The prime minister departed from his measured tones of reassurance this week when he described the “terrible tragedies” the pandemic is inflicting on long-term care homes. He’s right to say that something is very, very wrong here. What are we going to do about it?
A crisis can reveal the strengths of institutions, societies, citizens and leaders. It can also expose weaknesses.
“Right now, we’re seeing terrible tragedies in long-term care facilities across the country,” Justin Trudeau said Thursday. “This is unacceptable.”
The prime minister’s comments on the rising death toll inside Canada’s nursing homes and seniors centres were his most negative since this crisis began, and marked a departure from the reassuring tone he’s largely stuck to over the past six weeks.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with reporters on Thursday. 1:12
“If you’re angry, frustrated, scared, you’re right to feel this way. We can do better. We need to do better. Because we are failing our parents, our grandparents, our elders — the greatest generation who built this country,” Trudeau continued. “Going forward in the weeks and months to come, we will all have to ask tough questions about how it came to this.”
In terms of public policy, COVID-19 will leave behind a number of success stories. Thousands of public servants have worked to implement and deliver billions of dollars in relief. Federal and provincial leaders have collaborated across jurisdictions and party lines. The Canadian health care system has, so far, held up much better than the system in the United States.
A ‘broken’ system
But this pandemic also showed us where we’re failing as a country — in particular, how we care for the oldest and most vulnerable among us.
“I recognize the system is broken and we are going to fix the system,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said this week.
Other issues have come to the fore over the last month and a half: the importance of child care, the need for better and faster health and economic data, the limited fiscal capacity of some provinces, the fragility of international supply lines. But the most glaring problem to emerge is the one in our long-term care centres.
In Ontario, 573 residents of long-term care facilities have died — that’s 75 per cent of the province’s death toll. In Quebec, 1,045 residents have died — nearly 80 per cent of the provincial total.
“I think the tragedy of COVID-19 is that it’s exposed a number of the weaknesses that have been long-standing,” said Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Mount Sinai hospital and the University Health Network Hospitals in Toronto.
Soldiers in our seniors’ homes
Governments in Canada have responded to the immediate crisis with a number of short-term measures. The government of British Columbia took over staffing for some nursin