care work

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We hope you can join the discussion: How can we ensure that everyone gets the care they need, and make sure we are also caring for the people who provide it? We are building a coalition to advocate for a universal, comprehensive, publicly funded, high quality, affordable, accessible, accountable, and non-profit childcare system in Nova Scotia. Are you a parent? A grandparent? Are you a child care provider? An early childhood educator? A concerned community member? We want to hear from you at this event. 

Hear from panelists about why you should care about the care economy, which is about people who need care and those who provide care, paid and unpaid. Much of this care work is undervalued, most of it done by women, and disproportionately immigrants, migrant workers, and racialized people. Care is also critical social infrastructure. Hear how child care itself is an economic driver and why it is critical to create a healthy society, ensuring everyone reaches their potential.

Angella MacEwen is a Senior Economist at CUPE National, and a policy fellow with the Broadbent Institute. Her primary focus is understanding the impacts of Canadian social and economic policy on workers. Angella writes a quarterly publication, Economy at Work, which aims to communicate current economic issues to a broad audience. She holds a MA in Economics from Dalhousie University.

El Jones is a two-time National Spoken Word Champion and the former Poet Laureate of Halifax. She is dedicated to using poetry in prison outreach and youth engagement, and volunteers twice a week at Centreline Studio on the corner of Uniacke and Gottingen. Her poems deal with the social-political issues that surround race and gender. For the past year, Jones has been running the Saturday Morning edition of the Halifax Examiner, bringing her razor-sharp analysis to bear on Nova Scotian politics. Her book of spoken word poetry, Live from the Afrikan Resistance! was published by Fernwood in 2014. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred critical and much needed attention to childcare services as well as to wider sets of policies that address people’s paid work and unpaid care work. This panel explores three intra-connected critical pillars of Canada’s (federal, provincial, territorial) social policy architectures; childcare services, parental leave, and employment policies. The panel examines these in the context of COVID-19 and its long-term impacts on the lives of families and parents. They draw on research and analysis, including work-in-progress, that has been taken on, partly or wholly in response to the pandemic. They also highlight key issues that need to be considered in research, advocacy and policy development as we look ahead to the policy supports that families will need in order to live equitable, flourishing, and sustainable lives.

Chair

• Andrea Doucet, Brock University

Panelists