Two months ago, Willow Yamauchi received a panicked 6 a.m. phone call from her 12-year-old nephew, Dash. The boy had found his father unresponsive in their home.

They didn't know it yet, but Dash, who lost his mother to breast cancer six years prior, had already become an orphan.

“That was the most terrifying phone call I’ve ever heard in my life,” Yamauchi said.

She and her husband rushed over to the home and scooped up Dash as paramedics tried unsuccessfully to revive his father. Authorities have yet to determine what it was that killed him.

But that day, the Vancouver couple, who already had two children, ages 17 and 21, became parents to a third. They were close with Dash before the tragedy, and embraced their new role wholeheartedly – but the unexpected change in circumstances still brought certain difficulties.

“Dash is understandably quite traumatized,” Yamauchi said. “He’s a wonderful boy and he’s going to be OK, but he does need a tremendous amount of support.”

Between Dash’s doctor appointments, therapy appointments, legal appointments and time away from school, Yamauchi felt she had no choice but to take some time off work to look after him.

The family was confident they would qualify for parental employment insurance benefits from the government in their time of need.

To their surprise, that wasn’t the case.

Though they are Dash’s legal guardians, they are excluded under Canada’s current EI laws, which only recognize biological and adoptive parents for such benefits.

“I have to say, I just assumed I would get it,” said Yamauchi. “Of course I was going to be getting a leave of absence to take care of him. I’ve paid for 22 years into EI.”

After being rejected, Yamauchi took a brief sick leave to support Dash, but she’ll be forced to return to work soon. The family can’t afford for her to take time off unpaid.

Now, together with Jenny Kwan, the NDP MP for their neighbourhood, the family is sharing their story in the hopes of drawing attention to what they believe is an oversight in the law – one they fear is affecting other parents struggling through similar hardships.

Kwan said there are 11,000 people – aunts, uncles, grandparents and others – who currently have legal guardianship of a child or children in B.C. alone.

She believes all of them should be protected in moments of desperation, regardless of whether they decide to go through the adoption process.

“What we’re calling for is for our federal government to amend the [Employment Insurance Act]… to fully recognize those who have permanent legal guardianship of the children to be eligible for parental benefits,” Kwan said at a news conference with Yamauchi Thursday.

“At a time when they need it the most, that support and that insurance ought to be available to them.”

There are a number of reasons not to adopt, some of which are intensely personal. The process involves replacing the child’s original birth certificate, which carries the biological parents’ names, with another bearing those of the adoptive parents.

Doing so can be an emotional decision, especially in the immediate aftermath of a family tragedy.

“To require someone to nullify your parental history is wrong, and that is what the adoption process requires you to do,” Kwan said.

Yamauchi and her husband are more familiar than most with the adoption system. Both are children of adoption themselves, and Yamauchi deals with adoptions through her job as a social worker.

Because Dash is not in foster care, adopting him would costs thousands of dollars in lawyer fees and require a lot of paperwork, Yamauchi said. And though the family might go down that road eventually, it’s not a decision they want to rush into just for the sake of government benefits.

“I don’t think an adoption should ever take place under duress,” she said. “And this is duress.”

At the end of the day, the family simply doesn’t understand why the law would exclude people like them – family members who are parenting a new child in every sense of the word.

“That is offensive to me,” she said. “My family, now that my nephew has joined us, isn’t a strange family. It isn’t an untraditional family. This is actually a traditional family. Aunties and uncles and grandmas and grandpas have been taking in orphaned relatives for as long as humans have been humans.”

When reached by CTV News, the federal Ministry of Employment and Social Development would not comment on the case, citing privacy reasons, or on the possibility of changing the law.

With files from CTV Vancouver’s Shannon Paterson