Hey Prime Minister, did you forget about Maternity leaves for the Self-employed?

cc: An0n0nym0us

Last September, just a month before the federal election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised Canadians what seemed like a sweet and kind thing.

Maternity and parental benefits for self employed people.

His ulterior motive was uncovered about five seconds later: 2.6 million Canadians work for themselves, and one million of them are women. And this guy — who had already led a minority government and really needed to pump up his numbers — wasn’t too popular with women.

The ploy only half worked. Harper got in again as leader with a minority government, albeit a slightly stronger one. Perhaps a few more women voted for him, who knows?

But seven months later, Canadian women who work for themselves still have no benefits. In fact, there’s not been a single peep from Parliament Hill about this great and generous idea.

I myself have two young children that I raised from infancy without a whole lotta help from Canada’s otherwise very sophisticated social safety net. As soon as I figured out which way was up after having my son, I started talking on freelance work, and typed away during his naps and once he was in bed. He started in daycare part time at five months.

With my daughter, thanks to part-time teaching work, I got an incredibly bountiful $175 a week in EI benefits. When she was six months old, I had to return to aforementioned teaching gig, or risk losing it altogether. I hired a part-time sitter for a few months and moved her into a daycare at a year.

OK, I’m a writer and you’d expect me to be scrounging and cobbling together a career. But doctors, dentists and entrepreneurs are left in similarly unsupported situations when they have kids.

I don’t think Harper really thought this one through. Not only was his plan to make EI payments voluntary, and require people to pay in just six months before taking benefits (you’d just be showing right around that time) seem a bit blue-sky, but the final results would have been too piecemeal anyway.

Self-employed people, both men and women, are already on their own when it comes to everything from disability insurance to pensions to health coverage to mortgage insurance. It’s even hard to get a long distance plan that makes sense when you work for yourself at home.

But in the digital era, in the zone of the mompreneur and contracting out, the ranks of the self employed are rising. And with Canada’s not-so-great birthrate (we’re at about 1.59, we need 2.1 to replace our current population), our government needs more babies to build the next generation’s workforce.

I think we’ll need a heck of a lot more of a visionary leader than Harper to figure this one out. If you’re pregnant and self employed right now, start looking now for a good sling, breast pump and hands-free cell phone. You’re gonna need them.

Diane Peters

Peters writes a weekly column Odd Job s for METRO Newspaper and contributes to Today's Parent, The National Post and other publications.