That is a primary element of what we're trying to do as the Canadian Support Workers Association: It's to put essentially a fence around that title. Right now, in Canada, there are a number of different titles that can describe the work of the duties that a PSW or a community care aide or whoever perform across Canada.
Within each province, however, the provinces can simply create new titles to redefine that role at their leisure. Right now, we're dealing with.... This sounds like economics, but it's essentially an opportunity-and-cost question. If you have the opportunity to become a PSW and enter health care or not, [Technical difficulty—Editor] investment of time and money, why would you make it into a field like health care for PSWs when that title is not guaranteed? On your first day of work, your boss can say, “Well, I don't want to pay you that much money, so I'm going to pay a dollar an hour less to someone I found in the parking lot who I'm just going to give in-house training to.” That's happening again and again and has been happening for a decade, constantly eroding the value that these people feel on a day-to-day basis.
The senior members of their team and their directors of care can easily tell them, and tell them regularly, “You don't have to be listened to because you can be replaced on a thought.” This is not applied to nurses. This is not applied to doctors or to any other profession except frontline health care workers.
It is impossible to attract people. That's why it's no longer worth the opportunity cost to go into health care versus not going into health care. Until we can actually put a fence around it and guarantee any sort of investment around the title of “personal support worker” in Canada, we can keep dumping money into this and it will continually filter away, because it's a bottomless pit.
Like Ms. Silas and Ms. Stewart were saying, it's a question of what the conditions of employment are. Well, the conditions for a PSW are horrible. They're not allowed to have respect. Their unions may or may not speak for them, because they [Technical difficulty—Editor]. They have no professional association that they're mandated to join, and again, they can be terminated on a thought.
Once you can end that process, embed that title and create a baseline, that's what we need in this province and in this country for our patients and for everybody. We don't have that right now.