No abstract

Canada has two parental leave benefit programs for the care of a newborn or adopted child: a federal program, and, since 2006, a provincial program in Québec. Informed by a social reproduction framework, this article compares access to parental leave benefits between Québec and the rest of Canada by family income and by its two different programs. Our analysis of quantitative data reveals that maternal access to leave benefits has improved dramatically over the past decade in the province of Québec, especially for low-income households. By contrast, on average 38% of mothers in the rest of Canada are consistently excluded from maternity or parental benefits under the federal program. We argue that one key explanation for the gap in rates of access to benefits between the two programs and between families by income is difference in eligibility criteria. In Canada, parental leaves paid for by all employers and employees are unevenly supporting the social reproduction of higher earners. Our article draws attention to the need for greater public and scholarly scrutiny of social class inequality effects of parental leave policy.

PurposeThis research article explores several questions about assessing the impacts of fathers' parental leave take up and gender equality. We ask: How does the conceptual and contextual specificity of care and equality shape what we focus on, and how, when we study parental leave policies and their impacts? What and how are we measuring?Design/methodology/approachThe article is based on a longitudinal qualitative research study on families with fathers who had taken parental leave in two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Québec), which included interviews with 26 couples in the first stage (25 mother/father couples and one father/father couple) and with nine couples a decade later. Guided by Margaret Somers' historical sociology of concept formation, we explore the concepts of care and equality (and their histories, networks, and narratives) and how they are taken up in parental leave research. We also draw on insights from three feminist scholars who have made major contributions to theoretical intersections between care, work, equality, social protection policies, and care deficits: Nancy Fraser, Joan Williams, and Martha Fineman.FindingsThe relationship between fathers' leave-taking and gender equality impacts is a complex, non-linear entanglement shaped by the specificities of state and employment policies and by how these structure parental eligibility for leave benefits, financial dimensions of leave-taking (including wage replacement rates for benefits), childcare possibilities/limitations and related financial dimensions for families, masculine work norms in workplaces, and intersections of gender and social class. Overall, we found that maximizing both parental leave time and family income in order to sustain good care for their children (through paid and unpaid leave time, followed by limited and expensive childcare services) was articulated as a more immediate concern to parents than were issues of gender equality. Our research supports the need to draw closer connections between parental leave, childcare, and workplace policies to better understand how these all shape parental leave decisions and practices and possible gender equality outcomes.Research limitations/implicationsThe article is based on a small and fairly homogenous Canadian research sample and thus calls for more research to be done on diverse families, with attention to possible conceptual diversity arising from these sites.Practical implicationsThis research calls for greater attention to: the genealogies of, and relations between, the concepts of care, equality, and subjectivity that guide parental leave research and policy; to the historical specificity of models like the Universal Caregiver model; and to the need for new models and conceptual configurations that can guide research on care, equality, and parental leave policies in current global contexts of neoliberal capitalism.Originality/valueWe call for a move toward thinking about care, not only as care time, but as responsibilities, which can be partly assessed through the stories people tell about how they negotiate and navigate care, domestic work, and paid work responsibilities in specific contexts and conditions across time. We also advocate for gender equality concepts that attend to how families navigate restrictive parental leave and childcare policies and how broader socio-economic inequalities arise partly from state policies underpinned by a concept of liberal autonomous subjects rather than relational subjects who face moments of vulnerability and inter-dependence across the life course.

Bien que la pandémie causée par le coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) ait largement attiré l'attention, comme le réclamaient impérieusement les circonstances, sur la réévaluation des approches politiques à l'égard des soins aux enfants et des soins de longue durée aux aînés, les répercussions de la pandémie sur les politiques de congé parental et les prestations parentales relatives aux soins aux nourrissons et aux jeunes enfants ont suscité peu d'intérêt. Les auteures se penchent sur la révision de la conception et de la confi guration des politiques de congé parental basées sur l'emploi au Canada, tant pendant qu'après la COVID-19. En s'appuyant sur les connaissances théoriques relatives aux économies de soins, à l'économie politique féministe et à l'économie solidaire et la reproduction sociale, ainsi que sur les travaux de recherche sur les congés parentaux à l'échelle nationale et internationale, elles affi rment que le moment est venu de repenser les prestations de congé parental à titre non seulement de politique en matière d'emploi, mais de politique de soins et de protection sociale. Elles proposent, pour opérer ce virage, trois sujets d'étude qu'elles explorent : un système mixte de prestations parentales conjuguant des droits fondés sur l'emploi et sur la citoyenneté, l'établissement de liens entre la conception des politiques et l'égalité des sexes, et la nécessité de données intersectionnelles solides pour déterminer quelles familles canadiennes reçoivent des prestations parentales. Mots clés : Canada, COVID-19, égalité des sexes et égalité intersectionnelle, politique de congé parental, social, soins Although the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spurred critical and much-needed attention to rethinking policy approaches to child care and long-term elder care, little focus has been given to its implications for parental leave policies and parental benefi ts for the care of infants and young children. This article is about reconceptualizing and reconfi guring employment-based parental leave policies in Canada both during and after COVID-19. Informed by theoretical insights from the fi elds of care economies, feminist political economy, and care and social reproduction and by national and international parental leave research, we argue that it is time to reconceptualize parental leave benefi ts not only as employment policy but also as a care and social protection policy. To make this shift, we explore three topic areas: a mixed system of parental benefi ts that combine employment-based and citizenship-based entitlements, connections between policy design and gender equality, and the need for robust intersectional data to track which Canadian families are receiving parental benefi ts.

This paper compares access to parental leave benefits in the four largest Canadian provinces –Québec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia between 2000 and 2016, using quantitative data from the Employment Insurance Coverage Survey. We show that inequalities in the receipt of benefits mirror and reinforce the structure of income and gender inequalities. We argue that Alberta and Québec represent two regimes of parental benefits. In Alberta the take-up of parental benefits is low, and is closely related to income and gender. Conversely, the vast majority of mothers and fathers have access to parental benefits in Québec. We argue that Alberta is closer to a liberal regime of parental benefits, while Québec is closer to a social-democratic model.