Don't reward `bad actors' with more long-term care beds, critics tell province

Opposition politicians and advocates say the province should not be rewarding long-term care homes that had poor track records during the pandemic by giving them funding for new beds and buildings.

The province announced 29 new long-term care projects last week, which will lead to 3,000 new and upgraded long-term care spaces across Ontario.

The homes that will be expanded or rebuilt include Ottawa's Carlingview Manor, where 60 residents have died during the pandemic, and Pickering's Orchard Villa, where 78 residents died.

The province announced plans to replace Carlingview Manor with a new 320-space home in Orléans, 17 more spaces than at its current location on Carling Avenue, and 256 new spaces at a new Schlegel Villages home at the Riverside hospital site of The Ottawa Hospital.

The province also announced plans to modernize and build up to 11,000 spaces.

The new and modernized longterm care spaces are long-awaited and desperately needed in Ontario, but critics say they should not be run by private companies that oversaw devastating outbreaks and large death tolls during the pandemic.

“We have to ask the government the question, `Why did it not call for the expansion of public and non-profit ownership of these spaces?'” Ottawa Centre NDP MPP Joel Harden said. “Why are we giving 17 beds to Carlingview Manor, a place where 60 people died over a matter of months in the summer?”

Harden said the move was especially hard to understand during the pandemic.

“I don't understand why, after what we have seen with COVID, the Ford government wants to involve for-profit companies in administering desperately needed space.”

The Ontario NDP is calling for an end to private ownership of longterm care homes in the province.

Family caregiver advocate Vivian Stamatopoulos of Ontario Tech University echoed concerns about homes that had been “bad actors” during the pandemic receiving funding for more beds.

“This government has demonstrated time and time again that it is not the interests of our seniors in care which they seek to protect, but that of the industry.”

Carlingview Manor was among the worst-hit homes during the pandemic, yet they were “never held accountable in any demonstrable way,” Stamatopoulos said.

Orchard Villa in Pickering, one of the homes to which the military was called in to help out, was awarded 87 new beds.

“Seventy-eight long-term care residents lost their lives at Orchard Villa. It is beyond the pale that they are being awarded new beds,” Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca said in a statement.

Ottawa's Grace Welch, a member of the Champlain Region Family Council Network, said the new beds were long overdue.

“I think we are glad to see some progress on homes that have been in the works for some time.”

She also noted that Schlegel homes were leaders in “person-centred care” and said building a home as part of a complex at Riverside hospital was “very positive.”

She noted there was a growing push to end private homes, but said the issue would take a while to sort out.

“We need these homes now.” Researchers found that crowding was a major contributing factor to whether long-term care homes in Ontario had large, deadly outbreaks during the pandemic.