Madam Speaker, as a member of the Standing Committee on Health and critic for the family and caregivers, I want to express my opinion on this motion.
I would like to begin by reminding the House that January is Alzheimer Awareness Month, as my hon. colleague surely already knows.
In Canada, 280,000 people over 65 years old are affected by Alzheimer disease. That is, one person in 20. It is predicted that, by 2031, more than 750,000 people will have Alzheimer disease or related dementias.
In addition, it is a degenerative disease that causes lesions in the brain. The brain cells shrink or disappear and are replaced by irregular spots called plaques. This disease causes a gradual and irreversible degeneration of cognitive functions such as memory, orientation, judgment, language, and the ability to learn new things. The most terrible aspect of this disease is that one becomes the parent of the person, no longer their child, and worse, unable to express love for that person, who no longer understands.
Every year, $5.5 billion is spent in Canada on persons with Alzheimer disease and related dementias. The annual social cost of caring for an individual varies from $9,000 for a person with the mild form of the disease to $37,000 for a person with the severe form. Those are annual figures.
There is talk here of creating a national strategy on Alzheimer disease. Here is another federal attempt at encroaching on provincial jurisdictions, by acting directly in a field related to health. The Liberal government must understand that health is a provincial matter and that, at present, Quebec and the other provinces have considerable expertise in the field and have succeeded in developing unique forms of care.
A national policy is not what residential care centres need; they need funds to apply the strategy that experts in the field have already developed. The same is true for caregivers, who ought to receive more recognition for their work, and who ought to receive a tax credit, for example, which would compensate them for their great devotion. The only way to achieve this is to return money for health to Quebec and the provinces in order to enable them to provide the best possible care for people suffering from this terrible disease.
To come back to caregivers, 50% of people suffering from dementia live at home and not at a home care facility; 97% of these people receive help from a caregiver—often the caregivers are women—while 30% of caregivers have a full-time job. I should also mention that 50% of these caregivers are over 60 and 36% are over 70. When I talk about caregivers over 70, I mean people who have been caring for a person with the illness for at least five years.
Spouse caregivers are less likely to have back-up support than others and yet are more likely to be caring for a person with dementia. Only 3.4 per cent of caregivers use the respite care designed to give the caregiver a break for a few hours.
I want to explain a little more about the various stages of the disease to illustrate how devastating it is and what it demands of the caregiver.
At the first stage there is no cognitive decline. The person receives the diagnosis but experiences no problems in daily living.
At the second stage there is very mild cognitive decline. The person starts to forget names and locations of objects. In some cases, they may have trouble finding words.
At the third stage there is mild cognitive decline. The person has difficulty travelling to new locations and handling problems at work.
At the fourth stage there is moderate cognitive decline. The person has difficulty with complex tasks such as finances, shopping, planning dinner.
At the fifth stage moderately severe cognitive decline sets in. The person needs help to choose clothing and needs prompting to bathe.
This is the stage at which major aggression develops, because the individual is aware of his or her cognitive losses and frustrated at needing someone else's help to accomplish these tasks.
By the sixth stage, the individual needs constant supervision, because more advanced cognitive problems are developing. He or she needs help in dressing and bathing, and has problems getting to the toilet. Incontinence may start developing.
Finally, in the seventh stage, when cognitive problems are now advanced, the individual is reduced to a limited vocabulary or to one-word answers, loses the ability to walk and to sit, along with the ability to smile. There is a total loss of autonomy.
Not surprisingly, caregivers develop chronic health problems. Depression is almost twice as frequent in caregivers of Alzheimer's patients as it is in other caregivers.
The caregivers are often elderly and have neither the ability or the means to look after a relative in stages five to seven of the disease. This is the point at which most start thinking about finding a placement for the individual.
Fortunately, Quebec has developed some advanced services tailored to these specific needs. The long term care hospitals, for instance, have special care units, and there are special residences such as Carpe Diem in Trois-Rivières.
The special care unit concept is designed especially for residents with Alzheimer's to help them adapt and retain their physical, psychological and social integrity as long as possible, by including them in daily living activities, with the amount of support appropriate to their stage of disease. The people in these units are treated with respect and dignity, moreover.
Then there are the community organizations specializing in services to patients and families. In Laval, for instance, we have the Alzheimer's Society, under the enlightened leadership of Mariette Chalifoux, which has developed a broad range of services for raising public awareness and providing information and training.
There is also the Baluchon Alzheimer respite service, which enables caregivers to take a break with peace of mind for a week or two, without having to move their relative to a different environment. A live-in caregiver comes to the home of the person and takes that opportunity to perform an assessment using various intervention strategies. In addition, we must not forget the significant contribution of the staff at Laval's Coopérative de soutien à domicile, who, through the technical support and the housekeeping, groceries, and laundry services they provide, support the caregiver, freeing up more time to spend with the person being cared for.
As hon. members can see, we already have a service strategy for Alzheimer's in Quebec. What would help, though, would be new money, because facilities like Carpe Diem and respite services are terribly short of money and are often underfunded because of the growing costs of health care.
A national policy whereby the same standards would be applied to the care of patients from coast to coast is not what we need; what we need is funding transfers to allow the provinces to implement their own solutions and, in particular, to enable them to provide personalized care, as required by the circumstances.
In this context, the Bloc Québécois is demanding that the Prime Minister's government correct the fiscal imbalance that is limiting the ability of the governments in Quebec and the provinces to invest more in residential care and caregiver services for people with Alzheimer's.
Tax fields have to be divided more equitably between Ottawa and Quebec and the provinces. This would enable the governments of Quebec and the provinces to diversify their own source revenues, fully assume their exclusive responsibility over health care and ensure that all Canadians receive the services they need.
Hon. members have no doubt gathered that we denounce the numerous intrusions in health care by the federal government. Therefore, while we believe that the federal government should make an extra effort in the areas of health care and medical research, we demand that additional approved funding be given to the governments of Quebec and the provinces with absolutely no strings attached.
That is why the Bloc Québécois is totally opposed to a national policy on Alzheimer's, and I encourage all my hon. colleagues to vote against this motion.