Canada’s birth rate is dropping, and the cost of living is partly to blame. Why a more supportive leave plan could help.
Why Canada's Parental Leave System Isn't Working |
Many American parents envy Canadian parental leave policy. From the outside, it looks generous: a substantial period of time off in which your job is legally secure. But our system is far from perfect, presenting new parents with major financial challenges, especially as the cost of living is skyrocketing. Parental leave only works if you have a conventional nine-to-five job and you’ve been paying into employment insurance. Even then, it’s not great. During leave, parents receive EI benefits of up to 55 per cent of their salary to a maximum of just $668 per week—and it’s taxed. Ours is one of the least generous wage-replacement rates out of 38 OECD countries. Yes, the Trudeau Liberals recently extended leave to a maximum of 18 months, but the wage-replacement rate for parents who are away from work that long drops to 33 per cent. Only parents with high-earning spouses, or lots of support from their parents, can afford that. In 2022, the country’s birth rate fell to a 17-year low and, in an Angus Reid poll from last October, more than half of Canadian respondents admitted they delayed having kids due to financial concerns. Allison Venditti, an HR specialist, runs Moms at Work, a professional association for working mothers, and suggests in Maclean’s how Canada should update the system to reflect the needs of parents today. “We need a plan,” she says, “that ensures they’re losing sleep over midnight feedings more often than mounting bills.” –Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief, Maclean’s |
Most Canadian students spend their formative years in cookie-cutter classrooms with painted concrete walls. But in 2017, a group of Quebec-based education advocates broke with tradition. They persuaded the former education minister Sébastien Proulx to create Lab-École, a non-profit incubator aimed at developing learning environments that would make children excited to go to school. The result? École de l’Étincelle (or “Spark School”) in Saguenay, Quebec, which features an outdoor classroom, a sports circuit and lots of climbable play structures. |
For a while, bringing hundreds of thousands of international students into Canada seemed like a great idea. It was a windfall for universities and colleges, and the students helped fill Canada’s labour gaps. In exchange, they were promised post-graduation work permits and what seemed to be a straight line to citizenship. But recently, the government has begun slamming doors shut. For many students and recent graduates, the changes are devastating: they’ll be forced to leave the country, when they had every reason to think they’d be able to stay. At Maclean’s, we wondered how these could’ve-been Canadians were coping. Here, four of them share their stories. |
In 1914, French novelist Louis Hémon wrote Maria Chapdelaine, a coming-of-age romance that became a Québécois schoolroom staple. Almost 20 years later, the book was brought to life with 54 vivid illustrations by Quebec artist Clarence Gagnon, whose bright pastels immortalized scenes of Depression-era Canadians plowing fields, shoveling snow and attending church by horse and buggy. These paintings live on at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, where the complete set is only exhibited every three to five years for the sake of preservation. |
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