SENIORS NEED TIME
Organizations representing Montreal’s elderly say consultations for the city’s new action plan should be extended because they were poorly advertised, take place in the middle of winter and had documentation only in French.
While the city has now translated online documents on its seniors’ action plan, elders and organizations representing them say they need more time to participate meaningfully in consultations.
“If you really want seniors’ participation, give them some more time,” said Madhu Nambiar, 88, a member of the community group Respecting Elders: Communities against Abuse (RECAA).
“We are feeling we need a little more time to put our thinking caps on,” said Nambiar, a retired social worker.
She also said the consultations — currently consisting of five sessions, starting Wednesday at the Centre communautaire interg énérationel in Outremont and ending Feb. 28 at the St-Léonard library — “should be extended because it’s been such a harsh winter.”
RECAA is among a range of community groups that will join forces Monday at a press conference at the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Community Council to demand that the consultations on how to make Montreal more “age friendly” be extended into the spring.
If the consultations wrap up by the end of February as announced, many seniors won’t have the chance to take part, including those who suffer from mobility problems and are afraid to go out in bad weather, they say.
Anne Caines, 75, a volunteer coordinator at RECAA, said the election of Mayor Valérie Plante, who promised during the campaign to consult and empower citizens, raised hopes that seniors’ concerns would finally be heard.
But the fact that the online documents on the consultation were originally only in French, and that the meetings were originally scheduled in mostly Frenchspeaking neighbourhoods, meant that anglophone and minority seniors were excluded, she said.
“Do I really believe we’re going to have an age-friendly city if this is how we start?” she said.
Now that the city has showed willingness to reach out to anglophones and other cultural communities, it should also extend the time frame, she said.
On Thursday, Rosanne Filato, the city’s executive-committee member in charge of social and community development, had the website and online survey for the action plan translated into English.
And at the beginning of last week, the city added a meeting in English at the Cummings Centre in Côte-des-Neiges.
But Kim Sawchuk, a professor of communication studies at Concordia University and director of the research project Ageing, Communication, Technologies (ACT), said that while the city has made an effort to be more inclusive, the process is still too rushed.
It was Sawchuk and Shannon Hebblethwaite, director of engAGE: Concordia’s Centre for Research on Aging, who first raised concerns about the exclusion of many seniors in a letter to Plante two weeks ago.
In an interview on Sunday, Sawchuk noted that the city has not advertised the consultation on radio, TV or in newspapers. Instead, it’s relying on already overworked and underfunded community organizations to get the message out, she said.
While translating much of the content on the website is a step forward, she pointed out that many seniors lack access to computers or the internet.
Two-thirds of seniors have mobility issues and many have impaired vision or are hard of hearing, she noted.
While the city announced eight public meetings on the new animal-control bylaw on Friday, it’s not fulfilling its duty to ensure that all seniors who want to be heard can do so, Sawchuk said.
“It sends the message that when you’re old, you do not matter,” she said.