Dalla Lana School of Public Health

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The University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Sociology and the Centre for Global Social Policy present…

“Caring for the Caregiver: An intersectional analysis of caregiver policies in Canada.” This hybrid event is part of the Care Economies in Context Speaker Series.

Abstract

Unpaid caregiving is on the rise in Canada. However, less is known about whether and how policies in Canada are addressing their needs for support. This paper analyses caregiving-related policies at both the federal level and across six Canadian provinces: Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador, with a specific focus on supports for unpaid caregivers. Using the intersectionality-based policy analysis (IBPA) framework, we examine how these policies reflect and reinforce structural inequities through eligibility criteria, access mechanisms, and benefit structures.

We find that caregiving policies often prioritize the condition of the care recipient over the circumstances or needs of caregivers, resulting in the exclusion of many caregivers from available supports. Access is further challenged by fragmented institutional pathways and a reliance on digital systems which demand that unpaid caregivers possess sufficient time, digital literacy, policy awareness, and system fluency to access available supports. Additionally, policies fail to recognize multiple caregiving roles within a single household or to scale benefits in proportion to care demands. We conclude that the current patchwork of caregiving policies in Canada inadequately supports unpaid caregivers and offer policy recommendations to promote a more inclusive, accessible, and equitable care system.

Biographies

Kayla Benjamin
Kayla Benjamin is a PhD Candidate in Health Systems Research at the University of Toronto and a Vanier Scholar. Her research interests include health and social care policy, care work, and women’s health. Before her Ph.D., Kayla received an Honours B.MSc. in Interdisciplinary Medical Sciences at Western University and an MSc in Public Health and Health Systems from the University of Waterloo. She is currently working as a Research Assistant on the Care Economies in Context project and as the lead RA for the Caring across Generations project. Outside of academia, Kayla works with missINFORMED a national non-profit organization she co-founded in 2020. missINFORMED (missinformed.ca) is a youth-led health education and advocacy platform that crafts resources from an intersectional and community-informed lens.

Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero
Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero (PhD University of Toronto) is Director, Centre for Global Health; Director, Collaborative Specialization in Global Health; and Associate Professor of Global Health, Social & Behavioural Health Sciences and cross-appointed to the Institute of Health Policy, Management & Evaluation, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She is also the Co-Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Health Promotion and Editor in Chief, Global Health Promotion. She was inaugural Deputy Scientific Director, Canadian Institutes of Health Research – Institute of Population & Public Health. She is a global public health systems and policy researcher whose research focuses on the political and social influences affecting equitable policy progress in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. Her research also focuses on evaluating the health and health and gender equity impacts of policy and program interventions using implementation science and assessing governance effectiveness of global institutions and public health systems. institutions. As an educator, she is deeply committed to teaching and mentoring our next generation of global health researchers and leaders.

Erica is a member of the Care Economies in Context project and co-directs the Caring across Generations project.