Future of work
A curated resource of recent research on trends shaping Canada's labour market.
The authors measured the impact on parental employment and work hours in Canada by observing the geographical pattern of primary school re-openings through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. They did this by comparing parents of primary-school children in regions where schools re-opened to regions where schools remained closed. In addition, the authors considered the parents of secondary-school-age dependents as an additional control group.
Mainly using confidential microdata from the Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey (LFS) from between January 2017 to 2021, the authors estimated the impact separately for mothers and fathers, as well as for single parents. Single mothers experienced an 18-percentage point increase in their employment capacity following school re-openings as compared to all other parent categories.