Horgan vows to keep wage top-ups

Opponents, care home operators and workers laud campaign pledge

Long-term care workers in B.C. will likely keep their wage top-ups and remain assigned to work in only one seniors' home at a time, after an election promise by NDP Leader John Horgan Wednesday appeared to garner support from political opponents, workers and private care home operators.

Horgan said he would make permanent a recommendation from provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry that long-term care aides work only at one facility, to prevent against the spread of COVID-19 within a vulnerable elderly population.

Before the pandemic, full- and part-time workers could pick up shifts at multiple care homes, which paid differing salaries. If re-elected, Horgan said he would continue to spend more than $10 million a month to “level up” the wages and benefits of longterm care workers, so that they would earn a standard income no matter where they worked.

“What's more important for our seniors than having someone care for them in their later years?” Horgan asked Wednesday at a rally in the key battleground region of Surrey.

“Many workers had to work in more than one location. Our first step when the pandemic hit was to eliminate that, raise the wages of our front-line workers, and make sure that if you were working in a long-term care facility you only had to show up at one place, not multiple places. That restricted the spread of the disease.”

The majority of B.C.'s COVID-19 deaths have been seniors in longterm care homes.

B.C. Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson said Henry “very wisely” recommended single-site restrictions for care aides six months ago, and it was the right decision to prevent the virus from spreading even more quickly into long-term care facilities.

“There will clearly have to be adjustments in how that workforce conducts itself in terms of having more than one employer, and also in how much they're compensated, to make sure that it's a workable situation for them as long-term care workers,” he said.

“We need those workers. We need those people to be taking care of our seniors. They need to be properly compensated so they can do the job safely working in a single facility.”

The pandemic wage top-up for care aides in long-term care homes has cut the wage gap between facilities and moved B.C. toward a standard wage of roughly $25 an hour, said Mike Old, acting secretary-business manager of the Hospital Employees' Union (HEU). “It's positive they have recognized the problem and committed to extending the levelling-up of wages beyond the pandemic.”

The HEU represents the majority of the unionized workers in the sector, with an estimated 20,000 members in senior care. Its permanent secretary-business manager, Jennifer Whiteside, took a leave earlier this month to run as the B.C. NDP candidate in New Westminster.

The B.C. Care Providers Association, which represents private operators of long-term care facilities, said it also supports the single-site requirement and wage increase due to the recruitment crisis facing the sector.

“We support family-supporting wages in the long-term care sector and we've been telling the government for a number of years that we have a health human resources crisis in long-term care,” said association CEO Terry Lake, a former health minister in the previous Liberal government.

“We provide publicly funded spaces through our members. Paying higher wages is great, but that means the money government pays for those spaces has to increase.”

In the long term, the single-site staff requirement may cause some human resource issues, said Lake, because care homes also need to draw upon a flexible pool of parttime workers to fill in and supplement staffing as necessary.

Some of Horgan's other promises for seniors' care on Wednesday didn't garner as much support. He said he would set unspecified “new requirements” on private care home operators, and fund a 10year, $1.4-billion plan to renovate existing multi-bed rooms in health authority care homes to make them single spaces for seniors.

More than a third of seniors' beds in B.C. are in for-profit facilities, paid for in part with taxpayer dollars.