Mr. Chair, I am pleased to have the opportunity to take part in the discussion this evening. I will be splitting my time with the Minister of State for Families and Caregivers and will have a question for him when I have had a chance to make a few comments. I truly do consider him to be a champion for some of the most vulnerable in our society.
I want to talk about an issue that is particularly important to me. It is the issue of voluntary caregiving. Caring for one another is a Canadian value. Across this country Canadians are caring for members of their families and for their friends and they are doing it more than they ever have before. For some people the responsibilities are manageable, but for some the demands are overwhelming.
Caregiving can be very intense for a long period of time. The personal and societal costs can be very high. There is a role for government to play in supporting unpaid family caregivers to help them meet their caring responsibilities to ensure that those who are receiving care have a high quality of life and that caregivers can provide support without significant risk to their own health and their own wealth.
Furthermore, by helping caregivers, governments are helping to relieve pressures on our formal health care system and our social services systems as well. Over 2.8 million Canadians are providing care to seniors, adults and children with disabilities and to Canadians with acute and long term health conditions.
Not all caregiving situations are the same. Caregiver situations are diverse depending on who they are, where they live, who they take care of, their level of income, their level of family support, their cultural background and a lot of different areas.
I want to talk about my own personal experience and put this in my own context. One of the most important experiences of my life was the period when my parents were dying and my family and my six brothers and sisters and I provided care so that they died at home. My father had stomach cancer and my mother had bowel cancer. From Christmas of 2002 until my mother's death on March 31 and my father's death on May 13, my two sisters, Shelagh and Brigid, gave up their jobs in Toronto and moved into the family home in Nova Scotia.
They were the primary caregivers to mom and dad. Led by them, we all provided care. We took turns. We came together as a family, quite often three times a day, to say prayers with them, to provide medication and to provide comfort and all the things that had to happen.
Of course it was a sad time for the family, but in many ways it was very rewarding as well. Not only did we grow in our faith, but we grew in our closeness as a family. There is not one of us who would be able to say that we were not enriched by the experience of being with our parents while they died after they had spent a lifetime giving to us. We never regretted being there. We never regretted the opportunity to give back to parents who gave so much to us.
But we had some real advantages in spite of this difficult time for our family. We were not a wealthy family, but we had enough financial resources. There were seven of us so we took turns, although my two sisters, Shelagh and Brigid, took the bulk of the load. We all took turns and that made it a lot easier.
It was a short period of time. I can vividly recall my father saying to me after my mother passed away, “I'm going to go into a hospital and be taken care of from the hospital and you kids are going to go on with your lives”. He said that was what he wanted to do, but we knew he did not want to do that. We knew that deep down he was just being the stubborn old man that he always was. He wanted us to convince him that we wanted to take care of him, which we did. That is what happened. I remember the day he said to us that he would let us take care of him, but the only reason he would, he said, was that he knew he was not going to live very long because he wanted us to get on with our lives.
So we had resources and it was a short period of time, but we also had employers who understood our situation. Each and every one of had companies we worked for that understood the situation or partners who understood and allowed us the time we needed to make this situation happen. We also had a lot of support from people such as Jack McNeil, a dear friend of our family and a deacon in the Catholic church, who provided spiritual guidance.
Most people do not have those advantages. What was a sad but rewarding experience for us is a very stressful experience for many Canadians who do not have the level of income that they need to be able to take time off work and care for loved ones, be they adults, a spouse or a parent, or children who may be autistic or have other challenges. Those are very stressful times for Canadians and they are times when we as the Government of Canada need to support them.
It is difficult. There is no question about it. The demands placed on caregivers decrease their own capacity to provide quality care. If we as a government do not provide support it can negatively impact not only the quality of life of the people who are being cared for but that of the people who are providing care. Caregiving involves costs to caregivers, employers and society. Caregivers can lose income and have greater out of pocket expenses. There can be costs to employers to accommodate employees with caregiving opportunities.
I want to talk a little about the minister. I have had a chance to spend a great deal of time with him. He has taken the time to come to Nova Scotia, as he has for other parts of Canada, and do round tables with caregivers, because they quite often tend to be the forgotten people in society.
In Nova Scotia, I became a little bit involved with Caregivers Nova Scotia because of my own experience and have had the opportunity to meet many other people whose burdens are almost unimaginable.
The minister was with me in Halifax last month as the guest speaker to Caregivers Nova Scotia. One of the people who was honoured that day was someone who I believe had a spouse who was dying of cancer and whose child was diagnosed as autistic and Down's syndrome. How do people cope with that? How do people who do not have a significant income cope with that kind of pressure and responsibility?
One reason why we all got into politics was to help those who need help, not those who do not. When people are doing something to support the people they love and at the same time are taking a huge burden off the system, what better cause could there be for a government to support than that?
I know that the minister has spent a lot of time on this. I appreciate it, as do people at Caregivers Nova Scotia and other people across the country. Perhaps he could talk a little about what the government is doing to help all the volunteer caregivers who give so much of their time and energy to help friends and family members.