JUST Committee Report

NDP Supplemental Report on Elder Abuse in Canada

New Democrat MPs are proud to support the report of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on elder abuse in Canada but wish to add some important supplementary observations to this report.

New Democrats believe that this report identifies important actions that could be taken to bring elder abuse out of the shadows and reduce its frequency and severity.  The actions recommended by the Justice Committee include working with the provinces and community groups to increase awareness of elder abuse in all its forms, facilitate reporting and investigating elder abuse in all settings, provide whistleblower protection, and strengthen prevention and protection efforts.  Taken together and given sufficient and stable funding, these measures will make a real difference in the lives of seniors across the country.   The Committee notes the need for culturally appropriate supports and services to be provided to help reduce senior abuse among more marginalized populations in Canada, including Indigenous people, new Canadians, and the SOGIE community, in order to meet this challenge.

While acknowledging that most seniors do not live in institutional settings, the COVID pandemic has drawn our attention to serious failings in terms of quality of care in many long-term care facilities. While local staff have sometimes been held responsible for failures to provide adequate care that result in injury or even death, no owners or corporate executives of long term care companies who set the policies and working conditions that lead to these failures have ever been held criminally responsible for the resulting injuries or deaths, not even in the case of the hundreds of deaths during the pandemic. Many witnesses who appeared before the committee called for amendments to the criminal code to create a new offence of criminal endangerment.  Such a new offence would allow for the corporations, operators, administrators and directors who own and manage long-term care facilities to be held accountable in cases of elder abuse and neglect. New Democrats fought hard to make sure this recommendation appeared in the report and thank the other parties who agreed to support this recommendation.  

While New Democrats believe that long-term care should be public, as there is no room for profit in the care of our most vulnerable citizens, we believe that the ability to hold owners and corporate executives responsible when their failures and profit-driven policies lead to death and misery is an important step forward. 

Two further recommendations resulting from the lessons learned in the COVID pandemic were unfortunately not included in the report despite powerful evidence presented to the committee.  We believe that creation of national standards for long-term care could help improve quality of care in long term care facilities and also prove a standard by which failure to provide necessary care can be judged. These standards should include enhanced minimum direct personal care hours per resident and measures to improve working conditions in long-term care given that the conditions of work are the conditions of care.  We would also have liked to see included a recommendation that called on the federal government to implement programs to help prevent elder abuse in institutional settings by phasing out profit in long-term care.  Again the committee heard testimony demonstrating that for-profit long-term care facilities had much poorer records when it came to deaths of residents during COVID.  The fact that seniors were significantly safer in non-profit or publicly operated facilities makes the need to phase out for-profit care self-evident.

New Democrats support taking action toward protecting seniors from abuse in all its forms and the recommendations in the Justice Committee report combined with the additional recommendations suggested in this supplemental report set out a clear path to ensuing better care for seniors and better protection from elder abuse in all its forms.