As Canada’s fertility rate tanks, is it time to reform parental leave?

Vancouver mom Chelsea Heney waited until the age of 40 to have her first baby last November.

While wanting to be financially prepared was a “big factor” in putting off motherhood, concerns about her relationships, health and career also influenced her decision to wait.

“For me, having children was always something I knew I wanted, but was, increasingly as I got older, something I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do with respect to age, feeling financially secure,” she told Global News in an interview.

Becoming a mom to her son Olivier has certainly been a fulfilling experience, but Heney says it has come with a “financial toll,” especially since she was laid off during her maternity leave.

“It’s definitely a gut punch,” Heney said.

“I think there’s a financial toll that you take when you have children and especially in my situation, where a job that I thought I was going… to go back to was not there and not available to me.”

While she looks for another job, Heney has filed a human rights complaint against her company over her layoff.

“It’s really unfortunate that, as working women, we don’t have protections that we should in coming back to and being able to take maternity leaves, have children and then coming back to the workplace,” she said.

Heney is among many Canadians who have put off parenthood for financial or other reasons.

In a new Angus Reid survey released on Thursday, more than half of potential parents said they have delayed having children longer than they ideally would have liked, and this is largely due to the rising cost of living and other financial concerns.

“I think cost of living has become top of mind for a lot of people and kids are expensive,” said Allison Venditti, founder of Moms at Work, an advocacy group that supports working mothers.

According to the Angus Reid poll, four in 10 (41 per cent) said that the delay was because of concerns about the job market and financial security.

One-third (33 per cent) are also worry about the cost and availability of childcare and a similar proportion (31 per cent) have concerns about the housing market.

Marina Adshade, assistant professor of teaching at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver School of Economics, told Global News the concerns of potential parents are not just about the availability or even affordability of childcare but their ability to work and have children — especially for potential mothers.

“I think it’s particularly creating barriers for women who spend a lot of time in school, spend a lot of time investing in their career, want to have children, but then are looking at our current system and saying, ‘Can I have children, raise them the way that I want to raise them and still invest in my career?’” Adshade said.

For others, the timing isn’t right (26 per cent) or they just haven’t found the right partner yet (40 per cent).

Four in 10 also said they will “definitely” not have or raise a kid in the future. The Angus Reid poll was conducted last month and included 1,300 Canadian adults.

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It follows the news last month from Statistics Canada that Canada’s fertility rate, which has been steadily declining, has hit a record low and the country is now among the “lowest-low” fertility nations.

A StatCan report published in January said Canada, like other countries, is riding the “fertility ‘pandemic rollercoaster’” with more families putting off having children.

“Given the COVID-19 pandemic initiated a period of public health crisis, as well as economic and societal shocks, it is possible that a segment of the population responded to this period of widespread uncertainty via their childbearing choices,” it read.

Don Kerr, a demographer at King’s University College at Western University in London, Ont., said it’s a challenge to raise a country’s birth rate once it falls.

But Kerr added that government measures like increasing Employment Insurance benefits for maternity and paternity could help ease off some of the financial concerns that are holding Canadians back from having kids.

In Canada, those on maternity and parental leave get Employment Insurance benefits of up to 55 per cent of their salary, with a maximum weekly pay of up to $668, which is taxed.

The birth parent is eligible for maternity leave for the first 15 weeks after the birth of a child. After that, it switches to parental leave, with up to 40 weeks that can be shared between both parents.

Parents are also eligible for extended benefits up to 61 weeks for one parent and 69 weeks shared between both. In that case, they get up to 33 per cent of their pay and a maximum of $401 weekly.

Any money earned while on parental leave sees those benefits clawed back.

Experts say this money is not enough.

“That’s a major cut for a lot of young couples who are trying to pay the rent, the bills,” Kerr said. “It’s not particularly generous.”

Venditti said the maximum amount of salary that parents use is just over $60,000, which is also taxed, and for people who are making more than that, “it’s a huge chunk of change to lose.”

Lisa Wolff, UNICEF Canada director of policy and research, told Global News the delay to parenthood isn’t a surprise in part because parental leave has become what she considers a “highly inequitable policy.”

“We have to look at it differently and look at it more as an entitlement for infants to have that freedom from poverty and access to care that their parents want to provide right from the start and get them off to the best start in life so we can be more inclusive with parental leave,” she said.

France, which saw the lowest number of births since World War Two last year, is planning to overhaul its parental benefits program so that it pays better.

Parents in Croatia are entitled to full pay from the Croatian Health Insurance Fund if they’ve paid into social security for at least nine consecutive months, with those that didn’t pay in still eligible for 70 per cent of the “budget base.”

New Zealand also provides weekly parental leave payments at 100 per cent of either your ordinary weekly pay or average weekly earnings at 100 per cent up, whichever is greater, to a maximum amount of $754.87 gross pay per week.

Increasing the parental leave benefits in Canada would make a “huge difference” in easing some of the financial pressures parents are facing, Venditti said, adding that’s only one part of the reform needed.

“It’s very unlikely that we’ll be able to buy our way out of this problem,” Adshade said. “First of all, it would be phenomenally expensive. The second thing is, there’s no money in the world that will make somebody who doesn’t want children to want children.”

Policies that allow working for a limited time period during parental leave could also go a long way in helping boost income without having to raise EI, Venditti said.

She pointed to example of the United Kingdom’s “keeping in touch days” when some employees can work up to 20 paid days during maternity and paternity leave without losing any of their benefits.

In Canada, the federal government has been consulting for years on how to modernize the Employment Insurance (EI) program so it better meets the needs of workers and employers.

But there’s been little indication so far of what measures could be on the table.

Moms at Work was among dozens of organizations and stakeholders who were consulted by the federal government regarding the program in 2021 and 2022.

“The federal government is looking at adjusting and changing parental leave benefits, so making them more accessible to both parents, looking at the wage rate, looking at options for self-employed people or people who are contractors, which is a very big shift,” Venditti said.

Employment and Social Development Canada told Global News that the government has made “several important changes” since 2017 to the EI program that gives working parents more flexibility.

“The Government of Canada recognizes that balancing family, work, and financial considerations is a challenging task for Canadians raising young children, and that each family has its own needs,” Samuelle Carbonneau, an ESDC spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The Office of the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development Randy Boissonnault told Global News in January that the government was not specifically looking to increase parental leave pay, but said it was an ongoing process of improvement. 

The corporate sector also has a role to play in offering employees better compensation when they are on parental leave, Venditti said.

In a survey by Maturn and The Brand is Female released earlier this year, 70 per cent of employed mothers said they don’t feel they have adequate support from their employers.

Nearly 40 per cent of working women said that they did not receive a maternity leave top-up from their employer and 59 per cent of those who did were not offered other benefits such as coaching programs, counselling or child-care assistance.

Statistics Canada data shows that 55.7 per cent of employed women of child-bearing age reported that they had access to employer-provided maternity or parental benefits in 2022.

Fewer men (51.8 per cent) said they had access to parental benefits through their employer, according to StatCan’s report from June 2023.

Venditti said company top-ups are still not as common in Canada as they should be.

“This is not a huge investment for companies to make if they want to encourage people to stay and feel more confident in having children,” she said.

Heney’s company was giving her an 80 per cent top-up to the EI benefits. But now that she’s laid off, she says the parental EI benefits from the government are “not enough to live on.”

She and her partner are having to dip into their savings to afford childcare and meet other expenses.

Heney said the fact that paternal benefits are given from the same pool of money and at the same rate as someone who has lost their job in the case of being laid off, shows that the government  “doesn’t value the work” of parents.

“It’s hard work raising children and I think we need to do a better job of of putting a value against that,” she said.