Thank you, and the Member is correct. He has heard about this many times before. This is in our original mandate, and I have been bringing it up time and time again.
This is separating people who are essentially out of the workforce, people who don't expect to go back into the workforce, from people who are, you know, in and out of the workforce. So income assistance has different types of clients. Some of those clients are able-body people who are in between jobs who have fallen on hard times and who just need some assistance, and they will be on income support for a short amount of time and then off income support. And others are people who we don't expect to get back into the workforce. They've aged out of the workforce. They have situations that prevent them from working and there's no need to treat those different groups of people alike. We expect that there would be, you know, less reporting requirements, different reporting requirements, and we would look at different -- different things that perhaps would be funded in different ways. So we really are looking at what are the needs of seniors and how do we better serve them through an income assistance program. You know, we don't expect them to have income from a job that they're going to have to report on a regular basis so why bother making them come in every month to report. So that's one example there.
We also have a number of programs tailored for seniors such as the senior citizens supplementary benefit, seniors home heating subsidy, and so on. And we're looking at ways to tie all of those in together. And what I would really like to do is, you know, create this stream and separate it from income assistance in the sense that, you know, it is there to assist people with their income but it's not what people might consider to be welfare, which is really the negative connotation that the income assistance program has. And we don't want seniors to feel like that. We don't want them to be discouraged from accessing this programming. So those are some of my current thoughts on it and progress is moving along nicely, and we fully expect this to be implemented April 2023. Thank you.