City clearly can’t handle long-term care homes

Perhaps Ottawa should let business take over homes

Last week’s meeting of the city’s social services committee should have been an accountability session for city managers who have done such a poor job running long-term care homes that they had to be ordered by the province to do better. Instead, it turned into a group hug with the councillors who are supposedly there to make sure the city-run homes meet standards.

In a fine example of misplaced empathy, committee chair Diane Deans said she understood that the last few months have been difficult for city staff. No wonder, with reports of abuse of residents and more than 200 incidents of non-compliance with provincial rules over the last five years. That must be tough for staff, but what about the elderly people who live in these city homes? Shouldn’t they be the main concern?

It was particularly rich that both councillors and staff were content to blame their own deficiencies on a shortage of provincial funding. Yes, the province is miserly when it doles out dollars for the elderly, but money is not the problem here. It’s management.

Privately owned long-term care homes are able to make a profit based on what the provincial government gives them and the fees paid by the residents themselves. The city gets the same level of provincial and resident money, but supplements it with just over $12 million in local property tax dollars. That’s a little more than $17,000 a year per long-term care resident.

Perhaps they don’t know that subsidizing this provincial service is not really their job.

Surely, all that extra money should be buying the best-quality care, but judging by the province’s assessment of the city’s work, it’s not.

So where does the money go? What a good question for councillors to have asked, but they didn’t. Perhaps they don’t know that subsidizing this provincial service is not really their job. That’s understandable when the committee chair didn’t know the difference between a retirement home and a long-term care home. Still, these are the people who are supposed to have oversight of the $63.6 million long-term care home budget.

One might have hoped that the extra cost was the result of the city delivering more hours of personal support worker care than the average in the sector. Sadly not. The extra cost is more likely attributable to higher wages, but the city couldn’t say for sure.

The city’s 2017 budget shows that the province contributed an additional $670,000 to the city long-term care operation this year, but salaries and benefits went up by $1.4 million, more than twice the provincial increase. That would seem to be a problem. The solution is to take more money from local taxpayers every year. This year, the subsidy went up by a little over $1 million.

If the city could claim that its long-term care services were vastly superior to those of the private and non-profit organizations that run the rest of Ottawa’s long-term care homes, an argument might be made that the extra spending was justified. While staff last week described a program that is ideal in theory, the results fall short.

The city could just keep doing a bad-tomediocre job year after year, redirecting scarce property tax dollars to this provincial service. Or, councillors could ask themselves why we own four long-term care centres. Provincial law says a city must own one, not four. If city staff can’t do a good job of running these homes, why not sell them to someone who can? There are lots of other operators out there.

City politicians constantly remind us that property tax dollars are in short supply. That’s true, so why use them to subsidize something the city doesn’t have to do and isn’t very good at?