Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
As you heard at the beginning of the meeting, I am the chair of the National Seniors Council. I was appointed in 2007 as the first chair of the new National Seniors Council. In 2010, my mandate was renewed for another three years.
I would like to thank you for inviting me to discuss this topic with you. This is a major issue for both the council and for Canada as a whole. It is a challenge for our society.
I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak about what the National Seniors Council has learned about elder abuse and the recommendations it has made to the government on this matter. A lot of the stuff that Krista mentioned in her presentation is about the issues that were raised with us when we went across the country to consult with experts, front-line workers, and older people themselves. We did produce a report, which I'm sure you all went to our website and read, and it's called the “Report of the National Seniors Council on Elder Abuse”.
I should point out, though, that we were criticized a little for using the term “elder abuse” because, to a lot of people in Canada, “elder” means very different things. For example, in the native population, “elder“ does not necessarily mean older, so we should have called it the report of the national seniors on older abuse, as you have in your brief.
Let me give you a little bit of background on your National Seniors Council. It is a council that reports to three ministers: the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development, the Minister of Health, and the Minister of State for Seniors. The Minister of State for Seniors is the day-to-day overseer of what the council does.
The council has a maximum of 12 members. Right now we are in the process of selecting other members to the council, because the terms of five of them terminated within the last six months. The government is now appointing or at least looking at members to be appointed to the council.
I have the pleasure and the honour of serving with people who have expertise in a whole lot of areas. We had the former president of the Canadian Association on Gerontology as a member. We had Daphne Nahmiash, whom some of you may know, from Montreal, a professor, an older woman herself, who has chaired many committees on elder abuse or the abuse of older people and is participating, in her eighties, on many other committees that deal with this subject. That's the type of members we have on our council.
The first priority that was ever given to the council for study was the matter of la violence contre les aînés. Why was this picked? It is because it is a hidden matter in Canada. It was hidden for a lot of years. As Krista mentioned, there isn't enough research yet on the whole situation, and although a certain percentage of older Canadians are being abused, it is only those cases that are reported that we hear about. An awful lot is not reported, as we found out in consulting across the country on this matter.
As I mentioned, we did provide the government with recommendations on how to deal with this matter. I have an understanding with the ministers with whom we work and to whom we report that our documents, our reports, are living documents. In other words, it's not a report that is put on the table to gather dust. Every time the council meets it goes over all the recommendations it made in previous reports to see what it can raise again as an issue with the ministers and with the government.
In 2007 the government asked the council to look at the abuse of older people. it was Senator LeBreton, who was the minister responsible for the National Seniors Council, who decided on that first priority. What we did was go around the country to find out what it was all about--and the type of abuse.
I was surprised. I thought about physical abuse. Immediately when you talk about abuse, you zero in on physical abuse, but as Krista mentioned, financial abuse is number one--the abuse of older people in a financial way. When you have questions, I have a whole lot of anecdotal experience with people and what they told us about this matter.
We went across the country and had round table sessions in Moncton, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. Over 50 stakeholders representing all sorts of different dimensions in regard to these issues participated in these sessions. Boy, did we hear a lot.
The council's approach in dealing with issues is to produce two reports. The first one is what we call the “what we heard” report, and this is a summary of the discussions at the round table. The second report is our analysis of the what we heard report, the research, and then the recommendations that we made. We did provide the government with a report and, as I said, I'm sure you've all read it.
We did find out that there are a whole lot of older people, but especially older women, who are being abused. It's just a numbers game in one way, because there are far more older women at this time in our society than men; therefore, the older women tend to be abused more. Also, there's the link between poverty and abuse. The low-income women...there are far more of them than men, and there's a correlation between poverty, low incomes, and abuse as well.
What we recommended to the government was to implement a national awareness campaign to help increase awareness of elder abuse. I'm sure you all saw the commercials on TV. They usually come out in October. The government has repeated them from year to year. They are striking. Within 30 seconds to one minute, you really see different abuses happening, and these are not rare occasions.
The government put millions of dollars into the awareness campaign. One of the things that bothers me a little is that when these commercials come on, there is apparently an increase in the telephone calls to police departments and many are not well equipped to deal with the situation.
We talked about conducting research to support the updating of existing research on the causes, incidence, and prevalence of elder abuse.
We recommended working in partnership with national organizations that have shown leadership in the dissemination of information. In a whole lot of our round tables, we found that the duplication of effort was just terrible. People who knew one another and were from the same city were doing the same things, but they didn't know about it. This was discovered at the round tables.
We recommended providing support for volunteers to build capacity within the volunteer sector to respond to elder abuse, as well as examining federal legislative and legal frameworks to better understand how they may be applied to cases of elder abuse.
The report was prepared in 2007. The National Seniors Council is proud to see that the government has taken action based on some of our recommendations. I commend you for making this issue a priority, since it is a cancer in our society and we have to address it.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss this topic with you. Thank you very much.