Thank you very much.
I appreciate the opportunity to appear today. I am Bill VanGorder. I am the chief operating officer of CARP, also known as the Canadian Association of Retired Persons. We are Canada’s largest advocacy organization for older adults.
We're a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization that advocates for financial security and improved health care for Canadians. We have 320,000 members across the country and 27 chapters, all playing an active role in the creation of policy and legislation that affects older Canadians.
With more than 80% of the COVID-19 deaths linked to institutional long-term care, and the 90% of older Canadians who live in their own homes all severely impacted by COVID, Canadians were shocked by the complete inability of the system to protect its older citizens during the pandemic.
We found that the historic issues that have undermined elder care for some time exploded during this period. Overcrowded wards, lack of staff training, chronic understaffing and lack of support for family caregivers all must be addressed. Canada lags behind other countries in funding long-term care and community and home care. In long-term care, for instance, we only spend 1.3% of the GDP, where countries like the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden spend over twice as much on their elder citizens.
We need federal government financial support that provides appropriate, clear and measurable standards to improve the quality of care for all of these vulnerable Canadians, along with the appropriate tools to take action should these outcomes not be achieved.
CARP believes that the federal Auditor General should establish a working group to establish consistent standards for reviewing services and expenditures on home care and long-term care and make the report on it an annual Auditor General's event. We'd also like to see a panel of older Canadians created to advise the government on policies and programs. Older Canadians want decisions made with them, not for them, and they strongly believe that their level of health care should not be determined by their postal code.
CARP notes that the federal government’s budget presented this week includes some promises to assist older Canadians. The first is the beginning of a process to set, monitor and enforce appropriate long-term care standards. However, the $3 billion over five years had only one goal in the first year, and that was to get the Canadian Standards Association and two other groups to create a policy document that could be examined as late as early 2022. Surely we would agree with the CARP members who are saying that the need now is urgent and older adults across the country want action now.
As a sidebar, by the way, we note that there has been talk about changing the Canada Health Act. That will take much too long. There's much too much involved in that. CARP believes that long-term care should be a separate agreement with the provinces. Our members will work with the federal government to urge our provincial governments to co-operate on that process.
The budget also proposed $90 million over three years to produce the living well at home fund. That's wonderful to have that happen. Certainly those kinds of helps, like home repair and grass cutting and other assistance, are the sorts of things they need. However, the support must be accompanied by national standards to meet those critical needs, but also make sure there's enough funding for front-line home care, community care, respite care, expanding telehealth care solutions, eliminating sales taxes on family-funded services and an income tax rebate for family caregivers.
In the past, programs similar to the living well at home program, such as the new horizons grants, were provided as seed funding and then expected the local volunteer groups to fundraise or obtain other local grants to continue those programs beyond a year or so. This will not work with the living well at home program.
CARP urges you to assure that they will be funded for multiple years to assure that these services continue to be available to those older Canadians who require them.
We also must point out our severe disappointment and our members' disappointment that nothing has been offered in terms of help for family caregivers. Child care, yes, but what about those families who have to give similar care to older parents or family members, many of whom are in a sandwich generation where they have to give care to both?
Finally and honestly, CARP is sorry to report to you that older Canadians have a perception that the federal government has done very little to directly assist them during COVID. We're hearing from our members that they've seen money going to workers, businesses and institutions, but none for seniors.
In all fairness, of course, it can be pointed out that there have been programs that have been aimed at helping seniors, but in their view, all they have received was $300 last June, another $500 promised this August, and $200 more maybe last June if they were really poor. To dispel this perception, quicker, more focused actions by the federal government are necessary to support older Canadians during these difficult times.
Thank you for the opportunity to bring CARP's concerns to you.