There's no doubt that the investment in smart family policy to promote a healthier population isn't going to yield savings in the health care setting for young kids for 10 or 15 years. It is a medium-term investment.
That's the issue about health promotion all along. At some point we need to start.
We've been looking at a range of short-term issues that Canadians are paying for in the absence of having this new deal for families. The business community actually happens to be one of the biggest payers for the status quo. What I mean by that is when generation squeeze comes to work, they bring their time, service, and income squeeze with them, and that means a number of things. First off, they're more likely to be absent in any given year from the firm, on a given day. And who pays for that? Our employers.
That costs the business community about $2 billion a year. Then, thousands upon thousands of employees, more often than not women, say it's just too difficult to balance the caregiving at home and the responsibilities on the job. So they say “Forget it, I'm going to leave the firm for an indefinite period”, and then firms have to pay about another $1.5 billion to $2 billion to go out and recruit, retrain, and wait for the productivity of a new person to get up to the place where it was for the person being replaced.
Then, because people are squeezed, they're more likely to have greater work-life conflict, which leads to more stress, and then adults are going to the medical care system now for drugs, or to our physiotherapists, etc., more regularly. Who pays for a large part of that? Our employers, through our benefit plans.
In combination with the chief financial officer at Sierra Systems and two of his chartered accountants, my team at UBC has estimated that the business community right now is paying over $4 billion a year for the squeeze on the generation raising young kids. We can get short-term returns, and this is just the business community, by investing in a new deal. Then there are the returns coming back in some ways to government through better use of education dollars, less on crime, less on poverty reduction, because these policies will actually eliminate poverty for kids under age six, even though it doesn't do anything through welfare.