Fixing our nursing homes requires the right lead

Our long-term-care homes have become short-term death zones.

Now, after all the hand-wringing and finger-pointing, what are we going to do about it — not just say about it, nor complain about it — but do about it?

This week, Premier Doug Ford announced an “independent commission” to grapple with the problem, details to follow. But it won’t get to work until September, more than three months away, despite the urgency.

Predictably, the NDP opposition pounced on what Ford announced, dismissing the commission while insisting on a formal, quasi-judicial inquiry. With all the bells and whistles and delays that come with it.

This debate — over how to deliberate on nursing homes — is taking us down a rabbit hole. The arguments and counterarguments are as intellectually sterile as nursing homes are infectious.

The big question facing this province in a pandemic is not the difference between an inquiry versus a commission, which partisans and parliamentarians can debate to death while more people die. What’s truly urgent is the decision about how to deal with nursing homes that are death traps.

The challenge isn’t finding the perfect framework. It’s finding the right person, of unimpeachable probity, to head the probe while rising above partisan lines.

Someone like Bob Rae, the former NDP premier who later served as interim Liberal leader federally and is strongly respected by many Ontario Tories. Rae has headed several other key probes (or helped set them up) — on issues ranging from the Air India bombing to the genocide against the Rohingya and a report on postsecondary education.

Or Frances Lankin, a former NDP cabinet minister, now a non-partisan senator, who co-chaired a landmark inquiry for the last Liberal government on welfare reform. Or Gary Doer, the former NDP premier of Manitoba entrusted by ex-PM Stephen Harper to be Canada’s envoy in Washington. Or Dwight Duncan, the former Liberal finance minister who launched a major review of the province’s fiscal sustainability headed by economist Don Drummond.

Can the current premier rise to the challenge of being fairminded in making this crucial appointment? Upon taking power, Ford fell undeniably short of that standard, shamelessly politicizing and weaponizing an outside investigation into the province’s finances, making wildly unsubstantiated allegations that could have come straight out of Donald Trump’s latest “Obamagate” playbook.

In mid-pandemic, the premier has undeniably shown far greater political acuity and humility. A show of good faith and fairness by Ford matters more than the format.

Formal public inquiries can take forever going over old ground, when there’s no time to lose. They typically degenerate into a field day for “stakeholders” who lawyer up as rival groups — patient advocates, union leaders and industry lobbyists — cross-examine one another in an adversarial, ideological process that is wide-ranging but unwieldy.

A judicial inquiry rarely meets its deadline. While its consultations are public, its deliberations are private, yielding a massive data dump that lands with a thump that typically “gathers dust on a shelf,” as the unfortunate cliché reminds us.

The alternative of an independent commission proposed by Ford also has its share of shortcomings. While supposedly operating at arm’s length, the invisible hand of government often intrudes.

But that doesn’t preclude the party in power from picking the right people to speak truth to power, who can then persuade the government to do the right thing. The littleknown advantage of an “independent commission” — as opposed to a judicial inquiry — is that it typically keeps the government updated as to its inclinations and conclusions before any final report comes out.

While that might suggest the commission is co-opted, the reverse is often true — the government of the day is slowly conditioned to accept the inevitable and buy into it. That’s also the advantage of choosing a savvy ex-politician to head the probe, rather than a judge with no experience in the exigencies of government, or the complexities of summoning political will.

Long-term care, like health care, is about choices — striking a balance between politics and economics, between spending and taxing, between subsidizing seniors in nursing homes versus defraying tuition for young people on campus. Ideology aside, nationalizing for-profit homes won’t magically make funding shortfalls disappear, nor eliminate the shocking mortality rates in some not-for-profit and faithbased homes.

The question is not simply who owns the homes. We must all take ownership of the problems — not necessarily literally, or financially, but politically — for the truth is that successive governments elected by this province’s voters downgraded minimal inspections and minimum staffing levels for all homes, whether profit-driven or faith-driven.

What matters more than the template of the investigation is the temperament of the investigator. He or she must not only be independent, but nimble, not merely fast, but furious.

We already know the problems of the past. We desperately need the solutions — and decisions — for the future.