Good afternoon, and thanks for the opportunity to spend a little time with you this afternoon.
This has been a time of disruption—a time of difficulty for some, a time of opportunity for others and certainly a time of adaptation and adjustment for us all. This disruption has changed the way we work, who works and who doesn't; how we connect with our co-workers, our colleagues, our clients and our customers; and how we connect to family and friends, our community and the world. This is a period of focus on health and well-being. It's also a period of generosity and gratitude. It's a period of responsiveness and responsibilities. It's a period of time for learning and growth.
As a research and education organization, we're focused on understanding families, family life, and family experiences, expectations and aspirations. COVID has really put a spotlight on family. Either we have spent intensive amounts of togetherness or we've experienced extreme separation. Every system has been tested—our economic system, health care, justice, child welfare, community services, education, early learning and child care, long-term care and our system of families.
One of the things that we have learned through all our work in the last several months is that every strength and every weakness of each of these systems has been magnified, intensified and amplified during COVID. An example of this is our health care system—the magnification of the dedicated medical professionals and those who support them, and the weaknesses in the long-term care sector, where our reliance is on family, friends and volunteers to supplement the care. Once you remove them from that environment, we know that the quality of care drops dramatically.
This has been a period of time when we've focused on needing to be well, to do well and to stay well. To do that, we need to really understand how our systems have been tested. We know that each of them has had an impact on family well-being, and we've come to the conclusion that there are about nine things that need to be in place to optimize family well-being during COVID and hereafter.
The first one is income. It needs to be adequate, stable and predictable. The physical environment needs to be adequate, it needs to be stable and there needs to be access to outdoors. Employment or attachment to the labour force needs to be flexible, it needs to have tools to be successful and there needs to be autonomy on how, where and when work gets done. Children need to have attentive adults. They need access to the Internet for home-schooling. They need opportunities to play, explore and discover. Families need adequate nutrition, opportunity for exercise and access to the health care system. They need quality connections with each other and others, and they need access to current, reliable and accurate information. Last, they need to be able to optimize their connections through individual and family well-being.
We know that not everybody has all of these elements in place, in particular in rural, remote and northern communities where there's high density and high precarity.
To give you a bit of a sense of what we've been up to since we went into lockdown on March 10, we began collaborating and partnering immediately with Statistics Canada, the Association for Canadian Studies and Leger to do week-over-week polling.
We've collaborated with a group of people to establish the COVID-19 social impacts network, which is now over 125 people who study, serve and support individuals and families, and who need to understand how COVID is impacting. We've been part of the CanCOVID network of experts, who have been brought together by Canada's chief science officer. We have been collaborating with our colleagues in Australia, the European Union and the U.S. We've been working with the G7 team for women's empowerment, with UNICEF, with the UN on the expert panel on families and with our university colleagues who are receiving SSHRC and CIHR grants.
We've also been partnering with the Canadian association of marriage and family therapists and the Canadian counselling and psychotherapists association. Also, a project we've been working on is looking at veterans' families, with the True Patriot Love Foundation, Veterans Affairs and the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research.
What we've been doing is that, week over week, we've been collecting data through a poll. We have a standard set of questions that have been the same since March 10. We change a few of those week over week. We've also done some targeted surveys and have participated with Statistics Canada on their crowdsourcing survey. We collect the data, analyze it, synthesize it, mobilize it and operationalize it. The surveys go out on Friday and run over the weekend. We get the data back on Monday and analyze it on Tuesday. We write the report on Wednesday and translate it on Thursday, and on Friday the cycle returns again.
We've also been doing specific surveys with children and youth in collaboration with both UNICEF and Experiences Canada, a survey with family therapists, because we want to know what they're seeing in their offices and, as I mentioned, with veterans' families. Also, we've done boosters in the week-over-week work that include new Canadians, indigenous peoples and people from visible minority communities, and again, some boosters with youth. We collect that data and we've been running conferences and doing reflective practice sessions across the country week over week.
We've been posting this data. I've been looking at what I can share with you. There is a ton of information on our website and a lot more on the COVID-19 social impacts website. I'll make sure you have access to all of that.
As for what we've been finding, we're waiting for funding for looking at a broad “families in Canada” survey. We're waiting to hear back for some funding on families in recovery and families new to Canada, and also for a study on fertility and pregnancy implications, because what we've been hearing is that young people who were planning pregnancies in 2020 have postponed those, and that's going to have huge implications for everything from maternity benefits through to kindergarten and to high schools in the years ahead. We're also looking at parents' confidence in the early learning, child care and education systems as we start the rollback over the summer and into the fall.
We've been designing these surveys and polls so that we can compare them with pre-COVID using existing tools and then look at them post-COVID. We're also looking at some of the international things, such as what are the impacts on air pollution, childhood allergies and asthma, and premature births. Premature births have been dropping steadily during COVID. Nobody really understands why, so we want to get a handle on that. We also want to look at the stresses and strains on families and community and the impacts on well-being.
With just a few minutes left, I want to give you some samples of some of the results that we've experienced in the last little while.
One of the things that's interesting is that the data that's being collected right now is of very high quality. It's representative. It's solid information.
One of the things is that people are really interested to tell their story and to share their information. For the very first crowdsourcing survey that Statistics Canada did in relationship to COVID-19, when we had the questions ready and it was ready to roll out, we were hoping to get about 15,000 responses within 10 to 15 days. By day six in the field, we had more than 275,000 responses and, of those, 68% gave their email addresses for further study thereafter, so the data we have is solid.
We do know that those who were doing well before COVID are still, by and large, doing well. Those who were not doing well are doing way worse. For those in the middle, many of them are doing better, and a few of them are doing not as well.
Just to give you some specifics, I'll share with you briefly a couple from the very last poll that we put out, which I think might be of particular interest to you. It was around how many people are worried about the deficit. Thirty-five per cent are very worried, 43% are somewhat worried and 18% are not at all worried or not very worried. In response to the deficit, asked whether or not they thought government should scale back on the programs or payments, 41% said yes, and 44% said no.
On mask wearing, most people who are wearing masks are doing so in grocery stores. For those who flat-out refuse, it's mostly in bars, which has the highest refusal rate, and on public transit. When asked whether or not people think that we're at the end of the first wave, 40% say yes, and 47% say no. When asked about releasing protective measures, 10% said that the government should accelerate that pace, 64% are quite content and ask that you maintain it, and only 26% want you to slow it down.
In terms of mental health, if you had excellent or very good mental health going into COVID, chances are you're still experiencing excellent or very good mental health. If you had bad mental health, it's as bad or worse. There was a slight shift around early April, where a lot of the negatives peaked and then they came down.
This is true, too, for couples. Couples in March and into early April were very lovey-dovey, had meaningful conversations, no stresses, no strains, and then by week three, they were getting a little testy with one another. It was not so great by week three to four, and then it stabilized and has been fairly positive thereafter.
People find that it's very stressful leaving their homes, even with masks. The youth are more afraid of their loved ones contracting COVID than themselves, and they're much interested in looking after each other.
In terms of fear—