Finances

It is difficult to conceive why new adoptive parents would not receive employee benefits equal to those biological parents enjoy. As every adoptive parent knows, the process of bringing children home for the first time, introducing them to their new home, and establishing a strong parent-child bond, takes considerable time and work.

However, employers still don’t offer new adoptive parents the same employee benefits as biological parents, particularly in respect to those employers that top up the Employment Insurance payments given by the Canadian government.

Under current Employment Insurance legislation, women who give birth are entitled to 15 weeks of maternity leave and 35 weeks of parental leave. Adoptive parents only qualify for parental leave. So far, the Canadian government has chosen to ignore protests from the adoption community that this discriminates against adoptive families.