The (same old) stories behind this section

The special section you’re holding right now is an unusual one, and as such deserves a short background on how it came together, plus a short guide on how to use it.

Recently some Star journalists were talking (again) about the crisis in long-term care. And we realized (again) that we could have had pretty much the same conversation five years ago. Or 10. Or 20. And we realized (again) that journalists at the Star had in fact had that conversation over and over during those two decades.

We and journalists before us were reporting the stories. We and journalists before us were exposing the problem. But who was doing the fixing?

From there, this special section was born. We reached into our archives and, from the scores of stories on issues in long-term care in the past 20 years, pulled seven of the most harrowing, the most telling, the most compelling. We’ve reprinted them here in their entirety, and they remain as disturbing, shocking and illuminating today as they were then. But we’ve added new reporting. For each story, a little insight into what was happening when we wrote it in an introduction, and an update showing what little has been done since we published it. We reached out to the government ministers who were in charge at the time for their responses today on the inaction.

By showing all this, we want to highlight not just the problems, but the pattern of inaction.

And we want to break it.

We don’t want the journalists of tomorrow having that same conversation. We don’t want residents and their families living those stories.

We don’t want the stories of the last 20 years to be the story of the next 20.

Act now.