I'll quickly add something different to what Dr. Collins said. We are just shy of 20% of our population being over the age of 65, and the Conference Board of Canada report, which I believe was commissioned by CMA, told us that there's going to be a 20% rise in costs due to aging alone over the coming decade. That's $93 billion.
While we certainly need funding to help stabilize systems coming out of the pandemic, we have a larger issue of what we're going to do with all of those older folks. There were somewhere around 200,000 long-term care beds in the system in 2017-18. There was a shortage then of 63,000 spaces, with people waiting, and the Conference Board estimates that we need another 200,000 beds. Unless we start to fund home care and primary care, as Dr. Collins said, and palliative end-of-life care and other services, we're going to be in trouble, and those people are old now. The baby boomers are there now, so we're concerned that we must act. It's not a theory; it's real right now.