Iris Evans

Evans sparked a controversy when speaking to the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto on June 17, 2009, when she answered a question by stating that good parenting means sacrificing income to stay at home while children are young, and that her own children, now grown with young children of their own, "understood perfectly well that when you're raising children, you don't both go off to work and leave them for somebody else to raise."

In response to accusations that she had insulted working women, she later stated that she had not meant to "harm anybody or slam anybody's views on how they chose to parent or what choices they've made on the involvement in their families and parenting," suggesting that this demonstrated society's concern over parenting, and "So maybe its time for this debate ... maybe frequently we should examine what our choices are as families and see whether our choices are the ones that are working best for the child."[4]