, just after 2 p.m., either Rob Trendiak or his wife Eliza leaves their work to retrieve their two kids from daycare. The rest of their day is spent cooking dinner, mediating between siblings and putting the kids to bed — often all before picking up where they left off at work.

Parents to two children aged three and four, Trendiak and his wife recently returned to full-time work. Now, every day is a juggling act.

“Deadlines are deadlines and life is expensive,” Trendiak said. “Both of us love our job; however, toddlers and child care mean we have a puzzle to grind out every single day.”

Trendiak is thankful he and his wife both own their businesses, giving them the wiggle room to rise to the daily challenges of child care.

But that flexibility is available only to a fraction of Canadians. In a recent report, researchers with the Vanier Institute of the Family found Canada lags behind similar countries in supporting working parents with flexible work arrangements and parental leave hours.

The researchers are calling for the federal government to implement policies that already exist in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, including a national sick leave policy and the right for all working parents to request flexible work arrangements.

Economist Jim Stanford says these policies would make a big difference for parents — but only if they also come with better access to affordable child care.

“Working parents face a constant juggling act to combine work and caring for their families, and those caring duties never follow a predictable or reliable schedule,” Stanford said. “Canada’s labour standards are too rigid regarding working hours and arrangements.”

In the report published last May, a team of three labour researchers set out to find the gaps in Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial policies for employed caregivers. Then, they compared Canadian labour laws with those of nearly 60 other wealthy countries.

While some countries give working parents the right to request flexible working arrangements, that support is available for only a fraction of Canadians, said lead author and University of British Columbia sociology PhD candidate Manlin Cai.

“We have all kinds of care demands as workers,” Cai said. “Often, parents don’t have a choice; they have to miss work, and if they miss work, there are also a bunch of other negative consequences.”

In the United Kingdom, for example, employers are required to consider employees’ requests for modified hours or work location.

All employees have the right to request flexible working arrangements if they care for an adult, a child under the age of six or a minor with a disability.

While the employee’s right to ask for flexibility is enshrined in law in that country, it’s not guaranteed their request will be granted. Employers can turn down requests if they can justify a business reason.

In New Zealand, caregivers have the right to request flexible working arrangements if they have been employed at a company for at least six months.

“These are strong international models to learn from,” Cai said. “We can see from these great examples that we have the chance and space to make some progress.”

That’s a far cry from what’s available to working parents in Canada. The Canada Labour Code gives workers in the federally regulated private sector — including industries like air transportation and banking — the right to request flexible working arrangements. That’s only approximately seven per cent of the workforce, researchers found.

Meanwhile, public servants in some provinces, like British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador, have the right to negotiate hybrid work arrangements with their supervisors.

Working parents also lack access to personal leave when compared with other countries, researchers say.

“Canada has a relatively fragmented patchwork system in implementing leave policies,” Cai said. “We really hope to have this broader, inclusive, universal access.”

A lack of leave

Of the 57 wealthy countries the team studied, Canada joins the United States and Japan as the only countries with no federal sick leave policy.

Currently, employees in the federally regulated sector and all provinces are entitled to time off for family responsibilities.

For federally regulated workplaces and in five provinces, including Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, employees can use their sick leave to attend to family needs.

In British Columbia, workers are entitled to take at least five days of unpaid leave for family reasons.

Personal leave for family reasons is also typically unpaid, except for the first three days under the federal jurisdiction and the first two days in Quebec. But the total amount of family responsibility leave — both paid and unpaid — varies from province to province, researchers wrote, and varies from three to 12 days.

Meanwhile, federally regulated private sector employees and workers in only four provinces and territories have legally mandated access to paid sick leave.

On the other end of the spectrum is Sweden, Cai said. That country extends its parental leave policy to accommodate parents throughout a child’s early years. Parents are entitled to share a total of 480 days of paid parental leave when a child is born. It includes the typical parental leave parents get when their child is born, and can be used at a parent’s discretion until the child is 12 years old or finishes the fifth grade.

“Sweden is the golden example,” Cai said. “They can save some days of parental leave to meet caregiving demands later, which I think is a very good model.”

The limited scope of personal leave in Canada undermines many families’ financial security, the researchers wrote in the report.

They added a lack of access to paid sick leave fails to support parents through common day-to-day parenting situations, like taking care of a kid with the myriad of small-scale contagious illnesses that afflict children.

“We may have rising health concerns if workers go to work while feeling sick, or if they have to send their children to school whilst children are sick,” Cai said. “And when workers miss work, the employers shoulder the economic consequences.”

The report calls for a national policy of 10 paid days of sick leave per year, and for governments at all levels to expand their definition of sick leave to accommodate caregiving responsibilities.

“We really want to address those short-term caregiving needs in daily life, those caregiving needs that are predictably unpredictable, like colds,” Cai said.

Child-care access critical

Back in Vancouver, Trendiak had some concerns. He said while the policies could help employees of major employers, it could be difficult on small businesses.

Trendiak said when the provincial government mandated five paid sick days for businesses in 2022, the policy upped his family business’s costs by $60,000 — ultimately forcing them to sell the business.

“That policy would murder small businesses,” Trendiak said. “I sympathize on the parents’ side now that I’m a parent of two toddlers trying to juggle it all, but small businesses — that would flatline them.”

Instead, he said, the Affordable Child Care Benefit — a monthly payment from the provincial government to address the costs of child care — has massively helped his family manage financial pressures.

He added expanding access to affordable child care would help his family manage care responsibilities. Advocates told The Tyee earlier this year British Columbia is years behind on providing universal $10-a-day child care.

“It took us three years to get into a solid, quality daycare,” Trendiak said. “I think that’s crazy.”

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