How many times will we victimize our seniors?

Has anyone asked seniors living in Long Term Care homes what they want?

UPDATE: Ontario’s Minister of Long Term Care confirmed these changes today, The Toronto Star reports.

The CBC reported yesterday that “tougher rules will be coming for long-term care homes in Ontario, given the rise in COVID-19 cases across the province and the threat of the omicron variant.”

These “tough rules” will likely include increased testing at Long Term Care homes and limiting residents to two visitors at a time, both of whom must be vaccinated. Unvaccinated seniors in Long Term Care will not be allowed to leave.

At some point, Ontario LTC homes stopped being residences and became prisons and their residents are now inmates.

Nowhere in the CBC story does it say what residents of LTC homes think of these “tougher rules.” That’s likely because no one has asked them. I understand that many LTC residents are not mentally competent to speak for themselves. But many others are. And most of those who are incompetent still have perfectly competent families to speak for them.

How many times will we victimize our seniors?

Think about this for a moment. Your 88-year old mother or grandma was born in 1933. She was born in the Great Depression, survived the Second World War, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Cold War. She learned to hide under her desk at school and may have helped her father dig a bomb-shelter in their backyard.

She may have had her appendix removed in a surgery that required primitive anesthesia and an extended hospital stay. Perhaps, she battled cancer. She’s almost certainly confronted her mortality more times than either you or I.

Now, most of her friends are dead. She can’t live alone any more. Her family hasn’t the time or space at home to take her in. So they pay an exorbitant fee for her to live in a sunny, pleasant “retirement home” where she gets three quality meals a day, enjoys time and recreation with new friends and care as needed from a loving, attentive and professional healthcare staff. At least, that’s how the brochure describes it.

Not any more.

In the past two years, she’s been locked up – perhaps against her will – and deprived of any real contact with her family. Now, she is about to be robbed once again of her freedom and any remaining joy she may derive from life.

She will not be able to celebrate her 89th – and maybe last – birthday with her children and grandkids. She’ll be locked, again, inside her “home” indefinitely. For her own protection. If she’s unable to be vaccinated, she’ll literally be held captive inside the building. For her own good, she’s told.

And nobody even asked her what she thought.

She knows she’s at the end of her life. She know this may be her last Christmas. Her last birthday. Her last everything.

Quite possibly, if asked, she would happily undergo confinement in an effort to eke out a few more precious months, days, minutes of God-given life. Sequestered away from family to avoid contagion.

But perhaps, all she wants to do is spend her last days doing things she enjoys, being with people she loves.

We’ll never know because no one asked her. No government official consulted with residents of LTC homes – or their families. I understand it would be impossible to speak with everyone. I recognize it would be impractical to provide one-size-fits-one solutions for each and every person in LTC. But, in no other interaction with our government would we ever tolerate a complete and utter lack of consultation.

The city can’t paint the park benches in my local “parkette” without undertaking a laborious door-to-door survey and three public meetings to “engage and consult” with the community.

Surely, we could ask seniors if they want to be held prisoner by a government that isn’t competent enough to come up with a better plan, and doesn’t care enough to even try. Or, ask their families if their beloved mother should be forced to sit alone, and die alone, because someone smarter than us all knows what’s good for her.

And, she and her family get to pay for it.

The least our government could do is ask her what she wants.

How do you feel about the way we’ve treated seniors during this pandemic?