Basically, between the income replacement that one is entitled to from Employment Insurance and the employee benefits paid out under the terms of the Agreement, an indeterminate employee can stay home to raise their baby at nearly full pay (93%) for one year (2 Weeks Waiting Period + 18 Weeks Maternity Benefit + 32 Weeks Parental Benefit).

Now as the father, I wasn’t entitled to any Maternity Benefit — my wife could take that — but the 32 weeks… 8 months away from work… well, maybe I could take that…

…provided I could get past the psychological hurdles, of course.  What kind of man takes 8 months off of work at the beginning of his public service career?

I’d never been in any financial position to entertain such a question before.

I took 2 weeks away from work for the birth of my first child, and three weeks for the second.  The extra week the second time around was to provide extra care.  My second was born with Jaundice, and needed near-constant phototherapy for the first nine days of her life by remaining wrapped in a biliblanket.

8 months?

I love my children; my children love me.  But I’m the sort of person that needs to remain engaged.  After two weeks of  R&R, I’m ready to abort my vacation and get back to my desk.  I crave mental stimulation.  I need structure.  As much as I should probably feel ashamed for my lack of evolution, I am a man first and a social worker second.  My sense of self is largely tied to my attachment to work.  My importance is in what I  create.  My value is in the income I am able to provide for my family.

But I created this child.  And the benefits will allow me to provide for my family.

With much urging from my wife, I took the 8 months.

I wish I had the right words to express how great it was.

Not idyllic, by any means.  A lot of work; worries; weird hours; exhaustion; exasperation when nothing worked.  But also immense joy; attachment; love; connection like I never believed I could feel.  And tangible response from my baby; recognition; pleasure from my presence; anxiety from my departure.

8 months went entirely too quickly.  For those last 2 weeks, I held her constantly.

I thought I’d been a good father to my first two children.  I’d taken as much time as I could afford, to be there as they entered the world.  But in retrospect I was something of a stranger to them, and they to me.  It bothered me enormously that they seemed more curious than pleased to see me return home at the end of the day.  I was often beside myself with frustration for my inability to calm them when they were hurt or distressed.  Nothing I could do had anything near the effect of my wife simply reaching down and picking them up.

My baby will be 18 months old soon.  For some time now — for as long as she’s been able to, really — she has come running to see me when I arrive home from work.  Perhaps it’s better described as high-speed toddling, but more often than not she beats her 4 year old sister to the door.

Even after I’m settled in for the night, in between her adventures with her pets and her older sisters, she’ll come back to me with arms outstretched, “Da da!  Da da!” insistent that I hold her immediately.

I credit the baby for ‘teaching’ her older sister that these are good practices.  Not long after the daily return-from-work ritual began, my 4 year old also started racing to the door to get her own turn at being swept off her feet and kissed soundly.

I loved those 8 months.  They meant everything to me, and really showed me what they can mean to a newborn.  If there was any effect on my career prospects or my reputation, I can’t tell.  My profile is actually higher now.  Twitter, blogging, involvement with GCPEDIA and GCconnex — these all came after my return to work.

Honestly, I’m kind of ambivalent about becoming a DG anyway.

If you’ve taken parental leave, or just have something to share on the subject, I’d love to read your comments.

Free Culture is a difficult concept for some to understand, primarily because we have been born and raised in a capitalist society where few things in life are truly free, both in terms of their monetary cost and our ability to influence or control them. When you’re born and raised into this kind of environment — one of disempowerment — powerlessness becomes normal, to the point where we are not even cognisant of the limitations that are placed on our freedom.

Capitalism is merely a familiar frame of reference, but through indoctrination our consumerist personality becomes forged — along with an accompanying perception of reality that people are often unable to let go of in order to see things differently.

Education, both formal and informal, perpetuates this. Far from being an advancement of knowledge, it is more accurately conceptualized as a mechanism for advancing the status quo, and with advanced education can come advanced indoctrination. Through education, commercialization and cost become synonymous with quality and value.

While the trite phrase “the best things in life are free” can be applied to things equally trite — a sunny day or the smile on a child’s face — it almost certainly does not apply to “real” goods and services in our society, does it? Value is attributed to commodities by their price, and by the fact that they are privately owned to begin with. This association between cost, control and actual value, perpetuated by capitalism, becomes internalized and reflected in our own personal values and perceptions.

For example, there is a stigma attached to the notion of reducing or eliminating the scope of property (“Communism”). There is suspicion about the value of anything that one person would freely give away to another (“defective,” “worthless,” or “outdated”), and the character of any person that would depend on others to provide them with goods or services free of charge (“lazy”, “welfare”). With the amount of terms and conditions associated with so-called free gifts, and the serious limitations that our legal system imposes on what we know as freedom, the definition of the word free and its scope in terms of our real-life behaviours has really devolved into something almost completely meaningless.

I am a “consumer” of free culture (to borrow the capitalist term), and have a professional affinity for the ideas it promotes. These two realms are actually closely tied together. Social work (my previous career) has high social value, but is not well financially compensated by society.  This low value that capitalist society places on the value of my  work (and consequently reflected by the amount of income it earned) is what initially prompted me to become both a purveyor and a recipient of free culture, as a means of supplementing what was already a modest lifestyle, purely as a means of personal survival.

When I say “a consumer of free culture” I’m speaking in the comprehensive sense: many of the clothes that I wear, the items and appliances in my home, the materials I used to build my home, the music I listen to, the books I read and videos I watch on the Internet, the blogs I enjoy, the home computer I work on and the operating system and software that run the computer — all of these were freely given to me by people who made a conscious choice to cut out the capitalist middleman or simply put people before profit, and share with others.

Why? Why would complete strangers choose to share their personal and intellectual property with other strangers?

The fact that free culture seems like a new and revolutionary concept speaks volumes about the degree that we’ve been co-opted by capitalism. Once upon a time, freedom was the catalyst of all human progress. Once upon a time there existed an environment of collaboration where people worked for the common good. It wasn’t a fairy tale, 

“it was culture, which you didn’t need the permission of someone else to take and build upon. That was the character of creativity at the birth of the last century” (Lawrence Lessig).

One person had an idea, which another built upon, and yet another adapted to meet their own needs, while another still revised it in a way that improved it yet again. Who was it that said, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”? Isaac Newton.

The creativity and innovation responsible for human progress has traditionally built upon existing work, but copyright, patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property laws are working to prevent that process (Lessig). Sharing our excess time, effort and resources with each other mutually benefits us all, and leads to collective prosperity, but this flies in the face of modern drives to accumulate, hoard and protect. Over time, society is becoming more restrictive and guarded, and the potential for progress is being diminished accordingly.

Free culture promotes the creation and distribution of resources in ways that equalize opportunities for people. It encourages people to benefit from the contributions of others, contribute something back, then invite others to do the same. The concept applies to both tangible and intangible commodities: speech, ideas, books, software, music, computer networks, education, and anything else that people can create, share, and develop (freeculture.org).

I do what I can.  I use free software like the Linux operating system, I freecycle goods to others, I produce content under the Creative Commons license, to name a few things.  How about you?

The use and promotion of free culture is an exercise in radical social transformation because many of us are so deeply ingrained with the perception that usage restrictions are normal, even necessary, and that nothing of any value is given away for free. What is the meaning of charity in modern society, when even donations come with the expectation of a charitable tax receipt?

Change it. Circulate property, knowledge, time, expertise, without expectation.  Realize the value of what you possess by transferring it to others who can use it.  In North America, where middle class material wealth is high and informational wealth is nearly infinite, our real value is not in what we accumulate and hoard, but what we give away.

For further reading:

• Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture (various formats and translations)
• Williams, Sam. Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software (HTML)
• McLeod, Kimbrew. Freedom of Expression (PDF)
• Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar (HTML)
• Gay, Joshua. Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (PDF)

“Earth” image by Camille Harang.

Social work can be the shortest career of a person’s life.  I’ve known people that lasted less time in the field than it took to earn the degree to get them there.  To say it’s a hard job is a grievous understatement.  It’s frequently misunderstood — even feared and hated.  It’s societally undervalued, emotionally draining, and woefully underpaid.

I’m ashamed to admit that it was the last of these which finally forced me to take down my shingle.  Decisions I’d made to improve my own life — marriage, children, a home of my own — made it an impossible wage to live on.  But where to go?  Well, if you read my previous piece, you’ll know that life led me back to university, then into the government, despite it being the last place I expected to work.

After a positive experience as a CO-OP student, I told someone that I was considering a long-term career in the public service only to have them ask, “What does social work have to do with government?”  Good question.  Tip: You can easily gauge someone’s perception of government by answering: “Well, they both exist to help people.” just as I did.  Tip: If the person you’re speaking to falls over laughing or punches you in the face, this may indicate that they harbour repressed anti-government sentiment.

Trust me: I’m a behavioural expert.

All frivolity aside though, this change of direction prompted a number of questions and doubts, from others and from within. Was my most valuable contribution to society now to be a thing of the past?

When you think of government, what images does it evoke?  Imagery of power, bureaucracy, hierarchy, insularity and disconnect?  I can’t say that these spectres didn’t leave me feeling unsettled.  As a social worker, I possessed a sense of identity, duty and integrity that I didn’t want to risk compromising to any degree.

I think that bureaucracies can create efficiency and logical order, but can also foment disordered thought and behaviour through their structure and culture.  Bureaucracies have the ability to change people for the worse, if individuals lose sight of themselves, or begin to closely integrate their sense of power and position within their definition of self.  I am not singling out the Federal Government.  Rather, I’m thinking of my workplace experiences as a whole, along with information gleaned from co-workers, and plain old common sense.  I understand that this capacity exists within any large and complex organization: the risks associated with becoming part of something  that makes you lose a part of yourself.

And while social workers may have a certain sense of themselves, their purpose, and their personal and professional principles, there is no denying the lure of expert power.  It’s something that the public expects and demands, and something that social work therapists like I was may aspire to even if they do not consciously acknowledge it. While we may strongly identify with the professional goal of empowering those we work with, we also harbour a human need to feel personally respected, professionally competent, and societally valued, and we may assert this in a way that feels empowering to us but that places us in a position of power over those that we intend to help.

I would be very surprised to learn that none of my fellow social work practitioners perceive any difference in status between the so-called “soft sciences” and “hard sciences”. I know I felt this “legitimacy gap” as a university student and sensed an internal imperative to close it somehow by trying to appear more scientific. What better way to achieve this than to become part of a large and powerful organization with a macro-focused  human service, where my Master’s degree is a Master’s degree, and my value as an analyst or an advisor is based on the results of my work?  After all, is all bureaucracy as evil as some fear, and is social work really as pure as I like to believe it is?

As a social worker who worked in a variety of settings and networked with a great many others, I’ve observed environments where constructed ideas about being a therapist, a supervisor, or a person with a diagnosis (part real, part theoretical — based on a best-guess) orchestrated a reality that governed how people thought of themselves, interacted, conducted their affairs, and perceived other people. I’ve experienced environments of co-option where people were so consumed by the necessity to get up to speed with the entrenched policies and procedures, there was no time to consider whether they were right or wrong, let alone change them. I observed people so fixated on meeting deadlines, paying bills, and surviving professionally, they did not have the presence of mind to understand how they were being changed in the process.

What have I learned from this?

While I’m proud of the good I’ve accomplished as a social worker, the groups I worked with and environments I practiced in weren’t idyllic.  Nothing is.  In the final analysis, there is danger in any large and complex organization, be it a government, a health care network, or a school district. There isn’t a job to be found that offers complete safety of integrity, or any person that can make a guarantee to watch out for you (and what you might change into) except yourself, of course.  Probability of indoctrination is the risk inherent to attachment to anything significant.  Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the learner to remain aware of what is being learned, and exercise personal control over what becomes integrated as “self”.  This is as true for indoctrination by a bureaucracy as it is for the indoctrination I received through my university education.

So today I am a social worker who was taught to embrace structuralism, but I work within an entrenched system that I believe must be fundamentally altered.  I was educated to be an agent of change, but must work mindfully to avoid becoming an agent of the system.  I am able to bridge this gap because I believe that small change is possible, even within a bureaucracy. It isn’t the permanent, fundamental change that structuralism desires, but then, nothing is permanent in government.  I am eager to see what small changes I can accomplish, particularly as a member of the small but powerful group championing social media in the Government of Canada.