Canadian Social Policy: Issues and Perspectives by Anne Westhues & Brian Wharf

Author:Anne Westhues & Brian Wharf
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2013-07-24T05:00:00+00:00

Sharing the Caring

The third element in assessing the impact of parental benefits on systemic gender inequalities is the inclusion of incentives to encourage fathers to increase their involvement in the care of young children. Countries may include these incentives for reasons other than gender equity. First, increasing paternal participation in child rearing may provide optimal child development (O’Brien, 2009). Evidence suggests that fathers who take leave from employment in the early months after a child is born continue a pattern of greater involvement after returning to paid work (Waldfogel, 2007). Second, father-targeted parental benefits programs are thought to increase women’s paid work, not simply by freeing up time for paid work, but also by reducing employment discrimination by more closely aligning patterns of women’s and men’s paid and unpaid work.

While rationales are rarely given for not including specific provisions for fathers to take up parental benefits, policy neutrality is framed by maximizing “choice” to parents. However, as Arnaug Leira (1998, p. 367) explained more than a decade ago, “often couched in gender-neutral terms, parental choice does not appear as an option for fathers, because the family income would generally be dramatically reduced if fathers were to choose to stay at home with children.” The OECD reported that in 2011, the wages of Canadian women who worked full-time were 20 percent lower than men’s (OECD, 2011). Because the income replacement levels under CPB are especially low, it is normally more costly for families if fathers claim parental benefits.

In light of this, it is not surprising that, while both CPB and QPIP permit parents to share their parental benefits entitlement, mothers are far more likely than fathers to claim parental benefits. Outside Quebec, for example, in the last three years for which data are available (2007, 2008, 2009), fathers have represented roughly 13 percent of all new claims (CEIC, 2010). As well, when fathers do claim CPB, they claim benefits for significantly less time: in 2009, they claimed them for an average of just less than seventeen weeks, while mothers claimed nearly thirty-two weeks (CEIC, 2010).

For reasons that are also likely to reflect differences in culture and tradition, Quebec fathers are more likely to claim parental benefits. In 2005, the year before QPIP was introduced, all fathers living in Canada faced the same terms and conditions for claiming parental benefits. However, 32 percent of Quebec fathers claimed parental benefits in comparison to only 13 percent of fathers in the rest of Canada (Marshall, 2008). In 2006, Quebec fathers became eligible for paternity benefits as well as parental benefits, both paid at higher rates than in the rest of Canada. By the end of the first year of QPIP, the claim rate for Quebec fathers had increased to 56 percent, reaching 82 percent in 2008 (Doucet, Tremblay, & Lero, 2010). This remarkable increase provides a dramatic example of the impact that social policy can have on individual behaviour.

Policies can also have unintended consequences. While the proportion of Quebec fathers claiming QPIP increased dramatically,

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