Question Period Note: Dementia

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• Dementia is a set of symptoms affecting brain function. It is often characterized by changes in memory, mood, judgement and other cognitive functions. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form. In 2017–2018, almost 452,000 Canadians aged 65 and older were living with diagnosed dementia. This number is expected to increase with Canada’s growing and aging population.
• In 2019, our government released Canada’s first national dementia strategy. We report to Parliament annually on the strategy, and the third annual report was tabled on January 19, 2022. Tabling of the 2022 report is expected in the coming weeks.
• Through Budget 2022, an additional $50 million is being invested to advance efforts in the areas of dementia and brain health.
• New investments include $20 million for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to support research to learn more about dementia and brain health, and $30 million for the Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation to accelerate innovations in brain health and aging.
• These most recent investments build on earlier funding including over $227 million invested between 2017 and 2022 to advance research on dementia, and over $70 million since 2018 to support dementia awareness raising, surveillance, guidance on diagnosis and treatment, and community-based projects.

Dementia Strategy
On June 22, 2017, the National Strategy for Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias Act came into force and provided for the development and implementation of a national dementia strategy. A Dementia Strategy for Canada: Together We Aspire was released in June 2019, and has three national objectives: prevent dementia; advance therapies and find a cure; and improve the quality of life of people living with dementia and their caregivers. Legislation requires an annual report to Parliament, and the third annual report was tabled on January 19, 2022. Tabling of the 2022 report is expected in the coming weeks.

Federal Investments
Budget 2022 announced new investments of $50 million to support dementia and brain health-related research, further contributing to the implementation of the national dementia strategy.

Budget 2019 announced $50 million over 5 years, starting in 2019-2020, to support other key elements of the strategy’s implementation, including a national public education campaign, targeted awareness raising projects, dementia guidance, and enhanced dementia surveillance. The first phase of the national public education campaign took place in early 2022, and focused on reducing stigma, along with general awareness about dementia. The second phase of the campaign will begin in early 2023 and continue into 2024, and will focus primarily on risk reduction awareness, including healthy lifestyle actions that Canadians can take to help reduce the risk of dementia. The Dementia Strategic Fund (DSF) has funded fifteen awareness-raising projects to date.
Budget 2018 allocated ongoing annual funding of $4 million for the Dementia Community Investment (DCI) to support community-based projects that aim to improve the health and wellbeing of people living with dementia and family/friend caregivers, and increase knowledge about dementia and related risk and protective factors. Funded projects undertake intervention research to evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions and the context in which they work best. The DCI has launched 22 projects to date, including the “Canadian Dementia Learning and Resource Network” which acts as a knowledge hub to facilitate learning, collaboration and amplification of project findings and successes.
Other federal investments are supporting improvements in health care relevant to dementia. Budget 2021 announced $3 billion over five years, starting in 2022-2023, for Health Canada to support provinces and territories in ensuring standards for long-term care are applied. The government is also providing $6 billion over ten years, starting in 2017-2018, directly to provinces and territories to better support home and community care services, including palliative care.
Dementia Research
Budget 2022 provided $20 million over five years, starting in 2022-23, for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to ramp up efforts to learn more about dementia and brain health, to improve treatment and outcomes for persons living with dementia, and to evaluate and address mental health consequences for caregivers and different models of care.

This investment will build upon the research that the Government of Canada, through CIHR, has already supported across the country to delay the clinical progression of symptoms of dementia, and improve the quality of life of people living with dementia and their caregivers. Between 2017-2018 and 2021-2022, CIHR invested over $227 million in dementia research. This includes through the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging, which is Canada’s research hub on neurodegenerative diseases that affect cognition in aging, including Alzheimer’s disease, and was renewed in 2019 for five years with $31.6 million in federal funding and an additional $14 million from partners.

Budget 2022 also provided $30 million over three years, starting in 2022-2023, for the Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation (CABHI) to help accelerate innovations in brain health and aging. CABHI was established in 2015 and brings together health care, science, industry, not-for-profit and government partners. PHAC provided an initial investment of $42 million over five years to launch CABHI in 2015. Subsequently, PHAC (with funding support from Health Canada) provided bridge funding of $2 million in 2020-2021 to maintain operations and core staff after the initial five years of funding ended on March 31, 2020.

Dementia Surveillance
The Enhanced Dementia Surveillance Initiative (EDSI) funds projects that support the surveillance and data pillar of the national dementia strategy. Ten projects were put into place to better understand how dementia affects Canadians. This includes projects, led by academic and federal partners, exploring innovative ways to address surveillance data gaps related to: the causes, progression stages and impacts of dementia; the associated sociodemographic, risk and protective factors; and caregivers. In addition, several provinces, in collaboration with PHAC, are implementing projects to enhance surveillance of dementia through the Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System. These projects are building on PHAC's ongoing work with all provinces and territories through this system to provide updated data on the prevalence, incidence and all-cause mortality of Canadians with dementia by age group, sex, province and territory over time. A new webpage was created on Canada.ca to showcase the EDSI, and to promote the projects being undertaken to inform public health actions with new surveillance data on dementia.

International
Internationally, Canada endorsed the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Action Plan on a Public Health Response to Dementia (2017-2025). The WHO’s Global Dementia Observatory (2017), supported by the Government of Canada, monitors progress on the Global action plan and is actively collecting data on 35 key dementia indicators. PHAC also represents Canada on the World Dementia Council, which is an international charity that identifies and pursues opportunities for global collaboration on dementia.

• In June 2019, A Dementia Strategy for Canada: Together We Aspire was released. Federal investments in dementia research, surveillance, awareness initiatives, community-based projects, and guidance are supporting the implementation of the strategy. The 2021 annual report to Parliament on the strategy was tabled on January 19, 2022.