Unregulated Abandonment of the Elderly

"I think the society failed."
"[In Quebec, per capita, there are three times greater numbers of seniors in long-term care homes] than anywhere else in the world, [underfunded, understaffed, the workers underpaid]."
"We will still give ourselves a few days to take a decision on retail business. A crucial element that would help us to reopen is for the majority of people to wear a mask in public.."
"What I want to ask them [Montreal's major health care centres] about is why there has been so many deaths ... why there have been so many infections."
Quebec Premier Francois Legault

North Vancouver’s Lynn Valley Care Centre where Canada’s first known COVID-19 death occurred on 

March 8.   Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters/File

"[The long-term care homes suggest that nurses and other medical staff treating COVID-19 patients in LTC homes represent their own narrow, personal interests, while the privately owned LTC homes represent broad, community-based interests."
"I can imagine that the irony of that submission is not lost on the [nurses]. One need only read the affidavits of the individual nurses in this Application record to understand that they spend their working days, in particular during the current emergency situation, sacrificing their personal interests to those of the people under their care."
"And given the nature of the pandemic, they do this not only for the immediate benefit of their patients but for the benefit of society at large."
"To suggest that their quest for the masks, protective gear, and cohorting that they view as crucial to the lives and health of themselves and their patients represents a narrow, private interest seems to sorely miss the mark."
Judge Ed Morgan, Ontario Superior Court

Crosses have been laid out for the 50 residents who have lost their lives due to COVID-19 at Camilla Care Community, a long-term care home in Mississauga, Ont. (Mark Bochsler/CBC)

The crisis in long-term care homes for the elderly and the health-impaired in Canada echoes in part what has been seen all over the world. Societies everywhere in this brave new world of 'nuclear families' who live apart from extended family members and where both parents in the family work, sending children out to day-care, see such families in no position to assume the traditional role of care for elderly parents, grandparents to their own children. The solution has been generally accepted in Western societies not only to farm out children, but grandparents as well.

Care of the elderly who require special medical attention, and constant daily assistance in performing personal ease-of-living and hygiene rituals is now beyond the capacity of most nuclear families to contemplate; everyone is too busy, too involved in the outside world of working careers. Occasional visits to these abandoned seniors suffice now to demonstrate filial love and attention, and so social, emotional and family duties are seen to have been accomplished.

The vulnerable elderly are left in the care of mostly untrained, low-paid staff that do their best to provide empathetic support and assistance where needed, in dressing, hygiene, feeding, aiding in mobility for the elderly, warehoused along with others just like themselves in confined areas, often sharing bedrooms and washroom facilities with strangers, eating communally, sharing communal entertainment and when infectious diseases like COVID-19 strike, sitting ducks for highly communicable diseases.

A nurse wearing personal protective equipment looks out of a window at a long-term care home in Toronto. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

Little wonder that of Canada's 4,000 death toll, fully 80 percent are represented by deaths that have occurred in long-term care homes. Not only have the elderly fallen victim to the illness, so have their caretakers and minders, and as the elderly die, so do some of the staff of the homes. Necessitating an emergency call-up of Canadian Forces troops to give aid and assistance to those staff remaining in numbers inadequate to providing full care to LTC home inmates. The result being that now some members of the Armed Services giving aid have themselves contracted COVID.

On March 8, a man in his 80s died at the Lynn Valley Care Centre in North Vancouver which became for a short period of time the focus of public concern. And then speedily additional points of focus emerged, Pinecrest Nursing Home in Bobcaygeon, Ontario, Residence Herron in Dorval, Quebec, in an unfolding countrywide felling of seniors-home outbreaks overrun by infections, the elderly dying sometimes faster than their corpses could be moved out.

Roughly four thousand deaths,of which over four out of five, have occurred at seniors' long-term care homes, including staff. That's a massive over-representation of the elderly residents of long-term care homes. A reality that no one really anticipated, but which makes for just another page in a chapter of neglect. It made sense that the most vulnerable in age and health would be targets for a highly infectious virus communicable wherever people tend to congregate and physical proximity is unavoidable.

A Canadian soldier aids a resident at the Vigi Queen Elizabeth care centre in Montreal. Genevieve Beaulieu/Canadian Armed Forces/AFP via Getty Images

It was reported this week that the Vigi Mont-Royal home in Montreal was rife with COVID; every resident and 148 workers had all tested positive for the virus, attributable to a faulty ventilation system that required repair and cleaning. In a facility where isolation is next to impossible, a reflection of the conditions in all of these long-term care facilities. A long-term care home in Niagara Falls is facing a class-action lawsuit over how it handled an outbreak that saw the deaths of 18 residents.

Claims that it failed to train staff and allowed them to move between patient rooms wearing the same protective gowns front and center. A very similar dispute respecting registered nurses at four privately owned long-term care homes in Ontario has been brought to court. The nurses claim management failed to provide personal protective equipment and to launch pandemic plans already in existence. The cause of widepspread exposure of uninfected people to symptomatic patients not yet tested.

A union grievance was filed, but anticipating a lengthy wait for the situation to resolve, the Ontario Nurses Association requested an "unusual" form of urgent action from the Ontario Superior Court, Justice Ed Morgan presiding. Judge Morgan granted the nurses' request, ordering the homes -- which had argued that the balance of convenience should favour their interests -- to obey a provincial government directive on providing personal protective equipment to the nurses.