Thank you, Chair.
I want to thank you all for coming out. We've had a very interesting day here in Halifax-Dartmouth.
I want to chat a bit with Ms. Sholzberg-Gray, if I could. This may be partly philosophical, but it's partly financial. I'm taking advantage of your years of service on the health care front. I want to talk about caregiving with you, because you mention this in your brief—informal caregiving.
My experience with caregiving is a personal one, as is most people's. My parents died close together four and a half years ago. I had two sisters who moved from Toronto and came back to the family home and saw my parents out. We're a large family, so we all helped, but those two women in particular provided so much care to my parents, which is a wonderful experience. I can recall my parents, late in their lives, saying how wonderful their death was about....
It occurred to all of us then that it's an experience everybody should be able to have if they so choose—to die at home rather than in a hospital. It seems to me there's an economic argument here, that by keeping them out of the hospital, if you have volunteer caregivers, family caregivers.... There's an organization in Nova Scotia called Caregivers Nova Scotia. Alexa has a close association with them, as do I, and perhaps Mr. Keddy has as well. These are people who can make the case that they are providing so much care and are taking a significant burden off the health care system in terms of personnel and a hospital bed.
You talk about volunteer caregiving. Would you agree with me that this must be something we could work out financially; that we could shift some resources directly to people who are providing care for loved ones in a way that would actually reduce the burden on the health care system and improve the quality of life and death of citizens—not just for those who can afford it, like my family, but to enable other families to have that same experience?