Human Resources Committee on Oct. 5th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

I call the meeting to order.

Welcome, everybody. Thank you all for being here today.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the motion adopted by the committee on Thursday, May 4, 2017, the committee is resuming its study of advancing inclusion and quality of life for Canadian seniors.

Today is the second of three panels that will be held on the subject of income security for vulnerable seniors. Today I see that we have a very full panel, so we'll get right to it.

I'll introduce everybody first. As individuals, we have Charles M. Beach, professor emeritus of the economics department at Queen's University. Also appearing as an individual, we have Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald, an actuary and senior research fellow with the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. From the Canadian Union of Public Employees, we have Mark Janson, who is the senior pensions officer with the national office. From the National Association of Federal Retirees, we have Jean-Guy Soulière, the president, and Sayward Montague, the director of advocacy. From the Office of the Seniors Advocate of British Columbia, we have Isobel Mackenzie, the seniors advocate.

Welcome to all of you. We'll ask you to keep your opening statements to seven minutes because we have such a large group today.

We will start off today with Mr. Beach. The next seven minutes are yours, sir.

[Professor Charles M. Beach, Professor Emeritus, Economics Department, Queen's University, As an Individual]

Thank you very much for inviting me.

I'll be following quite closely a written set of comments that I provided.

Page 2 of my comments says I am an economist, so I am going to focus my remarks on what I view as economic challenges. The topic is very broad, but I'll have to focus on that.

On page 3, starting at “Economic Challenges”, I identify six different points in particular.

First is that the aging of the population, increased longevity, and the oncoming tidal wave of retirements lead to a growing elderly dependency ratio, slower economic growth, increased fiscal burden for governments, and a greater retirement income risk for seniors. This has received a lot of the public attention in the media, so I'm not going to focus on that in my remarks. A lot has been said about it already.

Second, what I do want to emphasize, though, is that it's not just greater longevity; increased longevity is coming with a growing number of healthy years. This provides an opportunity and a challenge to enable people to work longer if they wish to. You can see the figures there of seniors' labour force participation rates for Canada for groups ages 55 and over. They were increasing until the mid-1990s. That was the “Freedom 55” period. Since then, they have been going up quite substantially.

This means we need to get incentives right and focus on flexibility, choice, and reducing barriers to entry for people who do wish to work. This isn't new to me. This is a major theme of the federal expert panel report that came out in 2008. If you haven't read it, I definitely recommend it.

This growing longevity of healthy years provides opportunities for seniors to make greater use of the gig economy: more flexible work hours, self-employment options, and technical advances, medical and otherwise, for things like mobility, eyesight, and hearing. It's fortuitous that people are working longer now, as opposed to 20 years ago, when there is much greater opportunity for fostering and accommodating it.

This is such a major point that a major special issue of The Economist last July—and I can give you specifics if you want them—identifies the need to think in terms of a whole new stage in life. We can think of them as early seniors, or what they call “owls”—“older, working less, and still earning”. If you want to complete the idea of highlighting the point that seniors are not a homogeneous group, you have the healthy people who are continuing to work like me—I'm a senior—and you have those who do have health problems. I might suggest complementing the idea of “owls” with later seniors called “elfs”, as in “elder folks needing support”. The support could be just a private pension, but it could also be support from the family, OAS, GIS, or whatever. The point is that seniors are not a homogeneous group. We have an increasing group who are really quite healthy, and the other group, who are living longer and for whom health and quality-of-life concerns are very important.

Third, median real incomes—“real” meaning adjusted for inflation—of seniors have advanced, but only slowly, since the early 1990s. Some numbers are given there in my comments. One of the main reasons they haven't advanced all that fast is that the median total incomes for adults as a whole have advanced even more slowly. The latter have gone up about 13% or 14% over this period, and for seniors they've gone up about twice that. However, there is a growing concern when you combine the rather slow growth of median earnings of seniors with the run-up of pharmacare costs, which are just going to continue increasing.

Fourth, low-income rates among seniors have risen considerably since the mid-1990s. That's Statistics Canada's way of saying “poverty rates”. Numbers are provided at the top of page 5 of my comments.

They decreased dramatically between the 1970s and the 1990s because of new things brought in, such as the CPP and things like that. Since then, they've been inching up, so now it's about the same as for people as a whole in the economy. There are a number of reasons we could talk about when time allows, but you should keep in mind that the low-income measure StatsCan uses is a relative measure of poverty: it's those with income below one-half of median income. Basically, what this says is not that the real median incomes of seniors are slipping; it's that they're not participating in the rising earnings elsewhere in the economy.

Point five is that in the long run, fallen age-earnings profiles will likely reduce the effectiveness of the CPP and QPP and will put a greater burden on OAS and the GIS.

Economists refer to an age-earnings profile. You start off earning relatively little. As you get older, it peaks around age 45 to 54 and then tails off a bit. What was found is that between about 1980 and 2000 the real income of the younger group fell by about 20%, and it hasn't gone up. Very tentative results for Canada and the United States suggest that they haven't been making up for it by growing it faster later in their careers. The whole age-earnings profile has shifted down. Since a major source of income for retirees and seniors is CPP or QPP, which is based on your earnings career, we should expect that pillar of retirement support to weaken and more weight to fall on OAS and GIS.

Do I have time for my sixth point?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Hopefully, we'll get to it through questions.

[Prof. Charles M. Beach]

Okay. Very good.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much, sir.

Up next we have Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald, actuary and senior research fellow with the Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, for seven minutes.

[Dr. Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald, Actuary and Senior Research Fellow, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, As an Individual]

Thank you, Brian.

Just to broaden that a bit, at Ryerson I'm actually with the National Institute on Ageing as well.

I've been doing research for quite a long time. I always find it very surprising that when we look at retirement income security for Canadian seniors, we always look at age 65, but most 65-year-old Canadians who don't have enough money to sustain their living standards do what the rest of Canadians do: either they go back to work or they curb their spending. However, there is a crisis, and the real crisis comes when people develop chronic health conditions at more advanced ages. Once you develop a chronic health condition, you don't have the option to go back to work and you cannot curb spending because the associated costs are not voluntary costs: they're fixed costs, and they cannot be postponed.

Throughout time and around the world, that is where family would step in. Up until now in Canada, when seniors became frail and elderly and developed chronic health conditions, families stepped in to support the seniors in their household in their daily household needs and their daily care needs. Unfortunately, in Canada, this will not continue into the future. One reason is simply that baby boomers did not have children; the other is that mobility has increased in Canada substantially, and therefore children don't live near enough to their parents to help in any feasible way on a daily basis.

Somebody is going to have to pay these for costs, and they're going to be enormous. If seniors can't afford to pay for these services themselves and we want to help these vulnerable seniors, then somebody is going to have to pay. If it's not the seniors themselves, it's going to be a shrinking workforce of workers who are already supporting the economy and are already paying for our social programs.

The difficulty of understanding this absolute truth that we know is going to be happening in the next decade is that it's not just a complicated system. The retirement income system in Canada is not just complicated and it's not just about rules, formulas, and numbers. It's actually what we call, in the sciences, a complex system, because it's made up of real people and it's made up of components that are connected and interdependent, and they adapt and evolve. Nevertheless, I've worked for the last dozen years independently between government, academia, and industry, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that there are huge disconnects in the system.

I can also tell you with absolute certainty that there are also incredible areas of synergy between the three, and if we can leverage and identify those synergies, we can create extremely effective, viable, valuable solutions that will substantially help Canadian seniors in their well-being today as well as tomorrow.

In my mind, a valuable solution has to satisfy three criteria. The first is that a valuable solution has to be what seniors want; second, a valuable solution has to be what seniors actually need; and third, a valuable solution cannot pass financial burdens on to a shrinking workforce.

Fortunately, solutions do exist. The first solution is basically to allow Canadians seniors to have the money they need when they need it. The way we could do this at a federal level is to integrate in the Canadian registered retirement savings plan an option for Canadian seniors to take a portion of their savings and put it into a pool. Then, basically, with the other Canadian seniors, this pool would pay out a guaranteed income for those among them who live past age 85, the time at which they will develop chronic health conditions.

That is called “longevity insurance”. Longevity insurance is extremely popular and very successful around the world. It's completely absent in Canada. This solution satisfies my three criteria: it gives seniors what they want, it gives seniors what they need, and it does not transfer any financial burden onto Canadians. In fact, it will save us an incredible amount of money.

I recently presented this idea to leading pension policy thinkers in Canada. It was met with unanimous support, and it's soon going to be coming out in a C.D. Howe Institute public policy report.

A second solution is that we want to try to preserve the invaluable services being provided by the family for Canadian seniors, because we know these costs are enormous. Fortunately, right now 70% of care for seniors is being done from within the family. Despite the changes in our culture, we can still preserve this practice. The way we do that is by paying informal caregivers. Again, this solution has been implemented with amazing success around the world, in the Netherlands and in Germany, and I'm currently partnering with provinces across Canada and researchers to explore this solution.

Again, it's giving seniors what they want, it's giving them what they need, and it will save us a ton of money.

As Victor Hugo said, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” If we can leverage on the synergies between academia, industry, and government, as well as learn from the experiences of other countries, it will be very effective in creating viable and valuable solutions that will substantially improve the well-being of Canadian seniors. It will help them get what they want and get what they need without transferring financial burdens onto Canadians—the younger Canadians, part of what will be a shrinking workforce.

Unfortunately, the big “but” is that the effectiveness of all these solutions is time-limited. If you don't do it now, there's not enough time to make these solutions work. I implore you: the time to implement powerful solutions is now, and you are the people to do it.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much. You were well within time, and we appreciate that.

From the Canadian Union of Public Employees, we have Mr. Mark Janson, senior pensions officer, national office.

Thank you very much. The next seven minutes are yours, sir.

[Mark Janson, Senior Pensions Officer, National Office, Canadian Union of Public Employees]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the committee for having me today.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees is the largest trade union in the country. We represent 650,000 workers across the country, mostly in the public sector. Pensions and retirement security are issues we take very seriously. I'm a pension specialist with CUPE, so I'll be focusing on the income question before you today.

We see the same things everyone sees. We see that most Canadian workers don't have a pension at work and that the few who do are seeing the quality of those pensions under pressure from employers. We see that individualized savings systems such as the RSP and the TFSA predominantly benefit workers at the higher-income, higher-wealth end of the spectrum, and that as Richard Shillington told you yesterday, Canadians who don't have a pension at work—most Canadians—have wholly insufficient retirement savings.

This is why one in three seniors in Canada receives the guaranteed income supplement that keeps most, but not all, Canadian seniors out of poverty. We've actually seen Canadian senior poverty levels ticking up slowly, steadily, since the mid-1990s. The major attacks we've seen on pension plans have been relatively recent, in the last couple of decades. It takes a long time for that to work itself through the system and to be seen on the ground in future seniors, but the indications we're getting from research by academics and statisticians is that significant portions of the boomer generation have not saved enough for retirement. They are looking at a big drop in living standards when they retire, and the problem is projected to get worse for future generations.

This is why CUPE and the labour movement in Canada were so supportive of the government's successful expansion of the Canada Pension Plan in the deal that you reached last year. We recognize that this was not an easy thing to do, so we applaud you for doing it. We know it could have gone much further. We were essentially pushing for a doubling of CPP benefits; we got an increase of about one-third in CPP benefits. Much more could have been done there, but we applaud the work that was done. We should continue this critical campaign to improve the Canada Pension Plan and improve public pension plans in Canada.

A major shortcoming of the CPP expansion deal in the legislation that implemented that deal, Bill C-26, was the lack of child rearing and disability dropout provisions. Basically, a CPP benefit is a function of your lifetime earnings over your career, so if you have a period of zero or low earnings while you're working, that's going to pull your CPP benefits down someday. Governments realize this, and they realize there are some inequities in what we call the dropout provisions in the CPP. There's been a long-standing dropout for disabilities, meaning that if you were disabled and away from the workforce, those years were dropped from your CPP calculation and you were not penalized because you were unable to work. The same provision existed for decades for child rearing if you were at home raising a small child.

These provisions had long been part of the CPP, so we were quite frankly shocked to see that they weren't included in the CPP expansion legislation. They're going to continue to exist in the CPP we've always known, but they're not going to exist in the new benefits that are going to sit on top.

We don't think there's a rationale for this situation. We flagged it for government when Bill C-26 was tabled, but the government passed the legislation unamended and essentially punted this issue to the triennial review of CPP, 2016 to 2018. We urge the government to work with the provinces to fix this issue before these changes start to take effect.

The child-rearing dropout predominantly impacts female seniors. It's mostly women who take up that provision, and disabled seniors, obviously, people who have had a disability in their working career. These are among the most vulnerable future seniors in Canada, and they don't need more challenges in retirement. This is an easy fix. It's not a costly item, and we urge you to fix it.

I was going to make a point about how the old age security program increases over time, but I know Richard Shillington made it very eloquently on Tuesday. It's indexed to prices, not to wages. The chief actuary predicts that wages are going to go up faster than prices. He thinks prices are going to go up by 2% a year and wages are going to up by about 3%, so the old age security system will essentially be falling behind the standard of living by a per cent in every year that this situation is not remedied.

Other OECD countries peg their social security system to wages as well. There are different ways of doing this. This is a long-term problem for old age security. It's been around for a long time. If it's not fixed, we're going to see that program continue to shrink, compared to living standards as a whole.

I'd like to turn briefly to Bill C-27. This is federal legislation tabled by Minister Morneau about a year ago. It's still only at first reading. This is a bill we are strongly opposed to and that the labour movement is strongly opposed to. It would give federally regulated employers—banks, telecoms, airlines, crown corporations—a legal avenue to basically walk back on pension promises they've made to workers and retirees. They currently can't do that under pension law. This bill would give them the legal ability to do that.

I'm sure you've all heard the public outcry about Sears retirees not getting what they were promised. This is not something Canadians support. It's not something the labour movement supports. We're shocked that the Liberal government has tabled this bill. We call for it to be withdrawn.

Finally, I have just a few quick remarks. We can't have decent and secure retirements if we don't have decent and secure working lives. This government and all Canadian governments should be doing everything they can to improve the work prospects of working Canadians, particularly young Canadians, who are faced with increasingly precarious employment, low-wage employment, and part-time work when they want to be working full time. There are all kinds of things the government can be doing on minimum wages, employment standards, and universal social programs that could make working life better for Canadians, and that, in turn, could make retiring a whole lot easier.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much, sir.

Now, from the National Association of Federal Retirees, we have the president, Jean-Guy Soulière, and the director of advocacy, Sayward Montague. The next seven minutes are yours.

[Jean-Guy Soulière, President, National Association of Federal Retirees]

Thank you very much, and thank you for the opportunity to address this committee. We're very grateful to be participating in your study on advancing inclusion and quality of life for Canadian seniors. Of course, what should result from all of this is the establishment and creation of a national seniors strategy.

In seven minutes, of course, we can't go into detail on a whole lot of things, so I'm going to be general in our presentation. If you have specific questions, I'd be pleased to answer, with the assistance of Sayward.

As some of you may know, I was also the first chair of the National Seniors Council, a position I held from 2007 to 2013. From a personal point of view, that was the most interesting part of my life. It was a time when I had the opportunity to meet with seniors organizations and many stakeholders to discuss many issues related to an aging society.

I'd like to recognize the Hon. Alice Wong, who was my last boss when she was the minister responsible for seniors. It was a pleasure working with her. I shared a lot of issues with her, and she was very supportive when I was chair of the National Seniors Council. The problem is that many of the issues the council raised some 10 years ago are still unresolved, and we are still discussing them today.

My organization represents 180,000 federal retirees, including 60,000 Canadian Forces veterans. I cannot think of a more important issue that concerns Canadian retirees and their loved ones than creating a national seniors strategy that would coordinate programs with policies. I am sure that Canadians over 65, who make up 16.9% of the country's population, will agree with me.

In 2015, the news that there were more seniors than children in Canada made headlines. What surprised me was that so many Canadians were surprised by the findings. I can understand why the baby boomers took society and a great many parents by surprise back in the 1940s, but in truth, we all knew that this great generation would one day grow old.

Canadians and all three levels of government have a lot of catching up to do. Lest we think of a national seniors strategy as a short-term need, we should be mindful that average Canadian life expectancy has increased by 30 years over the past 100 years, thanks to the medical advances that continue today.

For this reason, we were glad to see the three major themes of the committee's study: access to affordable accessible housing, income security for vulnerable seniors, and community programs that promote social inclusion and recognize the importance of social determinants of health. Indeed, these were all issues that were being discussed by the seniors council some 10 years ago.

All of these things are related. Any physician will tell you that a miserable life will make you sick. Unhealthy people cost the health care system a lot. They cannot contribute to society or the economy if they are sick.

Public policy must ensure that retirement savings measures created for and available to Canadians are effective, efficient, and realistic. Earned retirement pensions must be protected, and government programs must meet the needs of the most vulnerable seniors. This is why we are very concerned about Bill C-27, as the CUPE representative said, which would introduce a target benefit plan or shared risk plan that would shift the risk from employers and plan sponsors to employees and retirees. In tough times, target benefit pensions can be reduced, providing less retirement security for their members, something that works contrary to the goals of the national seniors strategy.

In order to respond to the housing needs of seniors, a national seniors strategy needs to include home care, palliative care, and end-of-life care, as well as investments in infrastructure.

However, to achieve this, the provincial and federal governments need to be on the same page. Is this possible?

A new political approach will mean investing in infrastructure to improve access to housing; with affordable, accessible housing and measures designed to help seniors remain in their homes, infrastructure funding would be linked to the establishment of age-friendly communities.

We need to innovate by developing effective home care strategies, like the veterans independence program. Home care is not limited to just health care, but also includes access to non-medical support services, like housekeeping, meal preparation, transportation to appointments and social activities, as well as snow removal.

We believe a national strategy is an opportunity to ensure that Canadians continue to be healthy and productive well into retirement, contributing to the local and national economies.

Finally, the appointment of a minister responsible for seniors is a most important must to our organization, as I'm sure it is for all Canadians. The former government had a minister responsible for seniors, as I mentioned. We have a minister responsible for youth—we all know who that is—and we have a minister responsible for families, but we do not have a specific minister responsible for one of the most important parts of our society. We need this.

Let me conclude with a thought I expressed in our magazine Sage when we produced our last issue. I said that to have older Canadians is a challenge but also an opportunity. It is an opportunity to do something now that will benefit all Canadians, because all of you who are younger Canadians expect to grow old, and whatever is done for seniors today will benefit you in the future.

Let me conclude with some wise words from another person, Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and author of the Ontario government's seniors strategy. He says that aging is not a disease, but rather a triumph. I would add that we should get ready for a new definition of retirement. Let's get it right, and you have the opportunity of doing that.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much, sir.

Now from the Office of the Seniors Advocate of British Columbia, we have Isobel Mackenzie, seniors advocate.

You have seven minutes.

[Isobel Mackenzie, Seniors Advocate, Office of the Seniors Advocate of British Columbia]

Thank you.

Thank you. My name is Isobel Mackenzie, and I'm the seniors advocate for the Province of B.C. I was appointed by the government in March 2014. My office has a statutory mandate to monitor services to seniors in five key areas, including income, so I would like to thank the committee for inviting my office to provide our perspective on some matters that should be considered to address income security for seniors.

I recognize that the committee has heard from many of my colleagues at various levels of government and academia on the demographic projections, annual expenditures, and other technical and statistical information related to seniors, so I won't repeat those in the interests of time.

Income security for seniors means the ability to provide for all of life's necessities. I think we would all agree that only once this threshold has been met can we really talk about dignified aging and the quality of life. The challenge facing the federal government is how to ensure that all Canadians are guaranteed to achieve this threshold of income security, given the differences in costs across Canada for two of the most basic necessities, housing and health care.

As you have heard, the median personal income for a Canadian over the age of 65 is $26,000 a year. This tells us that at least 50% of Canadian seniors rely on OAS and CPP, with 30% adding in the GIS, to form a significant part of their retirement income. While these income supports are federally controlled, the expenses against the income are provincially controlled. Creating equality, therefore, is not just a function of income, the federal responsibility, but also controlling expenses, a provincial responsibility. If our goal is income security for a Canadian senior living in Vancouver to match that of a senior living in Charlottetown, we need to look at a more complex approach than just relying on universal income supports.

Health care costs are not something that figure into the budgets of most Canadians. We pay our taxes and we have the comfort of knowing that we don't need to bring our chequebook when we visit the doctor or the hospital, which is how most of us view health care. However, as we age, and as has been referenced by my predecessors, health care actually becomes a cost for many people. It can often exceed the cost of food and sometimes shelter. This is because as we age, help that was seen as a luxury when we were younger—someone to clean our house, cook our meals, cut our lawn—becomes a necessity as frailty and chronic disease impede our ability to engage in the independent activities of daily living without assistance.

Many types of the quote-unquote health care we need as we age are not covered by the Canada Health Act, so provinces are very different in what they provide. Hearing aids, walkers, eyeglasses, dentures, supplies for incontinence, nutritional supplements, help with bathing and keeping the house clean—none of this is covered through any federal program. Some provinces provide partial coverage for such things as mobility aids. Some provinces provide free housekeeping. Some provide dental care. Others provide nothing. No one provides it all.

Further complicating matters are those seniors who are covered by a benefits plan that they have either purchased or received as part of their workplace retirement benefits. My office recently surveyed B.C. seniors on this aspect, and we found that 65% of low-income seniors, or households under $30,000, had no supplemental benefits coverage. Paradoxically, our research showed that the higher your income, the more likely you were to be covered by the benefits plan and more able to pay.

To highlight the disparities, I'll use a bicoastal comparison of two 85-year-old single seniors, Margaret and Helen. They're both of sound mind. However, they have some frailty and require daily help in the morning to get up, washed, dressed, and check on their medications. They both have an annual income of $26,000 a year.

The one-bedroom apartment that Margaret rents in Charlottetown costs $696 a month, so she pays $8,300 a year in rent. In P.E.I. there's no copayment for her daily home support. The program includes housekeeping. In addition, Margaret worked for 15 years in the bank after her children left home, so she has a very small but indexed pension, ensuring that her $26,000 income will remain constant in real terms. She also has employer-paid retirement benefits covering her dental and extended health costs.

Now, compare Margaret with Helen, who lives in Vancouver. Helen rents her one-bedroom apartment for $1,054 a month and receives a shelter grant under SAFER, or shelter aid for elderly renters, of $90 a month.

This leaves Helen paying $11,500 a year in rent. In B.C., there's a copayment for her home support. Based on Helen's income, it's $12 a day, or $4,300 a year, for her daily home support, but in B.C. it doesn't include housekeeping. Currently, Helen's neighbour helps her with housecleaning, but she'll be moving soon, and Helen will need to hire someone.

Helen worked most of her life as a bookkeeper for small companies, so she has no company pension or benefits, just the RSP that she converted to a RRIF, which will be depleted at age 90. Then her income will drop by $5,000 a year. Helen pays about $2,000 a year for her dental and extended health benefits.

The result is that after rent and basic health care costs, these two Canadian seniors are left with vastly different incomes. In Charlottetown, Margaret has $16,600, or $1,400 a month, for all her other needs. Helen has $8,300, or $677 a month, for groceries, transportation, cable, clothing, haircuts, etc.

They are the same age and have the same income, same health care needs, same size of apartment, same citizenship, yet one is left with twice the income of the other after paying for very basic needs.

If the concomitant goals are income security and equality for all Canadian seniors, it will require that the federal government examine mandating standards for health care coverage among provinces and tackle the issue of vastly different housing costs for renters, in addition to the fluctuating incomes for seniors who are not covered by indexed workplace pensions or benefit plans. These are the very types of issues that need to be addressed in a national seniors strategy, and indeed the reason we need one. Hopefully, equality of access to health care and housing for all Canadian seniors will be at the forefront of deliberations.

Thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much. Thank you to everybody for keeping on time and making my job very easy.

First up, we have Mr. Warawa for six minutes.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here.

I appreciate the testimony. It's very informative.

As has been pointed out, we have an aging population. At this present time, I believe it's one in six Canadians is a senior. In 12 and a half to 13 years, it will be one in four. I have a number of questions and not enough time, so I'm assuming I know the answer to this question, but is there any witness here today who believes that Canada is ready to take care of an aging population? I don't see any hands, so I will assume that no one thinks that we're ready, which is what I think. I don't think any member of this committee thinks we're ready, and that's why we're discussing this issue.

Dr. MacDonald, you mentioned the synergy. We just heard from Ms. Mackenzie, and she's the advocate for seniors. We heard from the federal retirees that they would like to have a national seniors strategy and a minister for seniors. Over the last two years, having worked with my colleague, Alice Wong, who used to be the minister for seniors, we've heard over and over again from the different stakeholders representing seniors of the importance of working together as a country, creating a national seniors strategy, binding all the synergy, and finding the solutions to the problems. You created some very practical solutions. I'm thinking of the studies that have been done over the last three years by the Office of the Seniors Advocate of British Columbia and I think, since we have Mrs. Mackenzie and her office focusing on the needs of seniors, we have incredibly valuable and important studies and reports that we can rely on that could apply to the situation in Canada.

Would you agree that to provide a plan and a strategy and to move forward in a positive way and get ready, we need to have in every province and territory a person or a minister appointed to focus on their senior issues, so that we can start moving the synergy forward and get ready for this aging population?

[Dr. Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald]

The problem is that we have so many disconnects between all these different studies that it is difficult to bring the information together and get a storyline and come up with effective solutions. When analysts come to these problems, their difficulty will always be data.

Fortunately, in the Canadian federal government, analysts will take pieces of data and use that data to come up with solutions. Over the last 25 years, the government has actually been taking all the data that we have available in Canada and they've put it together into a very comprehensive model. Because of that, for Canadians across Canada, both rural and urban, we're able to get a fuller picture of what their needs are, what their income sources are, their family structures, and all this information.

Each Statistics Canada survey is like a piece of puzzle. When we can use these gold-standard computer models, we can put those pieces of the puzzle together. That will give us the fuller picture that we need to actually see, if we change this piece, how it affects the rest of the picture. If we change the GIS clawback, what's the evidence? What's going to happen? If we change our working income tax benefit, is that going to make CPP enhancements fairer?

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Sorry for interrupting, but we need to have people, experts in Canada, come together. Would you agree that we start the process of building this national seniors strategy and have a minister or a person, in every province and territory, at all levels of government, including the federal level, and that we start moving forward?

[Dr. Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald]

Right. Absolutely. What I was getting to was that—

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

I'm sorry, but I'm running out of time, and I have a quick question for Ms. Mackenzie.

You wrote a recent report on home care. We do not have enough people trained in home care. We do not have enough nurse practitioners. We have a lot of people trained in pediatrics but not geriatrics, and not enough people trained in palliative care.

What is the solution in Canada so we can now start preparing for that aging population and train enough Canadians?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

You have one minute, please.

[Isobel Mackenzie]

Step one is to establish national standards, national entitlements, or national expectations to deal with this variation among provinces. That will lead to an ability to attract to the labour force the kinds of people we need. When they look at the ability to rise to national standard certifications, for example, and they can see mobility within their profession because it's the same in Saskatchewan as it is in British Columbia as it is in Ontario, that will be a way to move that forward.

Informal care or family caregivers, which one of my predecessors spoke about, is also not to be underestimated as a solution to caring for our aging society in a way that is potentially more cost-effective, although not always, and it is certainly more centred on the needs of the seniors themselves.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

Mona, you're up for six minutes.

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for your testimonies today. We can see that you have a variety of experiences with seniors.

We need to recognize that we have work to do. We have to find solutions or measures that will help us do our part in ensuring that seniors in Canada can retire in comfort and dignity.

Ms. Mackenzie, I found your remarks on the cost of health care very interesting. Could you please tell us about some of the best practices or some of the models, in Canada or abroad, that you might have studied? Perhaps that will help us better understand how to tackle this issue.

[Isobel Mackenzie]

Thank you. I apologize for giving my answer in English.

Yes, there are jurisdictions where we see better practice around home care and universal availability of home care supports on a national level, such as in many of the European countries. It starts with recognizing that if the goal is to facilitate independence for the senior to live in the community for as long as possible, financial impediment should not be the reason that they go into a care facility setting where the government is going to step in and pay more. The analogy is penny-wise and pound foolish.

For example, if we don't provide supports for people to go and assist with those who can no longer handle their activities of daily living, such as bathing and getting dressed, they're going to go into a care facility and we're going to pay much more. In some countries, at a certain age—and it's not 65, but generally much older, like 75 or sometimes 80—there is an assessment done regardless to determine what we would call a baseline. You are then able to monitor to see when help is needed, and help is then provided.

Certainly when we look at other countries, we see that our rate of what I would call institutionalization is much higher than in some other countries. Those are countries with populations older than our populations. While our population is going to reach 25% in about 20 years, some other countries are already there, and they have much lower rates of institutionalization of their senior population.

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Thank you very much.

Affordable and accessible housing was top of mind when I was preparing for today's meeting. As we know, that is one of the country's main concerns, as many seniors currently have nowhere to stay.

If any of you have any ideas, I am all ears.

As you surely know, in its budget, the government invested $200 million to repair existing affordable housing units and build new ones.

Where should the federal government continue to focus its attention in this particular area?

Mr. Soulière, what are your suggestions?

[Jean-Guy Soulière]

First of all, I believe that we should stop talking about the aging population in terms of something we need to prepare for. The shift has already begun. Canadian society is aging, and it has been for some time now.

In my career, I worked in HR at the federal government. That was 25 years ago, and we were already looking into the phenomenon back then. Today, we talk about it as if it were something new, but this is not a problem for future generations; it is already here.

With regards to housing, there is a lot of available information. I suggest you take a look at the National Seniors Council's website. If I remember correctly, there was a study done about seven or eight years ago on affordable housing.