I want to ask a quick question.
You came up with an interesting statistic: that women who do caregiving, or what I like to call unpaid work, are worth $25 billion to Canadian GDP. I have a real concern for those women. I saw them when I was a physician. These are the women who, if they and their husbands divorce... Let's imagine they were married, because we know that a lot of these women tend to be much older now. If their husbands divorced them, if they got some CPP at that time, they no longer have it, because it was only a small amount, and especially if that person remarried, then they don't get any more survivor benefits.
And yet, if they have done... This is something that Canada brought to the United Nations way back in 1998, when I was the minister for women's equality. The United Nations have now picked up Canada's idea and are working on it in many countries. They've estimated trillions of dollars worth of unpaid work. These are the poorest women at the end of the day. How do we...?
You said an important thing about value. I would have liked us to talk about that; we haven't talked a lot about it. These women have fallen smack between the cracks. What is it we do to value the work? We value that unpaid work when we pay an early learning child care worker, when we pay a home care worker, when we pay a geriatric nurse. We do all of those things, and yet these women have nothing for that work. There is no value for that work, because the woman did it at home because she had to, because nobody else was there to do it. She's left poor at the end of her days, and is the sickest—because poverty is the greatest determinant of health—and costs the system a lot of money in health care and all of those other things.
How does society help her to be a lot more independent by valuing that work? I would love to have heard somebody come up with something on that, because that's a big issue that I feel we don't consider.
Do you have anything to say on that?