I'll take the first run at it.
Until a year ago, I was on the board of the Council on Aging of Ottawa, joined by, among others, Vern White, the chief of police in town. At the initiative of the council, we established an elder abuse network that involved the police and a number of agencies.
I think it works well. It has had some public money. I'm not sure, but I think it was Ontario money rather than federal money. In a sense, that doesn't matter much.
One of its difficulties for it is a difficulty so many social agencies face. I teach in a school of social work, and some of my students tell me about this all the time. Much of the money comes in on a project basis rather than as core funding. The agencies, including the elder abuse network in Ottawa, spend so much of their time justifying their existence, writing grant proposals, sending in interim and final reports, hoping they get the next one, and worrying about whether they have to lay off staff because they haven't heard yet.
This is incredibly inefficient. It's what the economists sometimes call “transaction” costs, but it's also a human cost for the people who work in this sector and who receive services from it.
So I welcome initiatives of the sort you describe. It is all too often a hidden issue. Judith and her colleagues occasionally find out about it—or MPs find out about it—because somebody happens to know a number to phone. A lot of it is hidden. It's partly a cultural thing; we have to bring it out into the open and make sure that it's not a matter of stigma. We also need more secure, stable places where people can go.