As I said earlier, we have to be very cautious, because it is unlike child abuse, where teachers, doctors, and social workers have an absolute obligation to report. In the case of dealing with older Canadians, people who work in nursing homes and institutions have a duty under their legislation to report as well, but in between that, we must be very careful not to infantilize the senior. It may be something that they've chosen to do; if you see a son always operating the bank account, that's not necessarily abuse.
There should be protocols such that you ask in a polite way so as not to offend anybody involved, and also protocols for the public to be educated on that asking, in that it is not meant to offend. There are protocols that are necessary, but I think that as a society we have to start accepting that we may have to interfere a bit in other people's family lives to prevent abuse. We have to walk around that a bit gingerly, just to be very careful of those kinds of complexities.
Nonetheless, the bottom line is that if we're all invested in preventing elder abuse, then we have to negotiate those pathways to detecting, including the duty to report.