Thank you, Chair, and good afternoon to my colleagues.
Good afternoon to Ms. Tamblyn and Ms. Ferrier. Thank you very much for your presentations. It's great that you're both here.
Ms. Tamblyn, obviously you're right across the Bay of Fundy, as we talked about earlier. I can almost see you on a clear day.
There's no question that this is an incredibly important study.
One of the things that would really break my heart, when I was doing door to door back in 2015 in my first campaign, was seeing seniors in their homes, and how seniors were so vulnerable and were forgotten. You roll that into what's happened during this pandemic with the isolation and just the travesty that it's had on all Canadians, but in particular seniors.
Certainly from our government's standpoint, as MPs, we're always lobbying and making sure we do the right things. It goes without saying that we certainly raised the GIS to 10% for low-income single seniors, and we rolled back the increase in age that the Harper government was going to bring for the age of eligibility for benefits from 67 to 65. I'm thrilled in this budget that we are increasing the OAS for seniors who are 75 years and older. Sure, there are people who would ask, well, why not 65 to 74, but we deem that seniors 75 and up are more vulnerable and have more health care costs. I'm certainly thrilled that our government is moving forward with those initiatives.
I'm in a province that has more people over 55 years of age than under 15. There was a study in 2018 which said that in our country now, one of two Canadians is over 40 years of age. It's a pressing problem, a challenging problem.
I want to talk about home care for seniors, but also kind of roll that into—if I said a NORC, you would know what I mean, obviously—a naturally occurring retirement community. These communities are popping up. These communities are forming, not really even forming deliberately, if you will. They're not designed that way, but over 40% of the people are 55 or older, and so on and so forth.
I read an interesting article the other day that was talking about a concept of needing to get better as government. MP Dong talked about the levels of government and how we need to co-operate better. The article I read basically said that we can do a lot better job of also bringing more services to seniors in these communities. Obviously that rolls into home care, and we're going to talk about specific home care.
I'll start with you, Ms. Tamblyn.
Could you talk about alternative types of care which would bring more care to seniors in their communities?