Horwath: Enough of your thoughts and prayers. Long-term care needs help, now

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Like everyone who read the Canadian Armed Forces report on Ontario’s long-term care homes, I was horrified, saddened and outraged. Cockroach infestations. Rotten food. Residents not bathed for weeks, left in soiled diapers and crying out for help.

The horror seniors in these facilities are enduring is inhumane. My heart breaks for them and their families. I can only imagine their anguish right now.

Thanks to the members of our Canadian Armed Forces, the veil has been lifted. It is clearer than ever that long-term care in Ontario is in crisis.

But this crisis is far from new.

For a generation, seniors care in Ontario has been getting worse.

In the late 1990s, Premier Mike Harris opened the door to for-profit companies operating long-term care homes in Ontario. Companies swooped in, taking advantage of the lack of regulations to cut corners, and pocket the difference as profit.

Between 2007 and 2016, Elizabeth Wettlaufer murdered eight long-term care residents and tried to murder six more. An inquiry showed how understaffing helped allow that to go unnoticed.

Throughout all this time, stories of residents with horrific bedsores, unseen falls and recurring infections have continued — and time and time again, the government of the day has sent thoughts and prayers, but never help.

In fact, government after government has swept Ontario’s long-term care problems under the rug.

The Liberals cancelled annual inspections of long-term care facilities in 2016, before a public outcry forced them to backtrack. They refused to expand the Wettlaufer inquiry into a broad public inquiry looking at long-term care as a whole.

The Ford government has gone down the same road, conducting just nine annual comprehensive inspections — called resident quality inspections — out of 626 long-term care homes. In his first budget, Doug Ford cut $34 million from long-term care.

Seniors and their families deserve so much better, and we need to act now to give it to them.

As of May 26, at least 1,531 Ontarians in long-term care have died of COVID-19. But there are still so many precious lives to be saved – so many grandmas and grandpas who need to make it through to hug their families again.

The government must urgently stamp out COVID-19 hotspots by ramping up inspections and having a hospital or public health authority take over every unsafe long-term care facility in the province.

They have to mandate infection control, isolation and minimum staffing requirements, and ensure every health-care worker has personal protective equipment, including N95 masks.

Then, we need to launch a full, transparent, independent, non-partisan public inquiry – a find-and-fix inquiry that is empowered to seek immediate solutions to problems it identifies.

We can fix things like low wages for personal support workers and the lack of minimum staffing requirements right now. But if we’re going to truly overhaul long-term care, Doug Ford’s closed-door commission, where the government reviews itself, is not going to cut it.

Then we can start the process of getting long-term care facilities out from under the ownership of private, for-profit corporations, making them public and community-based — because everyone deserves high-quality, dignified care, regardless of their ability to pay.

This week I spoke with Paul, whose mother is in a long-term care home living through an outbreak.

Paul’s mom survived Nazi bombs and rockets during the London Blitz. She, and so many seniors like her, have spent a lifetime helping to build our province, and a better world.

Now, it’s our turn to take care of her.

Andrea Horwath is the Leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party.