Evidence of meeting #65 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cpp.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:15 p.m.
Actuary and Senior Research Fellow, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, As an Individual
Also, moving things to wages, you're basically saying that you're keeping the seniors up more with wage growth in the economy, but with OAS and CPI, it is keeping up with inflation. A major concern of seniors is that they're finding with things such as their pension plans that aren't indexed to inflation, they're losing purchasing power. It's not the OAS. I think we have to make that differentiation.
5:15 p.m.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
My question to you was more on paying informal caregivers. What is the cost of that?
5:15 p.m.
Actuary and Senior Research Fellow, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, As an Individual
The idea with paying informal caregivers is that going forward there will be a much smaller supply of informal caregivers, because there are fewer children.
5:15 p.m.
Actuary and Senior Research Fellow, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, As an Individual
When there are fewer children, children have to make the decision, can I stay home and take care of mom and dad or will I go to work? If we can start paying them, then that's going to make that—
5:15 p.m.
Actuary and Senior Research Fellow, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, As an Individual
I'm calculating the impact of the cost right now in a very large-scale study.
But to give you an idea of what the cost is, it's actually a cost savings because the idea is that you actually pay them less than you would a formal caregiver. For every dollar you would pay a formal caregiver, you're paying an informal caregiver, say, 60¢ on the dollar. So the government is going to be saving 40%.
Realize that right now 70% of all care is being done by the family, and right now we're getting a 70% discount on all our care needs for seniors across Canada. We will not get the 70% discount in the future. Half of provincial budgets are being paid on health care costs, and half of those health care costs are already for seniors.
5:15 p.m.
Actuary and Senior Research Fellow, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, As an Individual
We're getting a 70% discount, so I think that should raise some alarm bells.
5:15 p.m.
Liberal
5:15 p.m.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
Thank you.
I'm going to come back to you. I can hear your frustration. I just wanted to explore a little why you think they've stopped using the data. What would be the results in starting to move forward with using that data? If you have a minute at the end, just talk about how rural committees could be impacted. I represent a rural riding and one of the biggest challenges is the huge expense that exists for seniors living in remote and rural communities.
5:15 p.m.
Actuary and Senior Research Fellow, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, As an Individual
Right. In terms of the idea of this big data, I was just visiting with Michael Wolfson. He was actually in charge of Statistics Canada when a lot of this stuff happened. Basically a number of years ago, they just felt the cost of sustaining this model.... They wanted to cut costs so they cut the model. I don't think the people who did it quite realized what they were doing. Basically we've been developing this model with teams of researchers in the government for 25 years. Baby boomers are retiring right now. This is the time we need the models to make really good decisions. What this model does, as I was explaining, is it actually takes all the data that we have, rural and urban, puts it together and gives us a fuller picture of Canada's needs and what happens when you change parts of the system. Where will the impacts be? What will the costs be to making those changes?
Going back to the urban-rural question, I did quite a bit of research on poverty for seniors and I actually did price out poverty lines across Canada based on the costs of goods and baskets. What I found time and time again is that the cost of goods in different cities across Canada differs by rent and by transportation costs, and food is pretty much the same. The big difference is going to be as soon as somebody has health care needs, and this is what distinguishes seniors from the rest of Canadians. Their poverty line, if you want to call it that, the senior poverty line for someone with a high level of care needs doubles. That's really the characteristic of differentiation.
For what you're saying, rural and urban, accessing good health care was an issue. Transportation was an issue for seniors because they don't have the public transportation systems. I think someone working on the ground could actually give more information. I work on more the data side of things.
5:15 p.m.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
What is always interesting to me is the intersect between data and actual realities on the ground and how do we make sure that those things fit together so that we are really facing and meeting the needs of people.
5:15 p.m.
Actuary and Senior Research Fellow, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, As an Individual
Right.
5:15 p.m.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
My last question is going to go back to you.
One of the things, Ms. Mackenzie, that I've heard a lot about is around the caregiving and how much of a challenge it is to find people to do the work and how we're seeing poaching happening across that sector. You're talking about the national standards. How can we make those things work together so that we can see more people training perhaps? I don't know what the solution is. I'm asking you if you know.
5:20 p.m.
Seniors Advocate, Office of the Seniors Advocate of British Columbia
I think the solution is going to come from working with immigration around whether we need to look at the temporary foreign worker program and how that has to be potentially recalibrated. I think that it is working with the post-secondary sector around training, and I think it is actually working—this is more a British Columbia perspective—with our unions around a model of.... We have the apprenticeship model for many trades. I would like us to look at a potential apprenticeship model for caregivers so that people can start to get their training and earning money at the same time.
One of the big impediments is the investment you have to make up front in the training before you're able to earn wages. If you adopt an apprenticeship model, you can help address that to some extent.
5:20 p.m.
NDP
5:20 p.m.
Seniors Advocate, Office of the Seniors Advocate of British Columbia
That's correct.
5:20 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bryan May
Thank you to all of you. I know I sure learned a lot today. There was a lot of information and I heard a lot of clicking going on and scratching of pencils.
I sincerely thank you. I spoke with a few of you at the beginning of today about submitting reports, so I'll mention it again. I know we didn't have a long introduction, but if there are reports, specifically if you are wrapping up the C.D. Howe report, if it's possible to share that with us, I'm sure we would all benefit from that. But if any of you have reports you'd like to submit, please do so with the clerk.
Thank you all very much. I hate to do this, but I do have to rush you out. We're going to suspend for 90 seconds and then come back for some committee business.
Thank you very much.
