By Daniel Fontaine
What happens when you invite someone to your home and they don’t show up?
That’s precisely what happened earlier this year when long-term care homes across Canada opened their doors and asked MPs to pay them a visit during “#BecauseYouCare” week. When all the numbers were tallied up, less than nine per cent of our 335 federal politicians accepted our invitation to visit a care home and hear directly from seniors and their care providers regarding the challenges they face.
In a society that often marginalizes older adults, a lack of interest in visiting a care home should come as no surprise. However, in an era with an increasing level of political talk about supporting a “seniors agenda,” the low level of engagement on the front-line is met with disappointment by those receiving care as well as their families.
Had more MPs actually visited a care home, they could have heard first-hand regarding the complex challenges seniors and their care providers deal with each and every day. They would have discovered that many of our care homes are aging and in desperate need of upgrades and replacement.
These types of infrastructure investments are not for cosmetic purposes. Rather, they are desperately needed to ensure buildings are better designed to meet the increasingly complex needs of seniors who are living with dementia. The reality is many of the current care homes were built in a previous era where Alzheimer’s and dementia were treated as the exception, not the rule.
While there is lots of discussion regarding how the federal government is interested in building new and affordable seniors housing, if you are living in a long-term care home you are unable to directly access federal infrastructure funds. That’s because federal policy takes an antiquated view of care homes. They are not considered as a place where seniors live, but rather, are viewed as hospitals and medical facilities.
As such, federal policymakers consider it the responsibility of the provinces and territories to fund these long-term care home infrastructure projects using their limited health dollars. That stark reality means they are left to compete with more politically appealing projects such as the construction of specialty or acute care hospitals or diagnostic clinics.
If our MPs are truly interested in addressing the needs of a rapidly aging population, they will first need to revisit the exclusion of care homes from the federal infrastructure funds. By doing so, they will quickly resolve one of their longstanding problems, which is to get enough projects to the “shovel-ready” stage. That’s because there are literally hundreds of care homes in towns and cities across Canada that are ready to get moving with a rebuild or new construction.
Had more MPs taken the time to visit a local care home, they would have also learned first-hand the stress our care staff are facing in 2019. An ever-increasing shortage of trained workers across the country is leading to a much higher level of stress and burnout as well as workplace injuries.
The federal government once again missed an opportunity to address a key issue facing seniors. At the end of February, the government announced an overhaul to the Foreign Caregiver System by introducing two new pilot programs: 1) The Home Child Care Provider Pilot; and 2) The Home Support Worker Pilot.
Among other changes, the new pilots allow foreign caregivers to be assessed for permanent residency criteria before they start work in Canada and bring their family with them through open work permits for spouses and study permits for children. Foreign caregivers are an important part of the backbone of our seniors’ care system and CALTC is pleased they and their families will be provided with an easier pathway to permanent residency.
While home care is and continues to be a critical component of seniors’ care, long-term care continues to be of critical importance to tens of thousands of Canadian seniors and their families each year.
That’s why it came as a surprise to so many people that federal government changes to the Home Support Worker Pilot program excluded every single senior living in a long-term care setting. These seniors and their families are now left to hope that addressing the shortage of care aides will be included in the platforms of political parties in the upcoming federal election this fall.
Later this year, a new crop of MPs will be heading to Parliament. Let’s hope they come with a fresh set of ideas and a keen interest in learning more about the seniors who helped to build this country. Let’s also hope that more than nine per cent of them deem it worthwhile to time to visit a care home in their community.
This op-ed was originally published in Ottawa Citizen.
