Justice Committee on May 25th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Thank you very much, Ms. Baker.

We'll now go to Seniors First B.C. for five minutes. Please go ahead.

[Marie-Noël Campbell, Executive Director and Lawyer, Seniors First BC]

Madam Chair and honourable members, thank you for inviting Seniors First BC to speak today on the important issue of elder abuse.

Seniors First BC is a non-profit organization that provides direct services to vulnerable seniors across the province of B.C. Our services include a seniors abuse and information line, victim services, legal services, and a public education and outreach program.

The seniors abuse and information line is our organization's front door, and we have attached statistics on calls to our brief. Between 2019 and 2021, the two most common types of abuse reported by callers were, one, emotional and psychological abuse and, two, financial abuse. These will be the focus of our presentation today.

With regard to psychological and emotional abuse, as we've heard, most abusers are family members. Most seniors do not wish to involve the police due to a combination of fears of repercussions for their loved ones and concerns about finding an alternative caregiver, but also due to the belief that they will not be taken seriously. Our workers frequently report hearing complaints about agencies' disregarding the older adults' concerns, assuming that they have dementia, are incompetent or do not understand what is happening to them.

Our victim services workers also hear from clients who actually have contacted the police, and the abuser has actually encouraged them to call the police because the abuser already knows the routine. A police officer comes, de-escalates the situation and leaves. Shortly thereafter, the abuser returns. Sometimes the police refuse to write a report because they consider this to be a civil or a family matter.

We have heard positive stories about local enforcement, typically in which the officer listened to the older adult's story, had a frank conversation with the abuser—sometimes warning them of possible criminal consequences—and followed up with the adult. Such successful approaches typically come from small communities in B.C.

Our recommendation, therefore, is to provide better training for dealing with elder abuse to local enforcement agencies, including [Technical difficulty—Editor] and to encourage investigation and follow-up.

In the context of abuse in institutionalized care, we support Graham Webb's recommendations to create the distinct offence of criminal endangerment and to provide strong whistle-blower protection to residents and substitute decision-makers.

The second common type of abuse reported by callers is financial abuse, and most financial exploitation of seniors, again, involves a family member or person in a position of trust through either a power of attorney or a joint bank account. Fraud also happens more and more frequently through international scams.

Unlike credit card companies, banks and credit unions do not monitor for suspicious activity on their clients' accounts. In the rare instances where financial institutions have been sued for negligence, courts have found that they did not hold any duty of care to their account holders or third parties. Ideally, there should be a legislated duty of care for financial institutions. Potential confidentiality issues about customers' accounts could be covered in the account agreement.

Another possible first step would be to introduce legislation protecting whistle-blowers at financial institutions, like the U.S. Senior Safe Act, which provides immunity from liability in any civil or administrative proceedings. Trained employees of financial institutions, such as bank tellers, advisers and investment bankers, report potential exploitation of senior citizens, even if it would otherwise violate privacy legislation, and they're provided training.

In our opinion, raising the alarm, if followed by investigation and action from law enforcement, would at least have a freezing effect on the author of the fraudulent behaviour.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Thank you very much, Ms. Campbell.

Just for your notes, for your next interventions as we go on with this meeting, could you please put the in-line mike closer to your mouth? That would be much appreciated by the interpreters.

[Marie-Noël Campbell]

I will, Madam Chair. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

We'll now go to Statistics Canada for five minutes of opening remarks.

[Kathy AuCoin, Chief of Analysis Program, Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics, Statistics Canada]

Madam Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to present our most recent statistics on senior abuse in Canada.

Much of the information I'll be focusing on this afternoon is available in the publication “Family violence in Canada: A statistical profile”. A link to the report and a series of custom tabulations have been provided to the clerk for your reference.

It's important to note that the data from this report highlight those forms of abuse that meet the criminal threshold and that were reported to the police. As a result, it does not provide a complete picture of the overall prevalence of senior abuse as it does not capture emotional, psychological and financial abuse. Also note that Statistics Canada is working towards collecting disaggregated data, that is, by ethnicity, life stages and gender, which will give us a better understanding of which seniors are most at risk of abuse.

Also note that I'll be referring to the most recent police data, which is from 2019. The 2020 data will be released at the end of July. This information will be critical to our understanding of the impact of COVID restrictions on seniors and whether or not they were more at risk of being a victim.

In 2019, there were more than 14,000 senior victims of police-reported violence in Canada. By senior victims, I mean those individuals who are 65 years of age and older. Of these victims, 55% were men, while 45% were women. This translates into a rate of 227 seniors per 100,000.

Since 2014, there has been a steady increase in police-reported violence perpetrated against seniors. Specifically, we've noted a 29% increase in victimization rates between 2014 and 2019. Over the same time period, the rate of violence increased more for senior women than for senior men. We also noted that there were increases in violence against other age groups—that is, people between 0 and 17, or 18 to 64—but it was only an increase of 16%.

Based on the police data, the highest rates of senior victimization were noted in the three territories, as well as Manitoba and New Brunswick, while Nova Scotia reported the lowest.

According to the 2016 census, 7% of all seniors lived in shared dwellings such as senior resident nursing homes. From police-reported data, we were able to get a glimpse of the violence committed against seniors in these environments. In 2019, just over one in 10 senior victims of police-reported violence were residing in a nursing or retirement home at the time of the incident. Two-thirds of these victims were senior women. Most of these seniors who experienced violence experienced physical assault, while one in seven were sexually assaulted.

Within the nursing and retirement home environment, the perpetrators of this violence were most often seniors themselves. They were a casual acquaintance of the victim, a neighbour within the retirement home or.... We can't tell from the data whether these individuals were suffering from some sort of cognitive impairment or dementia, which could have explained the reason for the violence. Further to that, the police-reported data noted very few cases where the perpetrator of the violence was a staff member of the residence.

Another source of data for senior abuse is the general social survey on victimization, which measures three types of violence—sexual assault, robbery and physical assault—as well as five forms of non-violent crime. These data are critical to our understanding as they capture victimization whether it was reported to the police or not.

According to the 2019 GSS, one in 10 seniors self-reported being a victim of household or violent crime in the previous 12 months and 84,000 seniors were victims of a violent crime. Through the GSS, we are also able to capture experiences of emotional and financial abuse of older adults by a family member or caregiver. Recent results found that approximately 2% of seniors reported experiencing financial or emotional abuse over the past five years. Finally, the GSS also noted that 14% of seniors experienced fraud over the previous five years.

There are challenges in collecting data on elder and senior abuse. Specifically, to obtain robust data, there must be an agreed-upon definition of “senior”, an agreed-upon definition of “abuse” and a sound method on how to capture this information from those living in an institution.

Thank you to the chair and members for their attention this afternoon.

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

We'll now go into our rounds of questions, starting with Madame Findlay for six minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Thank you.

I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being here with us virtually today, with an especially warm welcome to those from Seniors First B.C. and the Council to Reduce Elder Abuse. These B.C. organizations do important work in my home province.

Ms. Baker, I found your itemized list of issues and federal supports that would be beneficial to be particularly useful. Thank you.

I will be directing my first questions to Mr. Latimer and Ms. AuCoin from Statistics Canada, and maybe just just Ms. AuCoin if Mr. Latimer is sidelined a bit.

We know the importance of data in addressing issues relating to elder abuse, data that, as this committee has heard throughout our study, is largely missing. The testimony of the Canadian Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse emphasized that group's disappointment that the 2021 budget did not commit to better collection of elder abuse data to inform our policy-making, especially since the mandate letters of both the Minister of Justice and Minister of Seniors call for exactly that.

Could you elaborate on where, in your professional opinion, the gaps exist in data collection with respect to elder abuse?

[Kathy AuCoin]

Thank you, Chair. That's a wonderful question.

In 2008, Statistics Canada did a very comprehensive feasibility study to look at senior abuse and elder abuse to figure out how to fill a critical data gap. In having many discussions across the country with different experts, we found that a key issue was the definition of “senior abuse”. Is it over 55, over 65? That was a key barrier that needed to be ironed out.

Second to that was what would be included in a concept of elder abuse. The data that I discussed most recently was looking at police-reported data that relied on Criminal Code definitions. Elder abuse, as an entity, has not been embedded in the Criminal Code. Understanding relationships and trust, how are emotional abuse, physical abuse and psychological abusemeasured?

Third, how do you measure it amongst a population that is in an institution, a senior who is hard to reach, who also might be suffering from a cognitive disability and who cannot report on what they're experiencing? Do you do a proxy interview? Do you interview their family members? There are many barriers and challenges. That's not to say one shouldn't measure it, but to create...an overall prevalence of seniors in an institution and their levels of abuse is challenging.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

I appreciate your underscoring some of the ways to overcome these data collection challenges. I wish you well in that work, because it's very important to do so.

You also mentioned working toward collecting disaggregated elder abuse data by ethnicity, gender and so forth. Could you elaborate a bit on your progress and when that data might be available?

[Kathy AuCoin]

Through the budget there were funds provided to Statistics Canada to explore and work on creating more systems to release disaggregated data. On our police data, we'll start collecting ethnicity data sometime in the near future. We are going through the feasibility of how to capture that information.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Thank you.

To Seniors First B.C., whoever wishes to respond, we've just heard from Ms. AuCoin and other witnesses before the committee about a real need to clearly define elder abuse, generally it seems for data collection, and also in the Criminal Code.

Do you have an opinion as to any potential amendments to the Criminal Code that might help, including a definition of elder abuse, or what that definition might look like?

[Marie-Noël Campbell]

I'll defer to Eric Clavier on this question.

Just so you know, we do not engage in criminal law. For the definition of elder abuse, we have followed the definition that was provided before by an ebook published by the B.C. Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General in 2013. We have followed that definition.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Do you have thoughts on a further or better definition, or have you not put your minds to that?

[Marie-Noël Campbell]

We have not really put our minds to it, but Eric Clavier might have more to say on this.

[Eric B. Clavier, Lawyer and President, Board of Directors, Seniors First BC]

Thank you.

I've also not put my mind to a definition of elder abuse. I think one of the difficulties we all recognize is that elder abuse is a pretty generic concept. It's certainly something that we need to look at as to what would comprise a more lineated definition.

As Ms. Campbell has noted in her opening remarks, the most prevalent abuse that we see includes financial abuse here. It could be something that is not necessarily related to elders, but if you could have a definition that specifically targets that type of elder abuse where people take advantage of joint tenancy or joint accounts, that might be helpful. Unfortunately, I'm not able to come up with a definition that I think would be useful to the committee today.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

That's fine.

I think this is my last question.

I know that you serve more than 200 clients a month. Could you speak to how legal needs of your clients might have evolved since the beginning of the pandemic?

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Answer very briefly, please.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Where is your help being sought?

[Eric B. Clavier]

Ms. Campbell would be the person to answer that in the sense that she's in charge of the organization's elder law clinic as well.

[Marie-Noël Campbell]

Requests for legal assistance have boomed. The funding hasn't really followed. It has been limited because it comes from the law foundation and they do what they can.

We hear a lot about abuse of powers of attorney and abuse related to joint tenancies. Maybe I will provide more information in writing.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

That's great. That would be good.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Thank you very much for that.

We'll now move to Mr. Sarai for six minutes. Please go ahead.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I thank the two organizations from British Columbia, Seniors First B.C. and the Council to Reduce Elder Abuse, for their services and constant commitment to seniors issues and preventing senior abuse.

Ms. Campbell, my first question is maybe for you.

In your opinion, what steps can be taken to improve reporting of abuse among seniors?

[Marie-Noël Campbell]

Madam Chair, I don't think the issue is necessarily with reporting but with follow-through. What we're hearing from our workers is that when there is a report to police, no steps are taken. People do not hear back.

As we mentioned, there is little follow-up done, except in smaller communities. It would be helpful is to see that follow-up either by house checkups or by investigations. Our victim service worker has informed us that she has never seen any case reach the level of prosecution in spite of police reports being made.