Madam Speaker, Canada has over 11,000 deaths from COVID-19. It is the equivalent of a jumbo jet filled to capacity crashing every single week since the pandemic was declared in March. While some people, like the Premier of Alberta, have dismissed these deaths because those dying from COVID-19 are mostly seniors, I would like to remind the premier and everyone in this House that our seniors are not disposable.
If a jumbo jet crashed today, we would be shocked. If another went down next week and the next and the next, we would not just shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh well, they were old.” We would be outraged. We would demand change. I am outraged and I am demanding change.
The thousands of seniors that we lost to COVID-19 did not have to die. They are dead because we failed them. How many more thousands of seniors must die before we finally fix our long-term care system, before we finally decide to actually care for our elders?
Our long-term care system was already in crisis before COVID-19 hit. Decades of privatization have shifted the focus from caring for our seniors to creating profits for shareholders. Care and profits are two oppositional forces. The only way to wring profit from long-term care is to cut the care itself, to cut the people providing the care, to cut their wages, to cut the time spent providing care and to cut money from the design and maintenance of the homes themselves.
This is not news to anyone. Over the summer, we had study after study reveal exactly what went wrong in long-term care during the first wave of the pandemic. Was anyone surprised when those studies concluded that for-profit homes had larger COVID-19 outbreaks and more deaths of residents from COVID-19 than non-profit and municipal homes?
From the Royal Society of Canada to the Canadian Armed Forces, we heard about the horrific conditions in long-term care homes that led to military interventions in Quebec and Ontario. This information should have allowed us to prepare for the second wave of the pandemic, but it did not. We are now deeply into the second wave of COVID-19 and we seem to have learned nothing.
In my riding of Edmonton Strathcona, 83 of the 90 residents at the South Terrace Continuing Care Centre have tested positive for COVID-19. Fourteen of those residents have now died and 80 staff members are sick with COVID or have tested positive for the disease. The list goes on: 61 have died at Carlingview Manor, 31 have died at the Montfort Long-Term Care Home, 51 have died at Forest Heights Long-Term Care Home, 39 have died at Maples Personal Care Home in Winnipeg, 36 have died at Humber Valley Terrace and 21 are dead at McKenzie Towne Continuing Care Centre in Calgary.
All of these long-term care facilities are owned by one very large corporation: Revera. In fact, Revera owns more than 500 long-term care facilities worldwide and it is not the only for-profit with large COVID-19 outbreaks and daily deaths now numbering in the hundreds. Revera is unique because Revera is owned by the Canada pension fund and its board is appointed by cabinet. Revera homes are being ravaged by COVID-19—