Access to something as simple as the Internet can make a huge leap in terms of how older people can be connected not just to information, but more importantly, to their friends, family and health care circles. Again, we've seen during COVID that more older people are getting online in order to access those services.
This is not going to go back to where we were before. This trend of online health care, telehealth and tele-rehab is going to continue to grow. Because of that, the infrastructure needs to be there.
We applaud the efforts of this current federal government to put these points of access in place; however, the questions that we hear all the time from older people are, “Why was this not done five years ago? Why was this not done 10 years ago, when we knew that the role of the information highway was going to be so critical as we move forward?”
It's never really been an issue of technical capabilities. They've always been there. We've seen that in many of our provinces during the pandemic, where for decades, we've fought for telehealth services in the province of Ontario to no avail, then over a weekend it seems, all of a sudden we have telehealth because of the pandemic.
If anything can be taken out of this in a positive light, what we've gone through, it's the fact that it has shown us that we have the capabilities. We have the capabilities here in Canada to do so. Now is the time to really push this initiative forward as quickly as possible.