Yes. I think it is a good investment.
If you visualize this continuum of aging, people don't start out immediately needing total help. It's an incremental process as we age. We need a little help around the house with some housekeeping, some groceries, some meal preparation, and then we start to need some care. It's really at the care-needing level where it is possibly going to tip over into long-term care.
When you ask what more can be done, when we're looking at trying to ensure that people can stay at home and not go into the nursing home, yes, the independent activities of daily living, the IADLs, are important, but it becomes critical to have the care for the activities of daily living as well: the bathing, the feeding, the helping to the toilet, medication management. That's where we're coming up short, in part because, in the federated model, the federal government gives money to the provinces and the provinces decide what the province is going to cover for you. You have a hodgepodge. Some people include housekeeping, some people don't, and also what they charge for it.
In B.C., we charge quite a bit for our public home support. A person living on $28,000 a year, who needs a one-hour daily visit, is going to pay $8,000 a year for their public home support. In Alberta, it's free. In Ontario, it's free. In Quebec, there is a fee for it, but it's rebated a bit through income tax, and it's the same, I think, in Manitoba. It's all over the map. I think there is a role for the federal government to play in saying that, as a Canadian citizen, these are the services you are entitled to receive from your government at home, and this is how much you are expected to pay based on your income. It should be the same, and it's all over the map.