Not necessarily. You can justify and defend the US method of charging companies for unemployment insurance based on the claims record associated with the company, since terminations, dismissals, resignations etc are influenced to a significant degree by the working environment the company creates and sustains. But this is not really likely to be true of the rate at which employees fall pregnant. Charging a company more because it had a higher rate of claims for maternity benefit would basically be a tax on employing women of childbearing age, which would be (a) highly objectionable, and (b) very stupid, given that one of the common arguments in favour of paid maternity leave is to increase participation in the workforce.
Another mechanism used in some countries to fund paid parental leave is social security, which in the US is a federal programme. I don’t pretend to understand the constitutional ramifications in the US of expanding the social security programme to provide parental benefits as well as retirement benefits, but if the will to provide paid parental leave were there that’s certainly a mechanism that could at least be looked at.
No, that’s not how it works in Canada. All employees pay the same rate, and all employers pay 1.4 of what their employees pay, with an annual cap on each. How often an employee accesses EI does not affect the rates.
There are, of course, a lot of countries where not many women are in regular paid employment in the first place. So formal subscription to ILO principles on paid maternity leave may not be of as great a significance as its absence would be in highly-developed societies.
Actually, I would guess that few countries have a national election for chief executive. Certainly, Canada doesn’t and neither does the UK. France does, but that is really an exception. In most more-or-less democratic countries that I am familiar, the only election is for parliament and the party of majority (if any any) chooses the prime minister. Or else several parties get together and hack out a government (that is cabinet) and one of the parties–usually the largest–gets its leader name as PM.
It’s a fairly simple and decent system - the only adjustment is that (last time I bothered to look) in areas of higher unemployment it takes longer to requalify for benefits (or was it the other way around?).
For parental leave, the only downside is the paltry amount. Original UIC paid 66% of your wage for up to a year. Now it’s 55%, (and like typical banana republics, it’s renamed EI) as politicians nickel-and-dimed it down. The cap is thus 55% of “average industrial wage”, ie. 55% of about $C45,000 a year. My experience with a few co-workers that used it, was that anyone with a decent better-paying job (i.e. my boss, who made probably near $80,000) could not afford to collect for very long. She was back within 6 weeks, and then her husband, who made substantially less, collected for the remainder of the entitlement. The equivalent of $22,000 a year simply does not pay the rent and car payments, etc.