Marie-Danielle Smith, The Canadian Press Published Saturday, July 16, 2022 6:53 am EDT
Cathy Legere saw first-hand the conditions facing older long-term care residents and the intense pressure personal care staff were under in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The retired infection control nurse volunteered her services at the Orchard Villa home where her father-in-law Nick lived in April 2020 – and said she had witnessed a deeply “broken” system before she herself contracted the virus.
While self-isolating at home, she was horrified to learn that her father-in-law, Nick, had been left in a room for nearly 24 hours with the dead body of a resident he had watched slowly succumb to the disease over two days.
The horror stories that emerged from the long-term care setting during the early pandemic, particularly reported by Canadian military personnel who were drafted in to help, led the Liberal government to promise in its 2020 throne speech that it would work on Criminal Code amendments to “expressly penalizes those who neglect the elderly in their care.”
Nearly two years later, the government has not taken any serious steps.
That makes Legere, who is a party to a major class-action lawsuit against Ontario care homes, even more cynical about seeing any accountability: “Is this thing going to do anything, or is that just the Liberals saying ‘Oh , yeah, we’re going to do that, and everybody’s going to be in momentum again?”
Liberal Hedy Fry, the longest-serving female MP in the House of Commons, is trying to take matters into her own hands and propose changes that could form a roadmap for the government’s approach.
She introduced a private bill in late June, Bill C-295, which would amend section 215 of the Criminal Code to specifically criminalize owners and managers of long-term care homes for failing to provide the “necessaries of life” to vulnerable adults.
It would also give judges the ability to bar anyone convicted of or on probation for that crime from volunteering or working in a setting “that involves being responsible for or in a position of trust or authority over an adult who is vulnerable by reason of age, illness, mental disorder, disability or infirmity.”
Frye said her intent is to prevent a repeat of long-term care failures during the pandemic.
“Covid has exposed many vulnerabilities that we, smugly, as governments, as caregivers and as doctors, have always thought we were taking care of. He revealed that there were holes in the safety net,” she said in an interview. “The system was not up to the task.”
Fry said Justice Minister David Lametti had “no problem at all” with the bill and answered in the affirmative when asked if he believed the government was on board with the approach.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said only that officials were “exploring potential options for reforming the Criminal Code to better deal with abuse and neglect of adults”.
Experts say the bill is a step in the right direction, but risks becoming a public relations exercise and failing to achieve meaningful change if the government ends up supporting it in isolation.
Amendments to the Penal Code alone seem like a “very viable approach,” said Graham Webb, executive director of the Senior Advocacy Center and previously a longtime attorney.
“I really don’t know of any charges that have ever been filed for neglect of a long-term care resident,” Webb said. “I think it’s important that the criminal justice system is able to respond when we see such egregious cases of institutional elder abuse and neglect.”
He added that definitions around ‘managers’ and ‘owners’ of homes could be fine-tuned to ensure that those at the top, who control the money and resources available to staff, are held accountable for neglect, not individuals . line workers.
But Krista James, national director of the Canadian Center for Elder Law, said prosecutions under Section 215 are now rare and she is skeptical about the impact of amending it.
“Criminal law reform requires reform of the criminal law infrastructure to be effective,” she said, explaining that police and prosecutors would need to be trained and crimes and standards of evidence widely publicized for it to work. “Only if it was just about changing a law.”
Asked if she thought the bill could be a deterrent, James joked: “You hope that people providing long-term care will want to provide good care to vulnerable older people living in their facilities, whether they’ve gone to jail if they are I didn’t do it.”
Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition, said there have been “no consequences” for abuse and neglect that have been exposed during the pandemic, or for the unnecessary deaths of residents due to poor infection control and causes. other than COVID-19 such as dehydration and starvation.
While there is much to be done by provincial governments that oversee long-term care, Ottawa has a role to play in holding provinces accountable for better standards of care, Mehra said, by placing more conditions on federal health transfers.
That, and finally delivering on the promise of criminalizing bad actors.
“I think we need to search our consciences about whether the lives of older people are not worth a formal government bill,” she said, “and real change with teeth.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on July 16, 2022.
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