June 20, 2003

The Honourable Landon Pearson
The Senate of Canada
Room 210, East Block
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A4
E-mail:pearsl@sen.parl.gc.ca

Re: Canada’s National Plan of Action for Children in Response to “A World Fit for Children”

Dear Senator Landon:

On behalf of Mothers Are Women (MAW), and many other grassroots community groups, we want to say thank you for giving us the opportunity to provide input into the National Plan of Action for children around the world. We strongly support any efforts made to promote the well being of children and their families.

In reviewing the document entitled “A World Fit for Children,” many issues of concern to MAW were addressed. It was refreshing to see unpaid care work within the family and the larger community recognized and supported through many of the proposed strategies.

As requested, the submission below will outline our priorities for action, our selected strategies for getting there, and highlight an emerging issue of concern.

Priorities for Action

• Help Eliminate Child Poverty by Increasing Women’s Economic Security

Poverty contributes to many of the problems that children face; including poor health, lack of a safe and secure environment to grow up in, and fewer educational opportunities. Children are poor because their parents are poor. Since unpartnered women and children make up the largest group of poor people in Canada, we believe that women’s economic security should be a priority issue for action in Canada’s National Action Plan.

Improving women’s economic security requires not only ensuring job equity, which has largely been achieved, but also ensuring a woman’s economic security after she has children. This can be done by improving access to childcare, recognizing a woman’s contribution to looking after her own child if she so chooses, and providing measures of support particularly in cases of family breakdown where she has taken time out of the paid workforce to care for her children.

• Valuing Families

We agree with the premise that families are the basic unit of society, and that families come in all shapes, sizes, genders and colours. Parents are under a tremendous amount of pressure to provide for themselves and their children, as well as to make sure that all family members feel cared for. It is hard work. It takes time and energy to care for others. We would like to see the government do more to encourage families to take the time to care for themselves.

To that end, MAW encourages any government body dealing with children to recognize and support the unpaid care work performed by families. At the same time, MAW supports the incentives to strengthen early childhood care and education by providing services to families regardless of the labour force status of the parents or guardians.

We suggest the following strategies:

• Financial recognition of unpaid work for mothers who choose to care for their own children
• Establish a comprehensive, universally accessible, national childcare system to provide quality non-profit care to all families, regardless of the parents’ labour force status. Fully recognize unpaid and informal childcare as part of that system. The system should be built on the strengths of the childcare arrangements already established by women, but should also work toward integrating men into primary care-taking roles. End exploitation of care workers by ensuring that their salaries and benefits are commensurate with their responsibilities and experience.
• Remove maternity and parental leave from the EI system, which was designed to protect employees from unforeseen work interruptions, not to recognize the economically and socially valuable unpaid care work of parents.
• Create a national family day. This could be done in tandem with another day like Victoria Day or the Civic Holiday. The idea would be to promote healthy relationships between parents and their children through fun activities.

Emerging Issues of Concern

As the birth rate drops and people have dogs instead of children, we risk further decline in the perceived value of the contribution of children and their care givers to society. It is our view that the lack of recognition of care work has, and will continue to contribute to the poverty of women and their children. Children will be left behind if the work to care for them - whether provided unpaid in the home and community, or as paid work within the formal education and health care system - is perceived to be of little economic or social value.

Collective responsibility for children’s care, nurture and development is a tapestry with many threads of caring, all of which should be valued not only as socially desirable and generally useful, but as concrete, productive work. Policy solutions must include all caregivers, paid and unpaid.

We hope that the National Plan of Action will reflect and support unpaid childcare work and we thank you for considering our proposals. For more information please contact Kelly McDonald at info@mothersarewomen.com

Sincerely
Mothers Are Women

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