Thank you very much, Ms. Hall Findlay.
In fact, CARP has been on the record asking for caregiver support repeatedly. As we have made very clear, it has to be treated as one pillar of retirement security for Canadians, as not only the income they get from their pensions but also the defraying of their expenses as they meet their medical and other challenges. We have actually polled our members and they are, all of them, involved in some form of caregiving. All of them need to have some kind of financial support, and most of them have challenges in terms of the time they have to take off work, the insecurity of their job, the costs involved, and of course the health and other pressures they face. So all of these things are mounting up, and women in particular take on the lion's share of that responsibility.
Obviously, a recommendation that there be some substantive financial support is met by the proposal. Of course, we would like to see it be law, so I hope that all parties of the House will in fact endorse that proposal and get it done, because people are actually confronting these challenges today.
I'm pleased to be here with the palliative and hospice association because we also polled our people about end-of-life care. One of the points that came through--you may have seen it in the media--was that our people were actually supportive of the idea of assisted suicide. But it cannot be interpreted that they were asking for that so much as they were afraid of a bad death. To that extent, the idea of caregiving flowing into proper palliative care is all of a piece, and it's an important issue that we all face. There are many who are facing it in silence and with a lot of pressure.
This announcement comes at a good time. We are very supportive of all the aspects of it. It is a sizable amount of money. We can't hesitate to point that out. However, the unpaid labour being leveraged by that kind of expenditure is in the $25-billion-per-annum range. So when we look at the cost-benefit analysis, we're not even talking about the potential for diverting a massive amount of demand from the health care system to the contributions by family caregivers.