Battling Bureaucracy: Nicole, Annie and Stefanie

I’ve talked at length about why I think maternity leave and parental leave are so important. And they really are. Government programs that allow parents to spend the early days and months with their children are tremendously valuable. The problem, though, is that as soon as you get the government involved bureaucracy inevitably follows. The system can have arbitrary rules, and be difficult to navigate. It can also be highly inflexible and not terribly responsive to an individual family’s needs. Today I’m sharing three posts that speak to these problems.

Nicole went on maternity leave five weeks before her daughter was due. As she explains in her post Maternity Leave, her claim still hadn’t been processed by the time her little one arrived, right on schedule. She was also receiving reports to fill out, even though she claimed exemption. Eventually, after a lot of calling and wrangling the solution was rectified, but it does beg the question of why? Why should someone have to follow up and jump through additional hoops when they have a straightforward claim? As Nicole writes:

Anyways, it got me thinking: maternity EI should be a no brainer once your Records of Employment (ROEs) are in, especially if your ROE is submitted electronically by your employer. Maternity and Parental EI is based on the number of hours you’ve worked in a certain period of time. I knew I had the requisite number of hours for the maximum benefit. How difficult is it to create an algorithm that runs a check against the number of hours and performs the calculation of your benefits and trigger a conditional approval? All that would be necessary would be for a quick check to make sure that everything is in order.

Nicole also makes some excellent points about the level of maternity pay offered through the Employment Insurance system.

Annie acknowledges that in comparison to our American neighbours, we have excellent maternity leave in Canada. However, she believes that it could be improved by making it more flexible, as she explains in Flexible maternity and parental leave: Is it too much to ask?. I think she makes some really excellent points about why the system doesn’t work for everyone, and how it could be improved. Here is an excerpt:

What do I mean when I say that the current system is inflexible?

- You have to take the leave starting at the end of your pregnancy or the latest when your child is born.
- You have to take all of the leave within the first year following the birth of your child (you can’t take some leave, go back to work for a bit, and then take some more leave later).
- Money you earn while on leave is deducted from your benefits.

The suggestions for improvement that Annie makes already exist in some European countries, which give the option of part-time leaves and give you many years to use them in. I think it’s important that, as Canadians, we don’t become complacent and stop looking for ways to improve our system, just because it’s pretty good compared to some other countries.

Stefanie lives in the UK. (Before you check out her post, you might want to read my summary of Maternity Leave in the UK as a quick primer.) She struggled with some bureaucracy of her own, as she writes in The Moral: don’t change jobs while pregnant if you can avoid it, or try and change the system. In the UK, in order to get the full year of maternity leave and qualify for full maternity pay you must have worked with your employer for a minimum length of time, starting before you become pregnant. Stefanie changed jobs while she was pregnant so she had to return to work before she was ready. Stefanie took it up with her MP and the minister, but didn’t receive a satisfactory response. Here is a brief quote from the post:

Coming back to my case: At the time, I’d been in continuous tax paying and NI paying employment in the UK for 11 years. When I changed jobs, I didn’t even take a week’s break. So why then does the state not want to support my hard work with the ridiculous length of 6 weeks on 90% of my pay?

The good news is that Stefanie’s employer stepped up where the government fell short, but the argument stands. Why do these arbitrary rules exist in the first place?

I think it’s clear that there is room for improvement in most systems, and maternity leave is no different. It is my hope that we can continue to advocate for changes to help new families get off to the best start possible.