Hi, everyone.
Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members, for the invitation to speak with you today.
I am a co-founder of Protect People in Long-Term Care, an ad hoc citizens group formed in early April in an effort to propel our political leaders to take decisive action to address the unfolding crisis in long-term care.
On April 7 we launched a petition asking for emergency funding, a coordinated national strategy and the implementation of shared standards of care. To date, our petition has garnered over 77,000 signatures from every province and territory in Canada.
I'd like to underscore that those of us with loved ones in long-term care saw this tragedy coming. The systemic gaps and failures are something we are intimately familiar with. We saw what happened in Spain and Italy in February, and we knew what was coming our way. When families and volunteers were locked out on March 13 in many parts of the country, we knew that staff, who were already overstretched, would quickly become overwhelmed. We couldn't understand why staff were having to fight to get access to PPE, and we watched in anguish and horror as outbreak after outbreak was announced, yet long-term care homes in many jurisdictions were not being prioritized by their public health authorities for testing to ensure the rapid assessment and cohorting of residents.
This was the case in my own parents' long-term care home in Brampton, Ontario, which had to wait an agonizing nine days after their first positive case before their public health authority would finally give them access to testing for all residents. In their long-term care home, 50% of residents and almost 60% of staff were infected. Twelve people died, including two staff. Staffing levels were so depleted by COVID that the military had to be called in.
Canada has catastrophically failed the residents and workers in long-term care, and women have disproportionately shouldered the impacts of a tragedy that could and should have been avoided. I'm speaking of the workers, the majority of whom are racialized women, as we've heard today, whose work is undervalued and underpaid.
As we know, understaffing is a chronic gap in this sector, an issue that has been flagged for decades. In addition, many employers, especially those working in the for-profit spectrum, refuse to offer full-time work so they can avoid paying benefits. This forces low-wage staff to juggle shifts at various locations to make ends meet. The individuals, mainly women, doing this work have been put in an impossible situation and are left overstretched and often ill-equipped to care for vulnerable residents. They in turn have found themselves disproportionately exposed to the virus and at risk of bringing it home to their loved ones.
I'm also speaking about the family members and volunteers—again, overwhelmingly women—whose unpaid labour in normal times is the glue that holds this broken system together. Hundreds of us essential caregivers were locked out in mid-March. We were forcibly separated from our fragile and vulnerable loved ones and, in many cases, were not able to get regular updates. In the worst cases, loved ones died alone with no family member present. Families and workers alike will be living with the trauma caused by this devastation for the rest of our lives.
Here we are now in a second wave. Over 10,000 people in Canada have lost their lives to COVID-19. Eighty per cent of them were living in long-term care, the worst record in all OECD countries. The root problems have been documented in study upon study over decades: chronic understaffing, poor labour practices, an absence of shared standards of care, outdated infrastructure, deregulation and lack of accountability. To quote Doris Grinspun from the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario, “It is disheartening, exhausting and expensive to continue to study problems that are known and understood and where the missing factor is the political will to act decisively”.
In the throne speech, the federal government made a commitment to national standards for long-term care, yet, almost six weeks later, details and a timeline have not been shared. With the number of cases on the rise again and dozens of homes in outbreaks across the country, it is imperative that all levels of government come together and a timeline and action plan be put into place.
The solutions are known—