Thanks, Madam Chair. Yes. This issue was raised in written submissions from the Status of Women Council and the Union of Northern Workers. As I mentioned earlier, it is good that people will have access to unpaid emergency leave. What that means is that, if they have to go and self-isolate, an employer has to allow them to take the time off. It's unpaid, but their job is kept for them so that they can return to a job. It's not just the individual employee; it can be a member of their family who might need care, and so on. I think that's a good thing to do, and in fact, we are actually required to do it, if you read the plain-language version of the bill, because we have accepted through the Safe Restart Program that the federal government has. We were required to make this change to our legislation, so that's a good thing.
The downside is that, as I said earlier, there is no incentive for someone to take the unpaid leave. Some people are just not going to even be able to afford to take unpaid leave, so there is no incentive for someone to self-isolate and stop a pandemic, necessarily. Thank goodness we have the federal funding now, during the pandemic. When that's finished, I'm not sure that this is going to help, and that's, I think, precisely what the Status of Women Council said. We need to find a way to ensure that, if we want people to behave correctly and isolate and so on, there has to be a bit of an incentive to help them do that. They have to be able to continue to make some kind of a living. How that gets covered is the essence of this motion. Is it something that should be covered by the employer, should it be covered by government, or a combination of those? That's an interesting question, and I think that's what is at the heart of this motion, is to consider whether we can find ways to support people who need to take emergency leave and how we're going to pay for that. So I would encourage that the Cabinet respond positively to this motion and investigate ways to make this unpaid emergency leave actually paid into the future. Thanks, Madam Chair.