MEDIA RELEASE: R00110, 27 May 2016
Some 40 per cent of employed mothers across Canada — with the exception of Quebec — are excluded from maternity or parental benefits under the federal Employment Insurance (EI) program, new Brock-led research has found.
In contrast, only 10 per cent of mothers in Quebec are excluded from that province’s Parental Insurance Plan, formed in 2006 when Quebec exited the federal EI parental leave program, the research shows.
In addition, mothers in households earning $30,000 or more receive disproportionately higher access to benefits than lower-income households, especially under the federal EI program.
“Our findings quantify the extent to which Canada’s two labour market-based parental leave benefit programs unevenly reproduce and exacerbate class inequality,” says the study, Parental-leave rich and parental-leave poor: Inequality in Canadian labour market based leave policies.
The research, led by Lindsey McKay, postdoctoral fellow in The Department of Sociology and a Research Associate with Brock’s Social Justice Research Institute, set out to examine if and how social class — defined by family income — determines mothers’ access to maternal or parental leave under the federal EI and Quebec programs.
The research team, which includes Brock’s Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care Andrea Doucet and Sophie Mathieu, lecturer at the Universite de Montreal, examined statistics from the national Employment Insurance Coverage Survey, compiled by Statistics Canada.
“We point out a growing divide between Quebec and the rest of Canada and between households with different incomes, in terms of parental leave benefits in the first year of an infant’s life,” the research team concludes.
“The implication is that where parents live in Canada, and how much they earn, matters to whether and how care work is supported.”
The study also notes that the 2013 federal government survey excludes residents of Canada’s three territories and Indigenous people living on First Nations reserves.
The study was published May 19 in the Journal of Industrial Relations.
See story in The Brock News.
For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:
Cathy Majtenyi, Research Communications/Media Relations Specialist, Brock University, cmajtenyi@brocku.ca, 905-688-5550, x5789 or 905-321-0566
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