In terms of a process and timeline, again, I was appointed to the ministerial advisory board on dementia. That was something set out in legislation with clear targets and guidelines, and we helped to establish the national dementia strategy last year. The key is, that could be a template, for example, as a way to say we need to have a clear mandate and we need to have clear goals, because otherwise you could study things forever and never see any results or meaningful actions thereafter. If we say that this is what the goals need to be....
But we need to have federal and provincial co-operation so that we're all involving ourselves together to say what the end points are and how we are going to organize this. Do we use the Canada Health Act or other mechanisms with accountability, and how do you bring that back? I think the immediacy can be figuring out those types of things, like guidelines, to help us get through this pandemic, which will be with us for at least the next 18 months.
We're going to see more challenges in our long-term care systems, but then also how do we start reorienting our system to become one that's more home-care-based and community-care-based, and frankly, more sustainable? We know that our long-term care spending, right now if we do nothing differently, is going to go from $22 billion to $71 billion by 2050, and while we talked about family caregivers before, we know that we're going to have fewer available in the future to meet the care needs, so our current caregivers will have to be 40% more productive to maintain the status quo, which isn't sustainable at all.
These are the things. We have the data. We have the knowledge. We've seen what other countries can do. It's just that we need a clear mandate, timelines, targets and dedicated funding that can allow that to happen in collaboration with the provinces, territories and the federal government.