QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Jobs and Families
National Caregiving Strategy
December 9, 2025
Thank you, minister, for joining us and for all the work you do.
Budget 2024 as well as the Liberal platform for Election 2025 committed to the development of a national caregiving strategy. The federal government also committed to converting the largely unused non-refundable Canada caregiver credit into a refundable credit in 2021.
These commitments were absent from Budget 2025 despite an urgent need for action.
The financial, social and emotional tolls borne by one in four Canadians who are caregivers have cost Canada some $1.5 billion each year in lost productivity. And 80% of paid care providers have considered leaving the sector due to low wages and poor working and living conditions.
Could you please provide an update on the status of the work on the national caregiving strategy and a specific timeline for the completion of this work?
Thank you very much.
I will say it was a very moving moment to stand with the members of SEIU Healthcare, one of the largest unions that organized personal support workers twice in the last several months. Once was on Labour Day when many people think workers are taking the day off to march — and many are — but personal support workers don’t get that day off. They are there caring for our elders and people who need 24-hour care. On that day, we announced the launch of a retirement savings plan that SEIU Healthcare will coordinate with their members. It is a $25‑million investment that the union will utilize to help personal support workers save for their retirement, which is something that many people had been advocating for a very long time to see.
The second time I stood with SEIU Healthcare was for an announcement around the budget where we announced a tax credit for personal support workers, again advocated by SEIU Healthcare which very successfully made the argument that these low-wage earners are really the backbone of our Canadian economy. It’s why I’ve decided to strike a care sector alliance — because I believe Canada deserves more than a strategy. I do think the strategy is important, and we will do that work together, but I would also like to bring together all of the players to talk about how we stabilize the sector on which all of us rely and on which all of us will rely even more as we age. Personal support workers and people who provide care to children are truly the backbone of our —
Thank you, Madam Minister.
In the absence of measures to ensure adequate wages for paid care providers and supports for those unable to balance care work with paid employment, what new approaches, including income supports, will you be exploring in order to ensure that Canadians whom we rely upon to carry out unpaid and underpaid care work are not abandoned to poverty and — as we saw horrifically during the pandemic, in particular — to homelessness?
Thank you very much for that question. That is part of the mandate that I hope the care sector alliance will take on. I believe we have chronically underpaid people who provide care in Canadian society. The senator and I have spoken often about this. Often, the most vulnerable workers in our society are the people who provide care to our loved ones and to ourselves as we get older and older. That is why I’ve added a sectoral alliance, which is the care economy, to ensure we bring partners together.
Finally, I’ll say it’s hard to stabilize industries without providing adequate care. Good employers know this; they pay their employees decent wages. The challenge is that the sector is deeply underfunded.
