Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being with us this morning.
I'm going to ask the Justice witnesses a question, but I'm going to ask them to bear with me a moment while I lay out a story that I think raises some questions about how we actually respond to elder abuse.
The story I want to lay out is of a private, for-profit company providing services to seniors, a company that, in narrow business terms, is very successful. In 2020, this company exceeded its profit projections by 40%, and as a result, it paid out more than a million dollars in bonuses to its top five executives, including a performance bonus of nearly half a million dollars to its CEO. Now what if I tell you that this company is a long-term care company, with revenues of $716 million from operating dozens of long-term care homes in four provinces? This company suffered a rate of death of its residents of about 3.6 per hundred beds, so nearly 4% of the residents in its homes died from COVID. In two of those homes, more than 20% of the residents died from COVID. I would also point out that in one of those homes, in one month, the home was cited for 13 violations of standards of care, including failure to provide adequate hydration, failure to provide incontinence care and failure to provide adequate nutrition—13 times in one month while paying out a million dollars in bonuses to its chief executives.
The question I really have here is the following. Certainly the witnesses laid out that there is criminal negligence causing bodily harm and the failure to provide necessities of life. Those two aspects of the Criminal Code, I think, clearly apply in these cases where the company involved.... And I haven't named the company, because unfortunately you or I could name at least four companies with almost exactly the same story to tell during COVID. Despite this, I'm unaware of any criminal charges of any sort laid against any operator of a long-term care home when we have certainly had a vast proportion of the COVID deaths taking place in long-term care homes, and a large proportion of those taking place in a second wave, which indicates that there was a failure to put an adequate response plan in place. To me, that would also qualify under section 215 as a criminal offence for failing to provide the necessities of life, which would have required hygiene and infection protection measures, which were not taken in these homes.
My question for the Department of Justice officials is very specific. Have any charges been laid? If not, or if there have only been a few charges, who's responsible in our system at this point for charges being laid for criminal negligence or negligence in providing the necessities of life in long-term care homes during COVID?