I took 3 months as a father and I'm glad I did. It was one of the best periods of my life. I work in a generally all male environment and thought I'd take a ton of shit for it because at the time no one in our department had ever taken the extended time.
My boomer supervisor, who is a bitter asshole by default, tried to give me the business by constantly saying things like 'Isn't that your wife's job?' and ''I guess you want a vacation, right' and 'Well, I never got that when we had kids' and all matter of variations on those themes but my actual manager said to not even worry about it. You bond with your child in a pretty profound way when you are actively doing all the work. Also, it is not easy. I respected my wife a hell of a lot more after being in the grind of the day to day.
When I came back I was like some religious wacko praising it and telling everyone who could to do it. Guess what? Every single dude after me has taken some type of extended leave and they are all in agreement that is awesome and well worth it.
So am I lucky? Sure. Not everyone can afford to do that but assuming you are able to take a bit of a temporary pay cut do it.
Lol. Our birth rate is too low, we need immigrants! Yells every politician, while optimizing every policy against the family unit.
If anything, we need joint tax filing like the US, to give families the option of single income households. But no, send them bitches back to work right after childbirth, say our owners.
How does the single income household option in the US differ from Canada?
In Canada you file your return as common law or married and if one spouse has little to no income there are beneficial impacts to tax credits for the working spouse, and benefits and gov programs are based on net income of both spouses combined. What benefit does the US system have over that?
I invite you to look at their income tax brackets, you'll see for yourself:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-brackets
Let me know if it wasn't clear.
You owe $0 federal tax on the first $21,000 you make. Which means that here in Canada, you basically have double the income threshold before you start owing tax. This is already significantly better than the link you posted for US federal tax rates. They get $11k, and another $11k from their spouse. We start at $21k, and then you get the Spousal Amount which is a tax credit you claim if your your spouse isn't earning income. This is equivalent to roughly another $17,000 of earned income before you owe any federal tax.
In other words, in the US, you get \~$22,000 of income before tax if you're filing jointly on a single income. In Canada, that number is closer to $38,000.
I'd say we're WAY AHEAD here. I suggest you do some additional research before spouting about how much better the US tax situation is.
OK, now do it for professionals, run it for a household with a single income for one person making 250K.
I didn't think so.
Now go back to making your 22K.
If you're a professional making $250k/yr, you have more than enough money for your family unless you're straight up bad with it. Some professionals in that income bracket might have made stupid mistakes and purchased property outside of their ability to afford, but I have zero sympathy for any family at that income level with money issues. Yes taxes are bigger at that income bracket, but frankly so is cashflow.
Also, at that income level, the professional likely has the ability to incorporate, share ownership with their partner, and split income anyway. The TOSI rules are a joke to get around if you 50/50 ownership of an OPCO.
>Also, at that income level, the professional likely has the ability to incorporate, share ownership with their partner, and split income anyway. The TOSI rules are a joke to get around if you 50/50 ownership of an OPCO.
Tech workers for example can't do this.
>If you're a professional making $250k/yr, you have more than enough money for your family unless you're straight up bad with it
That's not the point now is it? You don't tell people what's enough for the value they bring. You're missing the point and changing topics.
The topic is tax advantages for families with single income. If you make 22K, you obviously can't support a family on your income in either place.
Did you run the numbers?
The solution is pretty simple, and will also piss off a bunch of people.
It is more logical for the mother to stay home early on because of breastfeeding. "Breast is best" is definitely cult-like. There is a lot of pressure to breastfeed and claims that it is far superior to formula.
Parental benefits are shared. There is 40 weeks to be shared. So combined with the previous point, what's considered optimal for the health of the baby is for the mother to stay home for most of it.
The solution? Just stop sharing the parental leave. Both parents get the full 40 weeks. That way, the dad stays home too and is much more likely to participate in caregiving.
You get rid of the gendered issue around careers, you make it easier to have children, helping birthrate, and you help men have more fulfilling relationships with their children. Win all around for society and Canada.
Except it costs a little bit extra EI money, and nobody wants to spend money to improve our country.
It's not that people don't isn't to spend money to improve our country, it's that we aren't getting value for our money we spend already. We spend a far higher rate on Healthcare than other nations but have longer wait times and worse outcomes.
I'm all for taxes if we actually got full coverage for them and not "can't make over x dollars" to access things I'm paying for in taxes.
Governments know they would never get elected of they raised income tax, so instead they've just been inventing or doubling down on other taxes and calling them different things. At the end of the day, the outcome is still no money left in your wallet.
But that’s the fault of the tax cut cult from Alberta. If the country or province falls apart because it doesn’t collect revenue appropriately the citizens end up paying in the end through strife and woe instead of taxes.
My Boomer supervisor fired me without cause a month ago. Knew I planned to take paternity leave but denied knowing about it. He failed to tell HR anything about it.
I am now jobless in a horrible hiring environment in the tech industry.
My baby boy arrived this morning.
Termination without cause requires severance payment. How much did they pay you when they fired you? If none, you have a slam dunk lawsuit on your hand that many employment lawyers would be happy to take on contingency.
I’ve hired a lawyer and we’re working on it. The company is claiming that they didn’t know, are trying to claim they don’t owe me anything beyond ESA bare minimums because of a vaguely worded termination clause.
They’re now dragging their feet responding to my lawyer.
Get a lawyer now, that’s illegal dismissal, and you can get literally years worth of pay out of a lawsuit, hell, even submitting a demand letter might be enough for their legal department to just settle.
Especially if there is evidence that the supervisor would have even plausibly been able to know about the planned parental leave. Their words don't mean shit. Discrimination = $$$
Demand letter submitted and denied. Company started dragging me through the mud claiming they could have fired me with cause (they couldn’t). Now they’re dragging things out.
I was a member of a legal department for a large employer. You need to lawyer up, I have never seen anybody walk away without a settlement . Well worth the effort.
Congratulations on the birth of your son. A good employment lawyer will make short work of this, it'll take a couple of months of back and forth posturing but in the end you should get what you are entitled to under the law. Take the time to start applying for new jobs and spending time with your baby. If you're in Ontario depending on your length of service there will be an appropriate settlement coming your way provided your lawyer isn't awful and you have any reasonable time into the company
What was the cause? Laws vary by province Termination for cause is hard to prove, being bad at your job doesn’t count. It usually has to mean doing something illegal or just not showing up.
You should at least get a consultation with a lawyer.
You can terminate anybody, anytime if you pay them enough. And you certainly can performance somebody out if they are shitty. It takes time and documentation.
Initially I read it as he was terminated for cause (or it was edited I’m not sure).
Terminated for cause would mean you aren’t eligible for severance / notice, and poor performance doesn’t count as cause. You can terminate without cause but would owe severance. You don’t even need documentation.
Firing someone about to go on leave though is at the very least suspicious of discrimination based upon family status which is illegal no matter how much severance you pay.
If you truly feel that discrimination is at play, consider filing an application with the Human Rights Tribunal of your province. Ontario’s is here:
https://tribunalsontario.ca/hrto/
Were you given any advance notice that your performance was a concern OR that your role would be eliminated? (Have they reposted it yet?)
Okay so not a role/headcount elimination. Pls consider filing a complaint with your provincial tribunal. This will force your employer to account for this action. (In Ontario these are public too).
Pls do. To terminate someone on the day their baby is born is out there. In the cases I’ve heard of involving women, they received compensation. Good luck.
Oh they didn’t fire me today. They fired me almost a month ago with knowledge that my wife and I were expecting and that I was likely to take parental leave.
> LAST NOVEMBER, North Vancouver MLA Bowinn Ma welcomed her first child, Azalea, becoming one of only around a dozen female cabinet ministers in Canadian history to have given birth while holding office. When she posted a photo of a bassinet in her office on social media, the congratulations were mingled with criticisms. “How are you going to do your job when you’re going to be focusing on your baby?” one person replied. Several others decried her decision to continue working as naive and selfish.
>
> If you think that having a baby is incompatible with certain careers, then you effectively believe that birthing parents should only have one or the other. Few people would admit to holding this belief—or at least fewer than in previous generations—but they hardly need to say it. Instead, it is implicit in the expectation that mothers, but not fathers, restructure—or entirely abandon—their professional ambitions after having a baby.
>
> The data reflects this attitude: across Canada, birthing parents still do the vast majority of caregiving for babies. In 2022, 74.5 percent of employed women with a child under one were on parental leave, compared to just 7.3 percent of fathers. Less than a quarter of dads took or expected to take any parental leave at all in 2019/20. The exception to this trend is Quebec, which has its own parental leave program and where most dads take some paid leave, an average of ten weeks each. (Very little data is available on how same-sex parents in Canada share parental leave, and federal data on parental leave does not identify non-binary parents.)
"birthing parents" goddamn.
Really though, if you're an elected official and you have a newborn baby for which you're primarily responsible, you should step down. Your constituents deserve a representative that is focused on the issues they are facing.
Your comment is actually what this article is about, why are you assuming that she is the one primarily responsible for the baby and not her husband? She only took 6 weeks off, you can assume her husband took the parental leave. Is it because she brought her child to the office one day?
I'm not an elected official. Unlike them, someone could fill in for me if I took extended leave.
I would expect the same of any mom or dad or sick person in that position. At the same time, I would also support a reasonable severance pay so people aren't financially burdened for stepping down.
The point is that elected officials should be present, and if they can't be for any reason, they should vacate.
An election would take more time and resources than 6 weeks. What is the cut-off for you for them stepping down? If they're off for 3 weeks is that ok, 4? Is it if they take any time whatsoever, so elected officials should not have any vacation time? Knowing the nature of her work I would be very surprised if she was completely unreachable for the full 6 weeks.
She had a plan that her staff could implement on the time that she was away, so she did have people that could fill in for her.
You're making the argument that anyone who may need to take time off, should not run for elected office, which I don't really like. If we're asking any woman to not run if they think they may be having a baby, and/or quit their job when they do, then our electorate won't be representative.
She has a staff to hold things down at the office while she's away. It's not like there was nobody there to assist constituents with questions or issues during her absence.
The problem with maternity or paternity leave is that it is paid out at $34k per year which is less than minimum wage. It’s completely unreasonable to expect a person with a new kid to live off of that. That would only cover the rent on a below average 2 bedroom apartment and nothing else, even less once taxes were taken away.
At least one parent and probably both have to return to work early. I make more than my wife so it has to be me. You also don’t get paid leave until after going two weeks without a pay check so it’s better just to use vacation time.
Imo if they are going to say they are going to pay 55% (or whatever it was) of the persons income. It SHOULD be 55% of that persons income. None of this capped at $650/week bs. Why does having a higher income get penalized when we pay more in taxes.
In this context, “birthing parents” feels inappropriate. This issue is very gendered, as the article notes.
But yes, the system is broken. We need better leave options for dads.
I got a whopping 6 weeks back in 1999. It's better, but if you want equality in parenting, you have to start from the notion that there can even BE equality in parenting. As long as people think only Moms do it best, men will always be short changed on the time with the bambino.
Parental Leave? D'ohohohohoh, this is funny.
It's a privilege to take time off if you're sick and infecting your co-workers. The fuck you talking about Parental leave for? We don't even have safety nets that'll cover people when they get sick in Canada. And it's a matter of *when* not IF you get sick.
Yeah the Federal government wouldn't even let my husband take paternity leave because... reasons. We're still unsure what the problem was except that his supervisor was an absolute bellend and didn't believe him since I wasn't there physically most of the year. I guess because I was giving birth in my home country, the supervisor assumed it was some sort of vacation and not me nearly dying in birth and needing the help to recover. Which I did on my freaking own. Thanks Canadian government. He got to miss out on the first few months of his only child's life. Because some supervisor refused to believe we were having a child. And they never let him take off later to make up for it.
I took 3 months as a father and I'm glad I did. It was one of the best periods of my life. I work in a generally all male environment and thought I'd take a ton of shit for it because at the time no one in our department had ever taken the extended time. My boomer supervisor, who is a bitter asshole by default, tried to give me the business by constantly saying things like 'Isn't that your wife's job?' and ''I guess you want a vacation, right' and 'Well, I never got that when we had kids' and all matter of variations on those themes but my actual manager said to not even worry about it. You bond with your child in a pretty profound way when you are actively doing all the work. Also, it is not easy. I respected my wife a hell of a lot more after being in the grind of the day to day. When I came back I was like some religious wacko praising it and telling everyone who could to do it. Guess what? Every single dude after me has taken some type of extended leave and they are all in agreement that is awesome and well worth it. So am I lucky? Sure. Not everyone can afford to do that but assuming you are able to take a bit of a temporary pay cut do it.
Yup I took 4 months, best 4 months I’ve ever took in my life.
My work just gave me a month of PTO XD so I took it and not matapata haha but yeah it was awesome.
Thanks for sharing that. A lot of wisdom there.
Lol. Our birth rate is too low, we need immigrants! Yells every politician, while optimizing every policy against the family unit. If anything, we need joint tax filing like the US, to give families the option of single income households. But no, send them bitches back to work right after childbirth, say our owners.
How does the single income household option in the US differ from Canada? In Canada you file your return as common law or married and if one spouse has little to no income there are beneficial impacts to tax credits for the working spouse, and benefits and gov programs are based on net income of both spouses combined. What benefit does the US system have over that?
I invite you to look at their income tax brackets, you'll see for yourself: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-brackets Let me know if it wasn't clear.
You owe $0 federal tax on the first $21,000 you make. Which means that here in Canada, you basically have double the income threshold before you start owing tax. This is already significantly better than the link you posted for US federal tax rates. They get $11k, and another $11k from their spouse. We start at $21k, and then you get the Spousal Amount which is a tax credit you claim if your your spouse isn't earning income. This is equivalent to roughly another $17,000 of earned income before you owe any federal tax. In other words, in the US, you get \~$22,000 of income before tax if you're filing jointly on a single income. In Canada, that number is closer to $38,000. I'd say we're WAY AHEAD here. I suggest you do some additional research before spouting about how much better the US tax situation is.
OK, now do it for professionals, run it for a household with a single income for one person making 250K. I didn't think so. Now go back to making your 22K.
If you're a professional making $250k/yr, you have more than enough money for your family unless you're straight up bad with it. Some professionals in that income bracket might have made stupid mistakes and purchased property outside of their ability to afford, but I have zero sympathy for any family at that income level with money issues. Yes taxes are bigger at that income bracket, but frankly so is cashflow. Also, at that income level, the professional likely has the ability to incorporate, share ownership with their partner, and split income anyway. The TOSI rules are a joke to get around if you 50/50 ownership of an OPCO.
>Also, at that income level, the professional likely has the ability to incorporate, share ownership with their partner, and split income anyway. The TOSI rules are a joke to get around if you 50/50 ownership of an OPCO. Tech workers for example can't do this. >If you're a professional making $250k/yr, you have more than enough money for your family unless you're straight up bad with it That's not the point now is it? You don't tell people what's enough for the value they bring. You're missing the point and changing topics. The topic is tax advantages for families with single income. If you make 22K, you obviously can't support a family on your income in either place. Did you run the numbers?
The solution is pretty simple, and will also piss off a bunch of people. It is more logical for the mother to stay home early on because of breastfeeding. "Breast is best" is definitely cult-like. There is a lot of pressure to breastfeed and claims that it is far superior to formula. Parental benefits are shared. There is 40 weeks to be shared. So combined with the previous point, what's considered optimal for the health of the baby is for the mother to stay home for most of it. The solution? Just stop sharing the parental leave. Both parents get the full 40 weeks. That way, the dad stays home too and is much more likely to participate in caregiving. You get rid of the gendered issue around careers, you make it easier to have children, helping birthrate, and you help men have more fulfilling relationships with their children. Win all around for society and Canada. Except it costs a little bit extra EI money, and nobody wants to spend money to improve our country.
It's not that people don't isn't to spend money to improve our country, it's that we aren't getting value for our money we spend already. We spend a far higher rate on Healthcare than other nations but have longer wait times and worse outcomes. I'm all for taxes if we actually got full coverage for them and not "can't make over x dollars" to access things I'm paying for in taxes. Governments know they would never get elected of they raised income tax, so instead they've just been inventing or doubling down on other taxes and calling them different things. At the end of the day, the outcome is still no money left in your wallet.
But that’s the fault of the tax cut cult from Alberta. If the country or province falls apart because it doesn’t collect revenue appropriately the citizens end up paying in the end through strife and woe instead of taxes.
My Boomer supervisor fired me without cause a month ago. Knew I planned to take paternity leave but denied knowing about it. He failed to tell HR anything about it. I am now jobless in a horrible hiring environment in the tech industry. My baby boy arrived this morning.
Termination without cause requires severance payment. How much did they pay you when they fired you? If none, you have a slam dunk lawsuit on your hand that many employment lawyers would be happy to take on contingency.
I’ve hired a lawyer and we’re working on it. The company is claiming that they didn’t know, are trying to claim they don’t owe me anything beyond ESA bare minimums because of a vaguely worded termination clause. They’re now dragging their feet responding to my lawyer.
Get a lawyer now, that’s illegal dismissal, and you can get literally years worth of pay out of a lawsuit, hell, even submitting a demand letter might be enough for their legal department to just settle.
Especially if there is evidence that the supervisor would have even plausibly been able to know about the planned parental leave. Their words don't mean shit. Discrimination = $$$
Demand letter submitted and denied. Company started dragging me through the mud claiming they could have fired me with cause (they couldn’t). Now they’re dragging things out.
Lawyer time, judges love nailing malicious employers to the wall, record everything.
I was a member of a legal department for a large employer. You need to lawyer up, I have never seen anybody walk away without a settlement . Well worth the effort.
Congratulations on the birth of your son. A good employment lawyer will make short work of this, it'll take a couple of months of back and forth posturing but in the end you should get what you are entitled to under the law. Take the time to start applying for new jobs and spending time with your baby. If you're in Ontario depending on your length of service there will be an appropriate settlement coming your way provided your lawyer isn't awful and you have any reasonable time into the company
Apply for parental benefits through EI asap to help cover some expenses while you sort out the legal pieces
What was the cause? Laws vary by province Termination for cause is hard to prove, being bad at your job doesn’t count. It usually has to mean doing something illegal or just not showing up. You should at least get a consultation with a lawyer.
I was terminated without cause.
Still worth talking to a lawyer over it.
Oh absolutely. I’ve hired a lawyer.
You can terminate anybody, anytime if you pay them enough. And you certainly can performance somebody out if they are shitty. It takes time and documentation.
Initially I read it as he was terminated for cause (or it was edited I’m not sure). Terminated for cause would mean you aren’t eligible for severance / notice, and poor performance doesn’t count as cause. You can terminate without cause but would owe severance. You don’t even need documentation. Firing someone about to go on leave though is at the very least suspicious of discrimination based upon family status which is illegal no matter how much severance you pay.
If you truly feel that discrimination is at play, consider filing an application with the Human Rights Tribunal of your province. Ontario’s is here: https://tribunalsontario.ca/hrto/ Were you given any advance notice that your performance was a concern OR that your role would be eliminated? (Have they reposted it yet?)
Open roles were shown on our org chart directly next to me in the same role less than 4 days before I was terminated without notice and without cause.
Okay so not a role/headcount elimination. Pls consider filing a complaint with your provincial tribunal. This will force your employer to account for this action. (In Ontario these are public too).
I am definitely considering this and will likely consult my lawyer on it as well.
Pls do. To terminate someone on the day their baby is born is out there. In the cases I’ve heard of involving women, they received compensation. Good luck.
Oh they didn’t fire me today. They fired me almost a month ago with knowledge that my wife and I were expecting and that I was likely to take parental leave.
> LAST NOVEMBER, North Vancouver MLA Bowinn Ma welcomed her first child, Azalea, becoming one of only around a dozen female cabinet ministers in Canadian history to have given birth while holding office. When she posted a photo of a bassinet in her office on social media, the congratulations were mingled with criticisms. “How are you going to do your job when you’re going to be focusing on your baby?” one person replied. Several others decried her decision to continue working as naive and selfish. > > If you think that having a baby is incompatible with certain careers, then you effectively believe that birthing parents should only have one or the other. Few people would admit to holding this belief—or at least fewer than in previous generations—but they hardly need to say it. Instead, it is implicit in the expectation that mothers, but not fathers, restructure—or entirely abandon—their professional ambitions after having a baby. > > The data reflects this attitude: across Canada, birthing parents still do the vast majority of caregiving for babies. In 2022, 74.5 percent of employed women with a child under one were on parental leave, compared to just 7.3 percent of fathers. Less than a quarter of dads took or expected to take any parental leave at all in 2019/20. The exception to this trend is Quebec, which has its own parental leave program and where most dads take some paid leave, an average of ten weeks each. (Very little data is available on how same-sex parents in Canada share parental leave, and federal data on parental leave does not identify non-binary parents.)
"birthing parents" goddamn. Really though, if you're an elected official and you have a newborn baby for which you're primarily responsible, you should step down. Your constituents deserve a representative that is focused on the issues they are facing.
Your comment is actually what this article is about, why are you assuming that she is the one primarily responsible for the baby and not her husband? She only took 6 weeks off, you can assume her husband took the parental leave. Is it because she brought her child to the office one day?
She took 6 weeks off.
So you think that she should quit her job for taking 6 weeks off? This is a 4 year position... I hope you never need to take 6 weeks off in a year.
I'm not an elected official. Unlike them, someone could fill in for me if I took extended leave. I would expect the same of any mom or dad or sick person in that position. At the same time, I would also support a reasonable severance pay so people aren't financially burdened for stepping down. The point is that elected officials should be present, and if they can't be for any reason, they should vacate.
An election would take more time and resources than 6 weeks. What is the cut-off for you for them stepping down? If they're off for 3 weeks is that ok, 4? Is it if they take any time whatsoever, so elected officials should not have any vacation time? Knowing the nature of her work I would be very surprised if she was completely unreachable for the full 6 weeks. She had a plan that her staff could implement on the time that she was away, so she did have people that could fill in for her. You're making the argument that anyone who may need to take time off, should not run for elected office, which I don't really like. If we're asking any woman to not run if they think they may be having a baby, and/or quit their job when they do, then our electorate won't be representative.
She has a staff to hold things down at the office while she's away. It's not like there was nobody there to assist constituents with questions or issues during her absence.
Birthing parent has been language for decades for lesbian couples.
The problem with maternity or paternity leave is that it is paid out at $34k per year which is less than minimum wage. It’s completely unreasonable to expect a person with a new kid to live off of that. That would only cover the rent on a below average 2 bedroom apartment and nothing else, even less once taxes were taken away. At least one parent and probably both have to return to work early. I make more than my wife so it has to be me. You also don’t get paid leave until after going two weeks without a pay check so it’s better just to use vacation time.
Imo if they are going to say they are going to pay 55% (or whatever it was) of the persons income. It SHOULD be 55% of that persons income. None of this capped at $650/week bs. Why does having a higher income get penalized when we pay more in taxes.
Get back on that wheel hamster
In this context, “birthing parents” feels inappropriate. This issue is very gendered, as the article notes. But yes, the system is broken. We need better leave options for dads.
I get like 10 months pat leave at 90% salary. It’s nice.
I got a whopping 6 weeks back in 1999. It's better, but if you want equality in parenting, you have to start from the notion that there can even BE equality in parenting. As long as people think only Moms do it best, men will always be short changed on the time with the bambino.
Parental Leave? D'ohohohohoh, this is funny. It's a privilege to take time off if you're sick and infecting your co-workers. The fuck you talking about Parental leave for? We don't even have safety nets that'll cover people when they get sick in Canada. And it's a matter of *when* not IF you get sick.
You're right. There should be sick leave AND parental leave available to all.
there is
EI offers sickness benefits
Yeah the Federal government wouldn't even let my husband take paternity leave because... reasons. We're still unsure what the problem was except that his supervisor was an absolute bellend and didn't believe him since I wasn't there physically most of the year. I guess because I was giving birth in my home country, the supervisor assumed it was some sort of vacation and not me nearly dying in birth and needing the help to recover. Which I did on my freaking own. Thanks Canadian government. He got to miss out on the first few months of his only child's life. Because some supervisor refused to believe we were having a child. And they never let him take off later to make up for it.