To answer your question with respect to what we do to support the treatment of mental illness in the workplace, I'll say, first of all, that CLHIA is very supportive of a Canadian mental health strategy. It's something we're very engaged with. A number of our members sit on that steering committee. We think it's a critically important piece of work, which we're very supportive of, because mental health will become a larger issue as the relative age of Canadians continues to grow. We're very supportive of that.
The perspective of the insurers, the perspective of the employers, and the perspective of the employees are all actually aligned on all of these chronic disability issues, whether it's mental health or other issues. It's in everyone's interest to keep people at work and to keep them productive. We don't want them to be isolated. We don't want them to be at home, cut off from the colleagues they chat with every morning over coffee and whatnot. We spend a lot of time with and have a lot of supports for employers to help them intervene in the workplace to help people get over mental health issues.
Anyone who has worked in a corporation may be familiar with an employee assistance plan or any type of plan that gives you a number to call to get counselling or other support in the event of mental illness. Those are examples of the types of services we help our clients, the employers, put in place to help people deal with mental illness and, to the greatest extent possible, stay at work. That's our largest focus in any intervention for disease and chronic illness.
I'll just quickly come back to your point, if I may, on financial literacy. I think there's potentially an interesting analogy here in the health care space. We almost need to increase Canadians' health literacy with respect to what is and is not covered. To your point, most people, I would say, from our polling, do not understand that there is not a government program for them as they get older. They don't understand that long-term care is essentially their responsibility to cover.
Putting some kind of program in place to help people understand, at the very minimum, what they're accountable for is a first step in their taking action, whether that's purchasing private insurance or using some other mechanism. That will be for them to decide. What concerns me greatly is that in a lot of cases, they are sort of in a position of ignorance. You don't want people to get to the point where they need that support and they suddenly realize that it's not there. I think a role for the federal government to play, and any government, really, is in making it clear to Canadians what is and is not covered and what they are expected to support.
