Stephen Katz, a professor of Sociology at Trent University and faculty member of the Trent Centre for Aging and Society
The first Canadian deaths from the COVID-19 virus were older residents of long-term care homes. As such places quickly became ‘hot spots’, their residents, by nature of their age, appear destined to be viral cases.
However, the vulnerability of older Canadians had already been augmented by Premier Doug Ford and Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party, who, once elected in the summer of 2018, began targeting health care services.
When the provincial budget emerged in 2019, it included plans to cut public health by 27 percent. The budget’s agenda of closures, cancellations, mergers, reductions, restructuring and privatization left no social service or hospital, health or public testing unit, telehealth or medical research center untouched. Particularly hard hit were vulnerable populations, including older adults requiring care and support.
Although some of Premier Ford’s proposals were delayed or rolled back, cuts affecting long-term care homes, healthcare workers’ jobs and salaries, and some OHIP coverage for seniors, are ongoing.
While the province’s elimination of out-of-country health coverage became a major lobby issue for seniors’ organizations, more insidious were the less publicized stresses and strains the cuts were creating for families and their elder members.
Overall, I am not surprised we are in a situation where containing the COVID-19 contagion in care homes for older residents and staff is so difficult. At the time of this writing, nearly half of Ontario’s COVID-19 related deaths have been residents of provincial long-term care homes.
Part of my work, as a sociologist researching age and aging, is making connections between wider political forces and the social sphere of everyday experience.
I am well aware that Canada’s population is aging. Government statistics tell us that in 2019, 6.5 million Canadians were aged 65 or older, representing 17.5 percent of Canada’s population. By 2030, seniors will number over 9.5 million and make up 23 percent of Canadians. Further, our current decade is the first one in history where the number of seniors is greater than the number of children (14 and younger).
These are not just demographic facts, but political, economic and social challenges as well. Such statistical scenarios and their predictions are often accompanied in media and gerontological reports with dire warnings about the burdens to come, as if aging in our country is a threat, for which younger people will have to pay, with few positive outcomes for anybody.
This narrow and ageist model of Canada’s future has fed into the kinds of reckless austerity budgets and lack of adequate consultation that governments, such as Ontario’s, are enacting.
Even before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, the care for older people in Ontario was suffering from underfunding, with long waiting lists and scattered services. Meanwhile, national income inequalities are rising.
While our ageist culture stereotypes older Canadians as privileged, elderly poverty rates have actually increased in the past two decades, government transfers have shrunk, and older single women in particular have become a rapidly growing poverty group.
The mix of current retrogressive politics, pervasive cultural ageism, growing elder poverty, reduction in health transfers, and poor planning around age-friendly housing, safety, transportation and services, is a toxic one that accelerates old age crises and destabilizes resilient family networks and communities. For older people it is not just their age that puts them at risk, but the ways in which accumulated social disadvantages in life add up.
We can only do so much to slow viral contagion. But we can attend to and strengthen our communities as multi-generational resources. We can also condemn the dooming and damning of older people as burdens and begin to see them as resourceful and innovative leaders, many of whom have lived through and survived the most dramatic crises of the modern era. And we can raise our voices against politicians who clap and cheer at Queen’s Park over more thoughtless cuts to our health budgets in the name of‘efficiency’, ‘savings’ and ‘rationalization.’
Trent Research Group on the Pandemic 