Yes. I wanted to go back to the issue of respect that was mentioned. If we think back to George Orwell, we know or we believe that if we take a word out of a language, the concept ceases to exist. In Canada, we don't even count personal support workers and care aides accurately. We don't track their wages easily or accurately. We don't assess the quality of work life that they have routinely. They're not paid very well. They're not educated very well. In English-speaking provinces, half of them in urban centres don't speak English as a first language, and the testing for whether that's sufficient to give care is variable across the country.
Those are just symptoms of how we don't respect and regard for this workforce that is looking after a population that we don't respect and regard very much. We have to think of nursing homes as places that are driven by dementia care. Dementia is on the rise; we're getting older and it's not going to slow down. There will very likely always be a smaller population of people with dementia who are going to need nursing care, and if you need it in a nursing home, it's the right place to be if the care is acceptable.
Recently, a survey in the U.S. reported that half of the people surveyed said they'd rather die than go to a nursing home. That' just not okay. We have a high-income country and these are all issues of values. I can't think of an existential fear greater than that of dying alone, but that's exactly what happened during COVID, and it's still happening for these older people—often women.
I think we need to step back and ask, how do those values influence us? When we say that we must have data—and we all say this—we don't just need quality of care data or data on wages. What we need data about is how this workforce is managing. Are they resilient? Are they able to manage the clientele they have? Do they have the right education? Did they ever get continuing education? Do they get child care? What about their aging parents at home?
In the matter of unpaid family caregivers, we have relied disproportionately on family to carry the burden of what we don't want to pay for as a country. By 2050 there will be a third less family caregivers, who are largely women, and that will —