First of all, we're not only talking about palliative care here, though that's part of the picture. We're talking about anything that involves ongoing chronic needs of relatives, whether it's children or the elderly or what not. We actually had proposed a package of supports for informal caregivers. One of them, which we mention in this brief, is a drop-out period from the Canada Pension Plan for people who take time off to be caregivers, just as there's a drop-out provision for children. That's one way. There are a number of other ones we could put on the table.
But it seems to me also that we have to recognize that another thing is to have positive programs, such as better respite programs, that are part of an expanded home care program. These are the kinds of things that have to be in any definition, it seems to me, of pan-Canadian approaches if there's going to be any more federal money. I know that all over the country there are those kinds of programs, but they're not necessarily enough, and they don't support and relieve families enough, because families can't do this 24 hours a day.
Absolutely, people ought to be at home rather than in hospital. People always ought to be in the appropriate setting as opposed to the most expensive setting, which is the hospital. In some provinces, though, because they don't have access to pharmaceuticals at home, they have to choose to go into the hospital so that they get the pharmaceuticals.
What I'm trying to say is that there's a link between everything and everything else. If you don't have pharmaceuticals at home, you're going to want to be in a hospital, and that's going to be the place with the most expensive care, so it would actually be cheaper to bring a pharmaceutical program to people who are at home—and so on and so on.
We have a package of those kinds of things to recognize the support to informal caregivers--but all the links between all parts of the system.