Status of Women committee  I'll go ahead, although Carole had her hand up. I think that passage of that could help, but like other legislation, it will only help if we have an implementation strategy. We have a lot of legislation on the human right to care, for instance, that we've adopted, but haven't re

Status of Women committee  I think our strategy has to begin by recognizing the difficulties of doing that work. We have a current project that is looking at the move into long-term care. We have interviewed so many women who have reached a breaking point in terms of trying to provide care for someone at h

Status of Women committee  I agree that public money should be going to public care and not to for-profit care, but I think we should also be clear that nothing in the Canada Health Act prohibits for-profit delivery. It only requires public administration by a not-for-profit agency. If we're looking to the

Status of Women committee  I want to say two things. One is that how much we spend, which I understood to be part of the question, is a matter of values, as the Romanow report made clear. We haven't sufficiently valued this labour force or those people who need this care. I think it's time we did value the

Status of Women committee  There are two kinds of unpaid care—I didn't get to that in my talk. One of them is the unpaid care by the people who are otherwise paid for the work. They do a lot of it. They work through lunch, they take home people's cloths to wash, they shop for them, they do all kinds of thi

Status of Women committee  There have been studies by the World Health Organization, the OECD and the ILO. Just a year ago, we were warned that we were going to face a terrible crisis in recruiting and retention in long-term care unless we did something about the entire range of working conditions, includi

Status of Women committee  Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here to talk about the long-term care labour force. Long-term care is primarily care for older women by women, many of whom are racialized and immigrant. These facts help explain why so little attention has been paid to this sector and so lit