On September 01, 2026, Canada’s New Society Institute released a report arguing that Canada’s government needs to change its approach to developing policies that support women with disabilities across the country. The report is rooted in the fundamental insight that many women are both caregivers and people who need care themselves— and are poorly served by policy frameworks that see them as only one or the other.
To better understand this complexity, the Institute and Human Rights Watch collaborated to organize in-depth focus groups to learn about the experiences of Canadian women with disabilities, whose lives entail both caregiving responsibilities and personal support needs. The Institute’s new report, We Are Always Leading, Supporting, Teaching Women with Disabilities and Deaf Women’s Unrecognized Care Needs and Work in Canada, presents those perspectives. It uses a “care economy” framework to scrutinize and critique relevant government policies and identify possible solutions. It also draws on the framework provided by the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD), which recognizes the right to support in different contexts. In this Q&A, Human Rights Watch offers a brief overview of what the care economy framework entails, and how it relates to the human rights obligations of Canada and other states.
- What are “care work” and the “care economy?”
When people talk about “care work,” they may think of professionals who are employed to provide particular types of care to other people, perhaps in a health care or institutional setting or as home health aides. But care work encompasses a much wider range of labor that people provide, whether paid or unpaid, to help one another meet their needs. Supporting someone with disabilities or chronic health conditions with daily activities is an obvious example of this kind of unpaid care work. Cooking and cleaning for a family member can also be care work, along with much of the work connected to parenting, for example. This establishes that almost everyone needs care and that many people, particularly women, provide care (including unpaid care) to other people in their lives.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) regards unpaid care as a form of work, and emphasizes that most people will engage in it during their lifetimes. Of course, in everyday parlance many people do not think of the care they provide to others as a kind of “work.” However, that doesn’t mean policy frameworks should disregard the effort and sacrifice that care entails. On some level, the point of an expansive definition of care work is to emphasize the common experience and personal impact of engaging in “care,” rather than to fixate on a particular definition of “work.”
The “care economy,” then, can be succinctly thought of as “the sum of all forms of care work.” The ILO’s International Labor Conference has adopted a more specific definition in one of its resolutions: “The care economy comprises care work, both paid and unpaid, and direct and indirect care, its provision within and outside the household, as well as the people who provide and receive care and the employers and institutions that offer care.” In other words, the concept of a care economy knits together the myriad different kinds of paid and unpaid care work into a single universe of activity and shared experience. Some advocates find the term useful because it captures the scale and diversity of this “economy,” and use it to argue for policy approaches that are cognizant of it in its entirety.
- How does the care economy framework relate to human rights law?
The idea of a care economy has potential relevance to a wide range of international human rights law obligations. For example, and as the ILO has emphasized, the need to engage in unpaid care work “can have adverse effects on unpaid carers’ economic opportunities, well-being, and overall enjoyment of human rights.” Paid care work is often precarious and poorly paid, and unpaid care work creates responsibilities that are deeply gendered in their impact—they tend to fall disproportionately on women. This implicates, among other things, state obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
Policymakers also need to take care to ensure that a “care economy” framework promotes and does not undermine the human rights of people who require care and support themselves. For example, the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD) requires states to reject policy approaches that treat people with disabilities as dependents who need care. Instead, the CRPD emphasizes the need to provide supports and assistance that allows people to live with autonomy and dignity in society. Care economy policies should be designed so that they align with that essential paradigm.
Human rights law implicates the rights of people to receive certain kinds of care and support, the rights of people who are paid caregivers, and the rights of people who engage in unpaid care work in their day-to-day lives. The care economy framework can be a useful way for governments to ensure that their efforts to respect human rights complement one another across all of these dimensions.
At a regional level, The Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued an advisory opinion in August 2025 asserting that all people have a right to care, including the right to receive care, to give care, and to exercise self-care. The opinion described care as an “unavoidable, basic and universal human need” and argued that the right to care entails not only a right to receive care but also, to provide it. The court also recognized that support is a constitutive component of the right to care.
In 2025, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a report on the “human rights dimension of care and support.” That report offers a good overview of the various points of connection between human rights law and government policies around care and support. The OHCHR report explicitly refers to support for people with disabilities, recognizing that it serves as an enabler for participation in society with dignity and autonomy.
- The New Society Institute Report focuses on women with disabilities who are caregivers—why might the care economy framework add particular value there?
A key argument of the New Society Institute report is that Canadian government policies treat people as either providers of care or as people who receive care. In reality, many people are both, particularly women with disabilities. The report makes a case that this creates tangible gaps and obstacles that prevent many women with disabilities from obtaining the kind of support they need to access care and provide care while enjoying their own fundamental rights without discrimination.
The care economy offers a conceptual framework that is explicitly geared towards a holistic and very expansive policy treatment of care and care work. In that sense it can be a useful tool for governments trying to develop policies that speak to those larger realities. In human rights terms, that could also mean policies that have expansive goals to uphold the rights of women with disabilities on different levels at the same time —under CEDAW, the CRPD, and other human rights treaties, and in ways that speak to women’s experiences as both care givers and people who need support themselves.
- What does this mean for Canada?
The New Society Institute report argues that Canada’s government has broadly failed to enact policies that are cognizant of the needs of women with disabilities who also engage in care work. Women who participated in focus groups for the report said that this translates into a wide range of negative human rights impacts that are intersectional and cumulative. Mothers said that the challenges of raising children without adequate support for their own disabilities were compounded by the prejudice they felt when interacting with their children’s schools. Several women with disabilities talked about struggling to care for family members and friends even as they struggled to get the support and services, they needed themselves. There was a common impression among many participants that their lived experiences simply weren’t factored into the design of policy frameworks that were very much about them.
Interestingly, Canada’s government has explicitly embraced the “care economy” paradigm and has tried to design policies that speak to it. For example, the government made significant investments in early learning and childcare, expanded tax support for unpaid caregivers, allocated funds to increase wages for personal support workers and related professions, and signed “Aging with Dignity” agreements with provinces and territories to finance long-term care and continuing care services. It also launched consultations with affected populations to help inform the design of policies.
The New Society Institute report argues that these policies have not gone far enough and that consultations around their design have not been inclusive or effective enough. Nevertheless, these policies may indicate sufficient common ground with civil society actors to allow joint efforts to keep building on and improving Canada’s policies so that they are better tailored to the reality that many Canadian women are not women with disabilities or caregivers, but both.
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Download the Advocacy Toolkit on Care, Support, and the Rights of Women with Disabilities in Canada by clicking here.
