Kershaw – Canadian family policy
The first thing to recognize is Canada has a long ways to go by any international comparison. Canada was ranked last by UNICEF recently, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked Canada last a few years ago, and even by my own research which tries to show ‘Oh no, but Canadians do some things well, like, like health care’. We still really don’t climb that far up from the bottom of the ranking. So that means we have a lot of room to move in order to get to the place where other countries are at. But I do see some moments of hope. First, 10 years ago, 12 years ago now, Quebec’s inroads around early learning and care services–or child care as a lot of people call it—and more recently, parental leave, and their efforts to combat poverty really gets at the time, resources, and community services side beautifully. They’re not all the way there yet, but by Canadian standards, they’ve made real inroads. It’s pretty typical for North Americans who are interested in this kind of social policy to look to Scandinavia where, for decades and decades and decades now, they’ve recognized the relationship between family policy and fertility–and they wanted to keep their population up—family policy and gender equality, and family policy and child development. So there they have robust parental leave programs. They create labour market systems that allow parents to work less time than we do in North America.
We have places though that are less affluent. I think about Spain and some of the other Mediterranean countries, where from early days on, they recognize the role of putting in place community supports and although they do struggle on those areas more with the gender equality issue, and who is taking leave and if leave is available. So I’m not wanting to say that Canada hasn’t been doing some important things well, but some of our strengths around family policy, and gender equality which is a key part of that, have been eroding and over the last few years our ranking from the World Economic Forum in terms of gender equality slipped from about 14th to 31st. But the countries that have the best family policy also have the best gender equality policy and, you know, there the high rankings come again in Scandinavia, and to some extent in France.
