More protectionist legislation is not going to fix the elder abuse. It's a band-aid, in my opinion. That's my experience in looking at the adult protection legislation that's in some of the provinces in Canada.
I also have had information from Charmaine Spencer, who I know also testified, who has been doing research specifically on adult protection, and I share her same approach to this.
It doesn't work because it's reporting to a third party, who then is supposed to respond. I must tell you that when I 've done that research.... Now, I'm not researcher like Dr. Armstrong, but when I've done that inquiry about, “Okay, so then what are the responses?”, I've found that the response system doesn't respond, or else they refer the senior back to the very services who reported to the response system.
So it's using money that should be going into direct services for this side service that makes it look like something's being done but nothing is being done.
The experience in many jurisdictions is that this kind of legislation just ends up dealing primarily with what I'll call it self-abuse, the person who has deteriorated, the people with capacity issues, the hoarders, the people who are living at jeopardy in the community alone. It deals with those, but not with those like the gentleman who we assisted who was living in a mansion in Rosedale who had given power of attorney to a friend. He was in his nineties. He was losing capacity, and his friend then took more than $1 million from him without his knowledge.
Fortunately, a relative of his helped him to get to us, and we assisted him in getting recovery. Unfortunately, the man died before everything was concluded.
So it's that kind of thing. It's not going to be picked up by some kind of magic reporting system.