Nursing home tragedies demand a full probe

Ontario’s nursing home system is broken and only a full-scale public inquiry will tell us how to fix it.

Whatever else the COVID-19 pandemic has done, it has also torn back a grubby curtain and exposed the deplorable conditions that have been the accepted norm in far too many long-term care facilities, not just in this province but across Canada.

And it has made an incontrovertible case for an overhaul of the status quo.

From the moment this highly infectious disease entered Canada this winter, our health authorities and political leaders knew the deadly toll it could exact. Our hospitals braced for a massive influx of seriously ill patients. The public was told to take unprecedented precautions even as governments locked-down the entire nation.

But something glaringly obvious passed under the radar screen. Our most frail and ailing seniors were left vulnerable even though we always knew they were most at risk. As a result, although the percentage of Canadians living in long-term care facilities is small, a full 81 per cent of the nation’s COVID-19 related deaths have occurred within their walls.

We believe — and the evidence to date suggests this is so — that this carnage is at least partly the product of systemic issues and failings that could be revealed through a public inquiry.

It is heartening to know Premier Doug Ford is committed to an official review of the province’s nursing home system.

But he needs to acknowledge all reviews are not created equal. The probe into the province’s longterm care homes cannot be part of a broader review of government services, as Ford suggested it might. Nor should this be something a handful of public health officials and MPPs toss around behind closed doors.

It is imperative that this inquiry be public. This means broad, public involvement that includes the providers of long-term care, the people who work in the system, experts on aging as well as the federal government, which helps fund the homes.

It also means that the workings of this inquiry, its hearings and most certainly its findings and recommendations, must be open to public scrutiny.

The inquiry must be independent of the government, too. The Progressive Conservative government led by Mike Harris enacted profound changes to long-term care in 1995 that accelerated the shift to private-sector dominance of the system. If those changes contributed to today’s failings, Ontarians need to know, even if it embarrasses Ford’s Tories. Criticism must not be curtailed to protect partisan interests.

And that leads us to what must be a major focus of this inquiry; the role of the private sector in Ontario nursing homes. Many if not most of the deadliest outbreaks of COVID-19 have occurred in privatelyowned, for-profit facilities.

There is a compelling argument that at least in some cases private operators have put profit ahead of quality health care. Some homes have crammed four residents into one small room. It can’t be a surprise, then, that scores of residents have died in a single facility where this is the norm.

While the Canadian Labour Congress and others are demanding an end to privately-owned long-term care homes, it is premature to make such a profound and, to taxpayers, costly change. But hold the inquiry, which should begin as soon as the pandemic is brought under control. And be guided by it.

In a country as affluent as Canada and where compassionate, high quality health care is deemed a right of citizenship, the system we have today is not just shameful, it is intolerable.