Finance committee  I would just say that we've done averaging for families who are bringing up young children, and it should be possible to do the same for individuals who take time off to take care of parents who can't get into long-term care facilities. If it's going to take a year and they have to take time off work to do that, they should be able to have this averaging so that eventually the CPP amount they receive is increased because they got rid of that year or two in which they had no income or had a lower income.

Finance committee  Create a separate program. Move the funding that was allotted to the compassionate care program into a separate program so that individuals who might not be eligible for EI could participate in that program.

Finance committee  There are two aspects, in that we fund people to take care of individuals at the beginning of life, but we don't fund them to take care of people at the end of life. We're saying the compassionate care program is only eight weeks long, and it's not nearly long enough.

Finance committee  Create a separate program in much the same way that the European governments have done. You have to allow for the fact that a large number of individuals who are taking care of people at the end of life are either working part-time or on contract, or they're self-employed. So they don't have the ability to draw from that fund, yet they're suffering.