Thank you, Mr. Chair and members.
My name is Mike Villeneuve, CEO of the Canadian Nurses Association. I've been an RN for the past 35 years, and I worked for 40 years in the health care system in a couple of other roles.
I would like to thank the Standing Committee on Finance for the opportunity to present recommendations from CNA, which is the national and global professional voice of registered nursing, representing over 139,000 registered nurses and nurse practitioners across Canada.
Our submission highlights four recommendations, but I'd like to focus on two of them today.
Our first recommendation calls for the creation of a health care innovation agency for Canada. CNA believes that the federal government has an opportunity to build on what provincial and territorial counterparts have already achieved by facilitating new opportunities for health care innovations across Canada. We see the spark. There are some successful innovations right across the country, but there is no mechanism to help spread them and scale them up. A new federal agency would target funding on innovative health projects to ensure that they are adopted more widely for everyone in Canada, including indigenous peoples, wherever they live.
The new agency, for example, could lead efforts to evolve medicare to help overcome the sometimes fragmented nature of our health care system. To drive the notion of the right care provided by the right provider at the right time in the right place and delivered at costs we all can bear, we need innovations that will accelerate the de-hospitalization of health systems, not unlike what you just heard from the Canadian Medical Association president. Nurses work at all points in health systems, and we recommend that nurses have a strong leadership role in any such new agency. There are nearly 428,000 regulated nurses across Canada, and we're well poised to dig in and help.
The second recommendation I'd like to highlight today and encourage the committee to support is the third one in our submission, which is about improving access to palliative care and support for people in Canada who are acting as caregivers.
I am pleased to inform the committee that CNA is a member of the Quality End-of-life Care Coalition of Canada, and I serve as co-chair of a committee of the national network along with 38 other national organizations whose vision is that all Canadians have the right to quality end-of-life care that allows them to die with dignity, free of pain, surrounded by loved ones and in the setting of their choice. Most Canadians tell us that they want that care, and we know they could benefit from it. Better palliation drives down costs. Most Canadians never receive that care.
The challenges we face in palliative care are compounded by our country's aging demographics. As I always remind people, we are set to become one of 13 super-aging nations by 2020, just 18 months from now. Nearly one in four Canadians will be over 65 by 2031.
We recommend that the Framework on Palliative Care in Canada Act, which was passed into law in December 2017, must include targeted federal investments for both new and existing federal programs to improve standardization of delivery of palliative care for people across Canada. We were happy to support Bill C-277, tabled by the shadow minister of health. We acted strongly to help that move along.
New federal funding that is predictable and sustained would help to address the gaps that currently exist in palliative care across Canada. We are pleased that the framework recognizes the palliative care training and education needs of health care providers as well as other caregivers, and we urge the committee to support our recommendation to provide funding for early career access to palliative care training and education to nurses and all other health care providers.
Research tells us that our country does not have adequate palliative care training for health care providers. One way to address the gap is to include education and training in core curricula for students, but we also need to create structures to provide that education soon after licensure. We are also calling on the federal government to provide increased financial support for the country's 8.1 million caregivers by making refundable the former family caregiver amount tax credit, which is now under the new Canada caregiver credit, and extending the compassionate care benefits to include a two-week period of bereavement.
In its current form, the tax credit is not paid to recipients as a direct cash benefit. We support the drive to move care out of hospitals, but we have also pushed significant costs on ordinary people. Many caregivers face high out-of-pocket expenses for specialized medical aids, medications, transportation, hiring staff, lost wages and so on. A refundable tax credit could help ensure that all eligible households receive something in return for those expenditures of time and money.
Regarding the CCB, CNA believes that adding a two-week period for time for bereavement would allow flexibility for caregivers, many of whom are employed, after a patient's death. Such a measure also allows for a more reflective and humane palliative care process.
Currently, support that's provided for successful applicants only covers the caregiving period for up to 26 weeks and not bereavement. Adding that two-week bereavement period would surely provide caregivers with some important financial support after such a profound loss.
Thank you for hearing our ideas, and I look forward to our conversation.