Care work is indispensable - YET THE CARE ECONOMY IN CANADA

Across Canada and around the world, daily tasks, like cooking, cleaning, laundry, family planning, child rearing, eldercare and caring for people with disabilities, keep our society running –and are disproportionally done by women. Burnout among paid care workers has spiked since the onset of the pandemic, and many workers are leaving the sector due to low wages and strain on their mental health1. The health care sector is struggling to meet the needs of a population impacted by ongoing COVID-19 infections and an enormous backlog of surgeries and procedures caused by COVID lockdowns. At the same time, the soaring cost of living is making it harder for households to afford basic essentials and is requiring workers to put in long working hours, often at more than one job2 For hundreds of thousands of women in Canada, there is no escape from the constant of care work.

The care economy refers to all care work that takes place in institutional settings (whether public, private, or non-profit), households and communities and includes all forms of paid and unpaid reproductive labour3. Unpaid care work includes the provision of unpaid direct care for children, young people, older people and people with disabilities, and unpaid indirect care, like cooking, cleaning and other related activities. In 2022, 52% of women over the age of 15 provided paid or unpaid care compared to 42% of men4. Within the household, women report spending 3.9 hours per day providing unpaid care compared to men who report spending 2.4 hours per day.5

When done for profit or compensation, those same caregiving roles are referred to as paid care work, which includes but is not limited to domestic workers, personal support workers, health care workers and child care workers.

Many of the women who work in the paid care economy are underpaid, (im)migrant and racialized workers working in homes and institutions.7

The gendered division of household labour and the prevalence of low-wage and precarious care work can be traced back to oppressive structures that devalue women’s labour and constrain their economic opportunities.8 In order to challenge the systems that produce these negative and unequal outcomes for the people who provide care, we must first recognize the role of capitalism and neoliberalism as the economic and political systems that create the conditions under which the care economy operates.9 Strong actions by governments are needed to transform the current conditions of care with bold policies tackling the root of the current crisis. Major investments in care infrastructure and communities and an overhaul of immigration law are needed. Equally necessary are concerted efforts to address and change the prevalent norm that care is undervalued “women’s” work, so it’s equally distributed between men and women, and from the household to the state.

This report assesses the strengths and weaknesses of federal care policy in Canada.10 The results show whether federal policies related to care have been adopted, funded and implemented, and the extent to which they have had a transformative effect on the intersections of inequality. Valuing paid and unpaid care workers and redistributing the unequal care workload between women, men and gender diverse people will require reforms to all these policies, guided by a whole-ofgovernment approach. The increased attention currently aimed at care presents a unique opportunity to rethink how paid and unpaid care work, and care systems generally, function in Canada.