Madam Speaker, I know my colleague from Battlefords—Lloydminster is on the call, as she just debated, and I would like to thank her for her work on the issue of seniors. She has been tireless. I have been working with her, and she has met with dozens of affected groups from across the country. I know she brings a good perspective to this issue.
I would like to start my speech today by talking about what this issue is. In the last year, we have seen senior citizens under the government's duty of care die alone covered in their own feces. We have seen the military called in to deal with these situations. Nobody in Parliament, or any other level of government, gets to say that it is not our job to deal with this situation.
What happened in our long-term care facilities across this country during this last year of COVID should light the entire country on fire. If we truly believe that every Canadian deserves to live with dignity, then we need to be talking about this issue. We need to be proposing solutions, and we need to be moving forward. Anything less than that, I would say, is un-Canadian.
This is not an issue that just affects seniors. This cuts across every generation. This is for the seniors who are living in long-term care. This is for Canadians who might be approaching the age when they have to consider long-term care. It is also for people from my generation who are starting to have hard conversations with their parents about what they want to have happen, how they are going to age, and whether they will age in place.
It also affects the workers in these facilities. I am tired of seeing articles, which are absolutely true, on the PTSD workers in long-term care facilities have experienced dealing with the COVID pandemic. We all need to wake up and understand that we have to push forward with proposing solutions.
I am very pleased that the NDP has decided to use one of its precious supply days bringing this issue forward to the House of Commons for debate. We have spent a lot of time in this Parliament, and in the last Parliament, talking about dying with dignity, which is an important topic. However, we also need to be talking about living with dignity. We also need to be talking about the conditions seniors in Canada who require long-term care are currently living in, right now.
I want to start by looking at the motion itself. The first part of this motion requires Parliament to recognize three deadly facts for which there can be no debate. The first is that “during the first wave of the pandemic, 82% of COVID deaths in Canada happened in long-term care, which is the highest proportion in the OECD”.
The second fact is that “there have been over 12,000 long-term care resident and worker deaths in Canada since the beginning of the pandemic”, and the third is that “residents and workers in for-profit long-term care homes have a higher risk of infection and death than those in non-profit homes”. These are facts. We cannot deny them. The evidence is there. Parliament has to recognize that.
The first part to finding a solution is recognizing there is a problem. There were 12,000 deaths in long-term care homes during the first wave of the COVID pandemic. Let us quantify and think about that. That is greater than the population of some Canadian towns. I ask members to think about how many families were affected by that.
We also need to think about the workers who are affected by this. Many workers in these facilities are underpaid and undersupported, and many of them are new Canadians. Some are temporary foreign workers, and this is something a lot of people are willing to turn a blind eye to. I am glad the NDP put these figures in this motion. Parliament should be recognizing them and waking up to them.
The second part of the motion suggests that something must be done, so the NDP has proposed a solution. The fix this motion proposes is to move all privately owned long-term care facilities into public ownership. That is a spicy solution. At least there is a solution being proposed here.
My party strongly supports a well-funded, robust and publicly funded health care system in Canada, and it cannot be denied that there are significant issues with privately owned long-term care facilities. I want to talk about one example that the government has never rectified.
That is the approval of the sale of many long-term care facilities to Anbang. The purchase of long-term care homes by Anbang was approved by the Liberal government by the former industry minister, who scrutinized the investment review decision because it exceeded the $600-million threshold.
In an article published earlier last year, the union head of B.C. said, “It's pretty clear that this company is in crisis and unable to provide adequate care at a growing number of its sites.... It's a big problem, because the company's also the largest contracted provider of long-term-care beds in B.C.” There have been other articles during the pandemic about the high proportion of deaths in Anbang facilities.
We would think that the failure to uphold Canadian standards by the state-owned enterprise would have resulted in some sort of action by the federal government, and nothing has happened to date. It is highly problematic.
Therefore, will moving all long-term care facilities into public care fix all of these problems? There is a strong argument to be made that the process used to approve the Anbang sale was certainly deadly for many Canadian seniors. Moving to a fully public model would need a strong framework to evaluate what would change. For example, how would provincial governments absorb this responsibility and over what period of time? What would this mean for seniors and workers? What is the framework of that care guarantee?
As well, I think that for-profit care providers now need to show that clear evidence that making profit off of long-term care can be combined with a high certainty of standards of care. That needs to be presented, as more clarity is needed. I am glad we are having a discussion about how to move forward, and no proposed solution at this point should be outright dismissed. We should not be saying that this is not our job to look at.
On the issue of jurisdiction, which everyone is dancing around today, the reality is that the federal government has paid billions of dollars for health care and the federal government provides guidelines and best practices for all sorts of areas of care. The question becomes why the federal government has not moved in this regard. I am not saying that we need to take, as everybody is saying, an “Ottawa knows best” approach, but after overseeing the sale of Anbang and not doing anything about that, it is very convenient to just abdicate responsibility.
At least we are talking about a solution here today. Again, there is more work to be done before moving to one conclusion or another on what the fix is, but I am glad that we are having this discussion today.
With that, and because I am always for finding solutions, I move, seconded by the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster, that the motion be amended by replacing all of the words after “the House call upon the government to” with the following: “collaborate and partner with the provinces, territories, seniors' advocates and care-giving organizations to: (a) improve long-term care standards including taking a leadership role and promoting best practices while recognizing the diversity of needs and challenges across the country; (b) ensure that long-term care homes have adequate access to PPE, rapid tests and an effective vaccine rollout; (c) direct existing federal infrastructure and housing funding toward new construction and the renovation of long-term care facilities; (d) develop immediate and medium-term solutions to address the critical staffing needs in long-term care facilities; (e) increase mental health supports for front-line health care workers, residents and their families.”
Let us get to a solution today.