Fathers Taking Paternity Leave in Québec (Canada) : Innovative and Subversive !

In our paper, we present first the Québec Parental Insurance Plan (level of wage replacement, the maximum insurable earnings, number of weeks, etc.) implemented in 2006, as well as some statistics on its use by parents to shed some light on the context for leave uptake for Quebec fathers, as the leave program and uptake are different from Canada.  The new leave program has a 3 to 5 week  leave for fathers, a leave which is non transferable to mothers, and which 80 % of fathers now take, for an average of 7 weeks (13 weeks for fathers who take the paternal leave and also part of the parental leave, which can be shared with the mother. We will also present a brief review of the literature on the question of fatherhood in Quebec and specifically on the social changes that brought fathers to become more involved with their families by sharing family responsibilities with mothers and taking the paternity and parental leave. We turn next to the portrait of respondents with whom we conducted interviews for this research on fathers taking leave alone with their child for at least 4 weeks. Then, we focus on the experience of fathers who took paternity / parental leave, alone with the child, on their relations with the child, family relationships, as well as the emotions experienced during this. Following our previous work on fathers and parenting (Tremblay, 2003, 2000), we wanted to study parenthood as experienced by fathers and look into the situation observed since the implementation of the new paternity leave reserved for fathers. Two main issues are central to our analysis: • What have fathers experienced and felt during parental leave / paternity leave, while they were alone with their child at home? • How does this experience affect their life, their career and the gendered division of labour within the family ?

We present the results of this research based on interviews done with over 30 Québec fathers in 2013.

Reference: Tremblay, D.-G. and N. Dodeler (2015). Les pères et le congé de paternité/parental. Québec: Presses de l'université du Québec.