Don’t expect quick fix to long-term care
Based on the recent past, the tears provincial and federal leaders shed over the failings of long-term care in Canada tend to dry up fast.
If only for that reason, waiting for one or more post-pandemic inquiries to come up with advice as to how to address the oft-documented problems that plague the system may be the last thing that’s needed.
If one could draw a straight — and short — line between the findings of an independent inquiry and government action, many of the serious flaws the armed forces have identified in the long-term-care institutions they have been posted to this spring would have been fixed before COVID-19 struck their residents.
By the same token before advocating for a royal or a provincial commission to look into the handling of the pandemic, it would be worth noting that the findings that resulted from a similar exercise after the 2003 SARS outbreak ended up gathering dust on government shelves.
(For a sense of the time frame involved in conducting government-sponsored inquiries, the Ontario commission that looked into SARS was created in June 2003 and its final report was released three-anda-half years later.)
It is not to diminish the work of past commissions of inquiry to find that one of their collateral results has often been to buy governments enough time for a challenging issue or an overly ambitious election promise to fall off the public radar.
Just this week, the federal government announced it was delaying the release of a national action plan on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls indefinitely.
The government has not sat idle since the MMIWG inquiry reported last year. On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced additional pandemic-related funding for Canada’s Indigenous communities including $44 million over five years to build 12 new shelters for women and girls fleeing violence.
But Ottawa has yet to come up with a comprehensive road map to implement the report’s recommendations.
Of course, the undelivered action plan is only the latest agenda item to be pushed off by the pandemic.
Court-ordered amendments to Canada’s medically assisted death law; a decision on whether Chinese telecom giant Huawei should be allowed to participate in the development of Canada’s 5G network and a provincial challenge of the federal carbon tax in the Supreme Court have all been punted forward.
But in the case of MMIWG, it is fair to ask whether an unprecedented window for meaningful action has not been at least partly squandered.
It will be a year in June since the 1,200-page report and its 231 “calls for justice” was made public. Its impact has inevitably faded.
Even absent a pandemic, time would have depleted the momentum that attended the commission hearings and its hard-hitting findings. The COVID-19 crisis has only accelerated that process.
The release of the inquiry findings last June came four years after Justin Trudeau arrived in power bearing the promise of a national inquiry.
Looking at where Canada was in late 2015 versus where it is now, one can’t help but wonder whether more measurable progress might have been achieved had the Liberals hit the ground running upon their arrival in office rather than hand over the file to a commission.
Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper all spent about a decade in power. There is no sure thing in politics but Trudeau in 2015 could reasonably expect to be prime minister for as long.
By now, about half that time is behind his Liberal government.
Over the past five years, the many allies Trudeau could count on at the first ministers’ table have been replaced by less politically friendly premiers.
The federal Conservatives who — at this time — remain the most likely alternative to the Liberals have not, historically, brought the same level of commitment to the Indigenous issue.
And then the fiscal environment has taken a turn for the worse. As a result, many of the items on the Liberal pre-pandemic agenda stand to be dropped or scaled down.
Take Trudeau’s signature election promise of a national pharmacare plan. Momentum on the health-care reform front is fast shifting to longterm care.
After the pandemic, a cashstrapped federal government will have to figure out where its attention is most needed. In no small part, its choice will be dictated by public opinion.
At this juncture, the focus is on addressing long-term care. But for how long?
When it comes to governments undertaking some heavy social policy lifting, the recent past tends to dictate to strike the iron while it is (still) hot. Chantal Hébert OPINION