Harris embodies nursing homes’ checkered history
Doug Ford is warning nursinghome bosses who profit from people that he’ll “hold them accountable.”
Is Mike Harris listening? Is anyone else?
A former Ontario premier who now chairs Chartwell Retirement Residences, Harris wasn’t mentioned by name at Ford’s news conference. When the current premier attacked profit-seeking owners who “want to be greedy and make money,” he made no reference to his Progressive Conservative predecessor or Chartwell.
But Ford’s rhetoric raised the ante.
“We’ll be holding people accountable because it’s not about money — it’s about taking care of people, taking care of the workers,” he told reporters last week.
Whether or not Harris is among those nursing home operators deemed “greedy,” to borrow Ford’s phrasing, he certainly knows how to “make money,” as the premier likes to say. Since leaving the premier’s office nearly two decades ago, his association with Chartwell — a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) — has paid off handsomely (though total values have tumbled since the pandemic, as they have across the stock market).
Harris had more than $7 million in Chartwell holdings at the end of 2019 (its last fiscal year) — including $4.29 million in “deferred trust units” (akin to shares) that reflect his accumulated compensation over the years (deferred until retirement) — according to chartered accountant Charles Smedmor, who specializes in forensic and investigative accounting and analyzed the numbers at my request.
According to Chartwell’s information circular co-signed by Harris on March 30, the value of his holdings had declined to $4.47 million (with $2.76 million in deferred trust units) by that date.
As chair and trustee (akin to director), his compensation for 2019 amounted to $229,500 (deferred until retirement), according to Chartwell’s vicepresident of marketing and communications, Sharon Ranalli, who also confirmed his cumulative holdings. She noted that retirement residences, not long-term care, make up “the majority of its portfolio” — referring to the company’s assets.
But 23 of Chartwell’s nursing homes are in Ontario, and they have been hit hard over the past three months. Ranalli told me 125 residents have died due to COVID-19, and 97 of them were in long-term-care (nursing) homes.
The former premier declined to comment on his cumulative compensation, or the situation at Chartwell’s properties under COVID-19, but Ranalli issued a statement on behalf of Harris and the company: “Each one of these deaths is one too many and our sympathies and thoughts are with the families of those directly impacted by this virus.”
For our current premier, who inherited a nursing-home sector thrown into upheaval by his predecessor in the mid-1990s, the question is who does what next in long-term care?
“I would expect as a shareholder to start holding the CEO and the chair accountable — that’s what happens in the real world,” Ford said of forprofit operators last week. “Something happens to your product, well, they have to be held accountable because guess what? We’re going to hold them accountable.”
His comments came in the wake of a devastating report by the Canadian Armed Forces detailing a house of horrors in our worst nursing homes, after the province requested emergency help from soldiers.
In fairness, the army did not go into a Chartwell home and
Ford wasn’t referring to Harris when he talked about holding the CEO or chair “accountable.”
But will he consult or confront Harris — or any other private operator — about the situation in our nursing homes? When I asked Ford last month if he’d spoken to Harris, the premier said he’d taken a call from him, but “I didn’t even know he was the chair of Chartwell.”
Either way, Harris and Chartwell may not be the worst offenders — indeed, they have their defenders, some of whom wrote me to say their homes are in good shape, while others say the opposite.
What makes Harris such a talking point, however, is that he embodies the checkered history of the nursing-home sector.
Private operators predated Harris’s government. But, sitting in the premier’s office in the mid-1990s, he diluted the staff ratios and regulations he inherited from Bob Rae’s NDP government, and now he is profiting from it all at Chartwell, where he sits as board chair.
Harris is not the only person with a personal stake in nursing homes. Revera Inc., another industry giant plagued by pandemic troubles, is owned by a Crown corporation on behalf of the pension plans of federal public servants, soldiers and Mounties.
It turns out, then, that the beneficiaries of Revera’s profits are ordinary pensioners who may end up in its profit-making homes (and paying a price for it). More often than we realize, the owners are us — whether a former premier, pensioners or taxpayers (in the case of government-owned homes).
That’s why, in the final analysis, we don’t need to nationalize them, just revolutionize them. We shouldn’t be paying off the people who profited from nursing homes by buying them out — effectively bailing them out — mid-pandemic.
Rather than spending billions of dollars compensating the existing operators such as Chartwell and Revera, we should regulate them in a way that requires them to invest the required funds. If they can’t measure up, then take away their licences; and if they have to sell out, then take over their homes — at the right price, not top dollar.
That’s not confiscation, that’s regulation — backed by inspection. No matter who owns the shares, we all own the problem of nursing homes, because we have a personal stake in them.
CEOs and board chairs aren’t the only ones who are accountable. Ultimately it’s the current premier who is answerable — and the onus is on all of us to keep asking questions.
We shouldn’t be paying off the people who profited from nursing homes by buying them out mid-pandemic