Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to reiterate that my party, the Bloc Québécois, will support Bill C-220.

I was not able to listen to the colleagues who spoke before me, but I think the bill's sponsor had two goals in mind. First of all, the bill is meant to recognize workers who take compassionate care leave to care for a loved one, under either employment insurance or the Canada Labour Code. Second, and most importantly, the bill makes it possible for workers to keep their jobs when they have to miss work to take care of someone.

Pursuant to the Canada Labour Code, workers have access to 28 weeks of compassionate care leave. Through the EI program, eligible workers can take 26 weeks of compassionate care leave. In both cases, workers can access these leaves only if the person they are caring for is expected to die in the near future.

In these situations, people often provide care for weeks at a time and sometimes provide end-of-life care. In some cases, the person receiving care may die long before the end of the leave. The rules of the Canada Labour Code are clear and require the individual to return to work after the death of the person receiving care.

Imagine someone who has had to support a sick family member and even drained all their savings doing it. This often happens to family caregivers, if I can use that as a general term. They give their time to support a loved one, which is very demanding, but as soon as the loved one dies, they are forced to go back to work. We do not think anyone should be forced into that situation. The change proposed in the bill is intended to ensure that each of those caregivers is granted additional leave to give them time to grieve without losing their jobs.

The member who introduced the bill had an opportunity to appear before the committee, and I think he also raised this issue in his own province. With the amendment we proposed, we set a new bar by increasing bereavement leave to 10 days, while of course setting out a time frame to bring the agreements in line with the Canada Labour Code. This proves that we value workers who go back to work and ensures that there is no arbitrary treatment and no layoffs or dismissals when the worker has to go back to work following the death of the sick person they were caring for. We changed the number of weeks and days that will be allowed.

We also had a chance to hear from another witness whose name I cannot remember. We spoke about bereavement. It is true that this is something we do not talk about a lot in our society, but the grieving period is very important. It is a period we must go through, so it should happen under the best possible conditions.

It is important that we make sure caregivers have this 10-day leave in the event of a death. It will give them time to make all the funeral arrangements, but it will also give them time for themselves, time to process what happened. That will be allowed, and no one will have to wonder whether they need to return to work early. Caregivers will be able to decide how much time they need before going back to work, depending on their situation.

That was the objective of this bill, which did not require major legislative amendments to the Canada Labour Code. However, deciding to change the rules is an important change for all those concerned, so I invite all parliamentarians to support it.

I believe that we, the committee members, dealt with this bill very efficiently after it passed at second reading. We studied it quickly and came back with a recommendation that is entirely favourable.

I also want to talk about what is going on with caregivers. Even though we raise awareness about this during national caregiver week, we tend to forget that, in Canada alone, 30% of the workforce are caregivers, which is quite a lot. The majority of these caregivers—54% in Canada and even more, 58%, in Quebec—are women.

These people are family members and friends. They decide to give their time to support someone and, as I said earlier, that takes a lot of energy.

We could take a more comprehensive look at the rules around compassionate care leave and how those rules are written, but I think the main purpose of the member's bill was not to change the number of weeks of leave, but to improve conditions for grieving caregivers. We needed to fix things so that people were not forced to return to work as soon as the loved one died, and that is what we have done. This bill will improve the situation by amending the Canada Labour Code.

The important thing to remember is that the caregiver will keep their job if the sick person dies, and they may need a few extra weeks, even if they have not used up all the weeks they were given. There is no way of knowing if or when the sick person will die. We hope it will not happen, but often it does.

The pandemic has highlighted this reality and given us an opportunity to debate the issue of caregivers. We have been able to look at how these people who are being asked to do so much, who generously give their time and want to help others, might need to be supported through various other programs. During the pandemic, we saw how difficult it was for them to manage.

Even though this is a modest contribution that we as parliamentarians can make to improve the Canada Labour Code, I should note that for the person who came to testify at committee, it was one more step in the right direction, a way of recognizing that caregivers also need time to care for themselves and to properly mourn their loss with dignity, just as they cared for people with dignity.

I may not have used all of my speaking time, but I just wanted to make it clear that it is important to unanimously support this bill to amend the Canada Labour Code.

Louise Chabot

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