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Editorial: Care homes ground zero

Canadians knew it was bad, but this week they found out just how bad it was. Data released Tuesday showed that 79 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths in the country have been connected to long-term care and seniors’ homes.
trellis
A concept sketch of the proposed Silverstone long-term care facility.

Canadians knew it was bad, but this week they found out just how bad it was. Data released Tuesday showed that 79 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths in the country have been connected to long-term care and seniors’ homes.

Translated into real numbers, it means that of 2,859 deaths nationwide linked to the coronavirus as of Tuesday, 2,259 were in care homes and 600 were not. The worst cases were in Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia, but B.C. has not been immune, with residents of long-term care and assisted-living facilities making up well over half of COVID-related deaths in the province.

Care homes are ground zero for COVID-19 deaths in Canada and for-profit facilities have rightly been identified as the prime culprit. Though public and non-profit facilities have also been hit by outbreaks, the substandard wages, inadequate staffing levels and shoddy working conditions of many for-profit facilities across the country have led directly to tragic outcomes.

The Sunshine Coast has been blessed so far during this pandemic in that its two publicly operated care homes in Sechelt and one non-profit in Gibsons have been spared the ravages of an outbreak. Advocates who have been fighting to block the Trellis development can now point to this fact and hold up incontrovertible evidence that for-profit care has failed Canadians in the worst ways imaginable.

And they are already doing so. With the Trellis application still before Sechelt council, opponents are even lobbying the prime minister to halt the project in view of the current crisis. We have noticed a tendency, however, to assign the black mark of “for-profit” with casual uniformity, and that is potentially misleading.

The NDP government has not budged in its defence of the Trellis proposal, and a key argument is that it negotiated a labour agreement with the company that guarantees union status, wages and benefits. This puts it in a different category from facilities where low wages played a major role in the deterioration of care standards. Indeed, the Trellis model may be the one adopted in the wake of the pandemic to address system failures in many facilities.

This is not what advocates for public health care want to hear, but it’s the way it is. Fight your good fight, but let’s keep it honest.