In Saskatchewan I can speak to specific examples, because they did surveys with their members at the beginning of the pandemic and in the middle of the pandemic, and the surveys are ongoing throughout just to accurately tell the story of what it's been like. I remember one of the most heartbreaking comments I read in one of the narrative portions was made by an executive director with 47 years of experience in running a centre in northern Saskatchewan. Her only comment was, “I wish I retired in January”.
If you imagine the last 47 years of Canadian history and what that woman has worked through and for, yet this was the thing, this was the moment, that broke that woman, trying to survive COVID and provide support to her community.
If I can be very personal, to me it's extremely difficult to sit in front of the committee and bring testimony when you know for a fact that we have Jordan's principle. Why is there any jurisdictional wrangling around whose responsibility people are when we have legal precedents on putting aside jurisdictional issues and making sure the right things just happen? It's not like we don't have templates for what we need to do. It's just that in this moment everyone is uncomfortable saying the truth, while at the ground level I have executive directors who are self-isolating themselves because they've been serving food with inappropriate PPE because no one else would.
Most of our centres are still open while other people are working from home. The reality I live every day as the president of that is trying to tell the story that when you get testimony from people and you get recommendations from people, we need to see at some point that it comes with action.