A new Ontario law, known informally for the little girl who inspired it, will help level the playing field for families created through adoption and surrogacy, by giving them the same benefits as other parents.
“Scottie’s Law” extends the provincial 15-week maternal leave, which until now had been reserved for women who gave birth, to adoptive families and parents whose children were carried by a surrogate.
Scottie, now 17 months, made an uninhibited appearance gleefully waving and clapping at a press conference announcing the change on Nov. 26.
Her parents, Zane and Baden Colt, reflected in an interview with The CJN on what the change means to families like theirs, who confronted fertility challenges and needed a surrogate.
“When we were early on in our surrogacy journey, we started to look at what was it going to look like when we finally were lucky enough to bring home a child. We were disheartened to realize we weren’t going to be treated like any other family would be,” Baden said.
The prevailing view was that they were lucky to get any job-protected, paid leave at all, she said.
“But the way that we looked at it, was that parents are parents and we all deserve the time to spend time with our child, bonding with them, taking care of them, being present in the home. I didn’t see a good reason why parents by adoption or surrogacy should be treated any differently.”
Scottie’s Law, part of a package of workplace reforms, is currently being debated in the Ontario legislature. When it is passed, it will give Ontario parents 16 weeks of job-protected leave.
The federal government, which oversees Employment Insurance, and payment of parental leave benefits, said in an economic statement in fall 2023 that 15 weeks of paid benefits would be extended to adoptive and surrogate parents, at a cost of $48.1 million over six years, starting in 2023-24, and $12.6 million ongoing. However, the measure has not yet been enacted.
About 1,700 families would be affected annually by the changes, the federal government has said.
All new parents can currently claim up to 40 weeks of benefits (or up to 69 weeks paid at a lower rate). Surrogates who give birth will still be entitled to receive 15 weeks of benefits, to physically recover.
But the additional 15 weeks of benefits and protected leave will be significant for families like theirs, Zane said.
“There’s a significant financial toll on us if we’re home for 15 weeks less or we have to put an infant in day care at nine-and-a-half months as opposed to a year. There are limited spaces and there’s a higher cost for an infant as opposed to a toddler,” he said.
“When you couple with that with parents by adoption or surrogacy have typically had an emotionally draining time getting to parenthood, often it’s a financially draining experience too, to go through infertility, sometimes multiple rounds of IVF… or a lengthy adoption process. This was just adding financial salt in the wound for people who were finally becoming parents,” Baden said.
The extension of benefits and job protection is also a symbolic victory, she said.
“What pleases me as a parent by surrogacy is it’s one more step to normalizing this form of family building and one more step in the direction of Scottie growing up and saying ‘I’m just like every other kid, it really doesn’t matter that I didn’t grow in my mother’s tummy.’”
