I would say there are two issues in play. One is actually identifying the sub-populations you're talking about. Immigrants are no less diverse than the population of seniors as a whole. We could be talking about recent immigrants or immigrants who have been established for some time but may not have adapted fully to either the English or French-language cultures in which they live. So there are specific challenges.
In my experience, the whole issue of seniors from external backgrounds is becoming much more of a factor in discussions. They are more of a factor in terms of service providers looking at how they deliver services in a way that a community such as the South Asian community of Vancouver might take advantage of what is known. At the same time, they want to learn from those communities what their first choices are and where they would go for help. Those may be different access points than we would normally see in a traditional non-immigrant community, if I can put it that way.
I think there's distinct attention being paid to them. We've worked through a variety of projects, for example, in looking at groups of older Canadians from a variety of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds to see what they can share with each other and what needs to be adopted. That carries over with a lot of our current work with international partners on a variety of issue areas, to see what we can pick up as well as what we can share.
I would say that the topic and the concern are well recognized, but the challenge remains and we have to keep at it.