In November 2023, hundreds of care providers, academics, physicians, non-profit leaders, patients’ rights groups, union members, and members of Parliament gathered in Ottawa for the National Caregiving Summit.
It was the first summit that brought together carers from the illness, disability, and aging spaces, and pulling it off was a big lift for the fledgling Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence (CCCE), a program of the Azrieli Foundation founded to drive a care agenda across the country. “We were quite siloed in various parts of this space,” says Liv Mendelsohn, executive director of the CCCE. “[But during the summit] everyone was in the same place listening to really powerful stories about caregiving across the lifespan.”
It was in that affirming space that the need for and potential impact of a national caregiving strategy sharpened. “I think we convinced everyone in the room that there’s something to the soup that we’re making here,” Mendelsohn says.