Thank you very much for the question.
Over half of the PSW workforce are immigrants. Over half of the people who are immigrants don't speak English as a first language and sometimes don't speak English well enough to understand it readily in a conversational way. It's a highly racialized workforce. We pay almost no attention to that. We don't collect that data. I have that data because we've been working for over 15 years with a longitudinal group in the west. We asked them what language they speak and where they come from, so we have that data.
When I talk to colleagues in Ontario and Quebec, it's even higher. It's not the same in some regions of B.C., and in the Maritimes it's a little bit different. It depends on the ecosystem that you're in. That is part of the reason they are so poorly compensated. They're women. They're poorly educated. They're not given any continuing education. They're not regulated, which means there aren't even criminal background checks, and we don't count them accurately in the country. What we have done is create this workforce that's largely unregulated, and we've deprofessionalized it.
In Germany, they legislated that 50% of the front-line workforce has to be regulated nursing staff, RNs. In Belgium, it's even higher, almost 65%. That's similar in other jurisdictions. Here, the regulated workforce is less than 15%, and that has been a financial decision, coupled with the belief that you don't need complex, competent skilled care for these individuals.
We can provide that care with a high proportion of unregulated staff, but we have to give them proper education. We have to give them continuing education, and we have to support them. We have to address what kinds of issues it creates if we have a highly racialized workforce in terms of the discrimination they feel. We know that COVID had a disproportionate impact on racialized groups, and we know that in some jurisdictions that was manifest in what happened in the workforce, in the nursing homes that had a particularly high proportion of people from other ethnic groups.
Poverty plays a role. The fact that they're women plays a role. All of these things come together and stack up, until you get a workforce that's quite vulnerable. On top of that, they're pretty much voiceless. They're not unlike the residents who don't have a voice; we don't give them much voice. They're at the bottom of a hierarchy, and they're not included often in a lot of decision-making, but they care. This is the thing that astonishes me through all of that. The average care aide or PSW in this country builds relationships with residents and cares and wants to do good work. We aren't even acknowledging....
That's the first step. Then we have look at what it means if a workforce is predominantly female and you have COVID and they close the schools and there's no child care. That's a problem. If you're a woman and you have children and the schools are closed and you're caring for aging parents, that's a challenge, so we have issues and we don't value caregiving. We don't value it for children, and we don't value it for the elderly. There's a very big convergence of these compounding issues of disparity and inequality in this workforce.