Many of the people who are taking time off to care for their dying loved ones are indeed working. The average caregiver is a 35- to 65-year-old; it's predominantly women, and more often now men, but in that age group. Obviously, there are senior citizens who are caring for their spouses, and that type of thing, who aren't in the income piece. But there are a number of shortfalls within the EI-based program, too, for people who don't qualify for EI. So we need to really look at a full spectrum of programs and balance it between them.
One of the reasons why we invited Mike here today is to talk a little bit about the industry's role in it. GlaxoSmithKline is a corporation that actually provided their own compassionate care benefit--which predated the federal government's program--in 2003, where they allow 13 weeks' leave for their employees, because their employees were showing up either disengaged or were phoning in sick. There were lots of reasons why, as employers, they needed to do that. So they created their own benefit.
I think in order to have this debate over the next 10 years, industry is going to have a clear voice in this, because they are the employers of many Canadians. So I think we're hitting the tip of the iceberg, but we're really going to have to engage in a very innovative type of debate over the next 10 years on how we're going to support family caregivers.
The last thing you mentioned was about personal support workers. They're referred to in the health care sector as the unregulated workers. As more and more physician tasks are being handed off to nurses and being handed off to personal care workers, we really need to invest in retention, recruitment, compensation, and training for them. They're often poorly trained and terribly compensated.
I think we really need to look at all these areas of our health care system, because they are important. You can't expect the backs of Canadian families to do it all. We really have to balance it.