Human Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to address this committee on behalf of the Public Health Agency of Canada. Let me begin my remarks with some important definitions that I think will illustrate the public health imperative of supporting and improving mental hea

Human Resources committee  Maybe I'll just take it at a very high level. I don't know if StatsCan would have any data in that regard. Employment would be a very important “social determinant” of health, as we call it in the public health world. If you have a job and you're contributing, your mental healt

Human Resources committee  Thank you for your question. I'll speak to some of the programming we have at the Public Health Agency, in particular the maternal and child health programs I referenced earlier. In those cases, we work very closely with provinces and territories. We have a number of joint manag

Human Resources committee  Off the top of my head, one example is the age-friendly communities initiative that I spoke of earlier. We have an excellent working relationship with Quebec, which has really embraced that initiative. It's found in probably more communities there than anywhere else across the co

Human Resources committee  Sure. I can maybe partially answer and then perhaps my colleague, Mr. Perron, can talk about some of the future investments we're thinking about making in the area of services. Again, I want to make the distinction that at the Public Health Agency, we are trying to prevent peop

Human Resources committee  Yes, to the extent you can.

Human Resources committee  Sure. I think, based on the number of experts you've had before this committee, you've already figured out that in order to do something about poverty and to make a difference, we have to come at it from several sectors. As I mentioned in my remarks, it's not just about income.

Human Resources committee  I'm not sure that I made the link between social assistance.... Did I? I'm not 100% sure. Do you remember if you had a statistic on that?

Human Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to address this committee on behalf of the Public Health Agency. I'm pleased to spend this time speaking to you about healthy aging and more specifically the issues of inclusion and quality of life for seniors from a public heal

Human Resources committee  I'm not sure we've necessarily done the analysis of whether it's more difficult in a smaller or larger community. I'm going to check my stats. For example, about 800 communities are age-friendly in Quebec, 300 in Ontario, only 28 in Manitoba, so the numbers vary across the countr

Human Resources committee  We don't have any up north. We have one in New Brunswick, which I'm guessing is probably a smaller community. I can certainly report back to the committee with a little analysis of the size, whether there's an impact there.

Human Resources committee  Sure, if you want stats, I can go to my stat book here.

Human Resources committee  I'll give you some basic stats around population projections. In 2015, for the first time in Canadian history, the number of persons aged 65 years and older exceeded the number of children aged 0 to 14. I think this committee knows that. In terms of the proportion of Canadian sen

Human Resources committee  Yes. I want to check here because I don't want to give the wrong numbers. The prevalence of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias is increasing, it's 7.1% over the last...I don't have exactly since when, but the trend is going up.

Human Resources committee  Sure. I'll start with the basic issue around stigma. You'll never get to quality of life for someone with dementia unless you address the issue of stigma. People need to have an understanding of what it's like to have the disease. That's partly why we invest in the Dementia Frie