editor’s letter
| Untangling the long-term care crisis
On a sunny fall afternoon, while walking in my neighbourhood, I heard what sounded like bigband music. Excited at the prospect of a live show, I headed toward the noise and found myself outside the Vermont Square long-term care home on Bathurst. The music turned out to be a recording, blaring out of a stereo system, but there was a jolly saxophone player slowly working his way up and down the sidewalk, wearing a sparkly dinner jacket and shiny, pointy shoes, playing “The Last Waltz” by Engelbert Humperdinck.
The musician, I learned, was a guy named Ivgeni Kriger. By day, he’s a nurse at Mount Sinai and CAMH. As a side hustle, he runs a company called Musical Retirement, through which he serenades the residents of long-term care facilities. His talented daughter Anat sometimes sings. Before the pandemic, he’d often do 1940s-nightclub-style concerts inside seniors’ residences across the GTA. Now he mostly plays from the sidewalk, and encourages residents to open their windows to hear the music.
When I spotted him that day, he didn’t seem to have much of an audience: a few residents sat outside clapping and a couple of staff members wearing scrubs came out to watch. Vermont Square was in the midst of one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the city, and its residents were largely on lockdown. Then I looked up at the building itself. People inside were peering out the windows, swaying to the music. Staff
members were raising their gloved hands in the air, smiling and dancing. The scene was so emotional—somehow, in the middle of a crisis of illness and isolation, joy was peeking out. I found a nearby patch of grass, sat down and had a little cry.
Years ago, when my kids attended a daycare in the neighbourhood, the daycare staff would take the children on occasional after-school field trips to Vermont Square. They’d bring artwork to brighten the walls and fill the common areas with the sounds of boisterous children. Now Vermont Square has a strict no-visitors policy. Last I checked, 38 residents and 21 staff members had been diagnosed with Covid. Eight people had died.
Nursing homes were by far the worsthit communities in the first wave, and this fall, it’s happening all over again. By the end of October, Vermont Square was one of 83 nursing homes in Ontario experiencing an outbreak. Why did Covid spread so quickly in long-term care facilities in the spring? And how did we find ourselves in the exact same spot seven months later? Jason McBride answers those questions, and more, in his excellent, sweeping and heartbreaking piece “Houses of Horror” (page 88). McBride deftly illustrates how our longterm care system became so threadbare and why it badly needs reform.
The nurses, doctors and PSWs who were dancing in the windows of Vermont Square that day are exactly the kinds of front-line workers Toronto Life is celebrating on our cover this month. In this annual issue of the magazine, in which we rank the most influential people in the city, the No. 1 slot belongs to all the TTC drivers and grocery store clerks and nurses and firefighters who take enormous personal risks every day to keep the city running. They don’t have the luxury of working from home but instead perform their jobs out in the world— not just to support their own families, but to help yours and mine. Could anyone else be considered more influential?