It's a complex question, and I think that is why there is a need for a thorough consultation to understand it. We all understand the motivation behind the bill, but to understand the best mechanism to accomplish the goals would, I think, require extensive stakeholder consultation.
If you think back to March 2020—we've all lost track of time, but put your mind back there—we didn't know what we didn't know. All we knew was that there was this virus out there that was deadly, particularly to older people.
Put yourself in the shoes of a long-term care personal service worker, for instance, particularly in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, at the time when there was a high incidence of virus prevalent in those care homes. First of all, if you were sick, you didn't go to work. However, if you weren't sick and you were afraid for your family, you didn't really know what to do.
If people were that scared to go to work, I don't think this legislation would have compelled them to go. Thankfully, the vast majority of long-term care workers in fact went to work, and those who went to work performed heroically to keep our seniors well and safe.
I think there are better mechanisms. I think Jodi has touched on a few of those.
Properly funding long-term care is one. As you know, long-term care is not covered under the Canada Health Act, and it varies by province. However, generally speaking, the province will pay for a portion of the cost of long-term care, and then the resident and their family will pay the balance. Often that's income-tested.
However, it has suffered from chronic understaffing for many years. There's a bit of a stigma that is applied to health professionals working in long-term care, so they may choose acute care, thinking it's a better form of health care for them to be in. Ageism is part of that. There's no question about it.
The difficulty in recruiting into long-term care has always been a challenge. Anything that makes people think twice about going into long-term care—or home care, for that matter, because this would apply to people providing home care as well—would make them think about other health care settings before long-term care.
I think we could do a lot to protect seniors in care by increasing investment, by increasing hours of care and by increasing the incentives and recruitment and retention strategies—all of which, by the way, the provinces are all working on at the moment.
As Dr. Samir Sinha often points out when he's doing media, Canada underfunds seniors' care by about 15% compared to other OECD countries.