OECD Blasts Lack Of Canadian Parental Support

"If you reduce the barriers to either employment or to parents providing personal care to their children, you get happier parents, more babies and more employment," says Willem Adema, who edited the Babies and Bosses report. Without palatable child-care options, parents are essentially forced to choose between career and family, he says. That's bad news for workplace productivity and for the low fertility rates many countries are fretting over, he adds. The issue used to be resolved in one way, Adema says: men went to work and women stayed home to care for children. When women entered the workforce in large numbers, the situation became more complex and governments are still struggling to find a solution, he says. Nordic countries generally lead the pack, the OECD review found, with comprehensive systems of parental leave, subsidized child care and out-of-school-hours care. Iceland reformed its parental leave policies in 2001 with tangible success, Adema says. The country now offers nine months of well-paid parental leave, with three months reserved exclusively for the mother, three months for the father and three to be shared as they wish. Before the reforms, men used just three per cent of parental leave, Adema says, but now they take one-third of it. Quebec's $7-a-day subsidized daycare provides a Canadian model of the returns that are possible with a policy change, says Jody Dallaire, chair of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada. A 2006 CD Howe Institute report found that since the province introduced the program in 1997, the proportion of working mothers in two-parent families rose by 21 per cent -- double the growth rate in the rest of the country. Quebec's investment also created a reversal of the falling birth rate, Dallaire says, but child care in Canada is still viewed as a frill rather than a necessity. ... http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=75482dcc-e077-4b53-9518-f33eacdb6657&k=58318

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