These Seniors Homes Were Fined for Their Failures. The Province Let Them Expand Anyway.

Posted: June 7, 2026

(June 6, 2026) By: Inori Roy with data collection by Ilyass Mofaddel, The Local

New analysis of government data shows that nearly a third of long-term care companies approved to expand or renew their operations by the Ministry of Long-Term Care were also fined for failing to meet provincial care standards.

When the pandemic revealed the grim state of affairs inside Ontario’s long-term care homes, advocates pointed to two decades of steady privatization as the cause. Seniors in for-profit homes were facing more severe COVID outbreaks, and dying in greater numbers, than their peers in non-profit and municipal homes. Scholars and health care practitioners argued that the financialization of senior care had left those very seniors behind, in the pursuit of wealth for shareholders and expanding portfolios for the for-profit giants in the industry.

After the pandemic, the provincial government promised more beds in long-term care to meet the needs of a rapidly aging population, and people hoped that the authorities deciding the future of the sector would take heed from the lessons of the pandemic. In the years since, that has appeared not to be the case. Now, new data analysis by The Local reveals that 30 percent of the companies approved by the province to build and run the long-term care homes of tomorrow have been fined by the same government for what it determined were their failures to meet care standards.

The Local’s analysis comes from cross-referencing information available on the province’s public long-term care relicensing registry—which lists the Ministry of Long-Term Care’s decision-making process for companies vying to either renew their long-term care operating licences or obtain new ones to build more homes—and exclusive data obtained through a freedom of information request on administrative monetary penalties (AMPs) issued by the province. AMPs are fines that homes receive from the ministry when it determines that they’ve repeatedly failed to meet a standard set by the 2021 Fixing Long-Term Care Act. 

The data reveals that between January 2022 and July 2025, the operators being approved for licence renewal have paid more than $570,000 in collective penalties to the province. This may be pocket change compared to the bottom lines of some of these companies, but it suggests a much bigger quality problem at their homes. For a home to be penalized, the Ministry of Long-Term Care must find it to have repeatedly failed to follow their directive. A base fine is $1,100—meaning that $570,000 represents a vast number of persistent failures in the ministry’s eyes. And because long-term care development, upgrading, and expansion are all underwritten by provincial funding, these findings mean that the same homes being penalized for their apparent failures by the Ministry of Long-Term Care are then being rewarded with millions in funding by the province.

Among the worst offenders for ministry fines are for-profit companies Extendicare and Caressant Care, who, in part by virtue of their expansive portfolio of long-term care homes, have each racked up more than $100,000 in penalties since the province began fining homes in 2022. Extendicare is named as the licence-holder for ten proposed or approved long-term care projects on the ministry’s list, and is tied to three more projects through its partnership with the wealth management firm Axium. These projects range from taking over an existing licence from a different company, to renewing an existing licence for another few decades, to putting shovels in the ground to build a new home.

Caressant Care director Kayla Ritz said in a statement that the company “continues proactive, organization-wide action to ensure we are meeting the high standards our residents deserve,” adding that relicensing and redevelopment are a “vital opportunity to modernize aging infrastructure and better serve the evolving needs of Ontario’s seniors.” Extendicare and Axium did not respond to The Local’s request for comment.

“The companies that were the most egregious performers during the pandemic…in terms of poor inspections, in terms of taking the profits without providing the care—those companies have now been the biggest winners,” says Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition. “Nothing happened to them, to penalize them at all, or to hold them accountable. They’ve been rewarded—and what’s the lesson then, for a for-profit company?”

Also on the list are companies like Kindera Living (under its former name, Rykka Care Centres) and Southbridge—large for-profit companies that own homes notorious for their high infection rates and deaths during the pandemic, and particularly for the conditions in which their residents died. Kindera was approved for an expansion and a 30-year licence renewal despite two of their homes requiring intervention from the Canadian Armed Forces during the pandemic and the company having been fined more than $37,000 since then. Southbridge is slated to build more than 1,600 new beds alongside renewing their licences to operate, redevelop, or take ownership of hundreds more—but just last fall, the Ontario Superior court green-lit a class-action lawsuit against the company and a handful of other for-profit home operators, permitting plaintiffs to sue for alleged gross negligence. In those proceedings, Southbridge denied the allegations; they did not respond to The Local’s request for comment.

Cathy Parkes has been advocating for greater accountability in long-term care since her father, Paul Parkes, died at Southbridge’s Orchard Villa during the devastating first wave of COVID in 2020. During that phase of the pandemic, conditions in the Pickering home were appalling, with the Armed Forces reporting roaches and rotting food in the building, alarming failures in care by staff, and routine indignities imposed upon residents. Despite this, a little over a year later, Orchard Villa’s parent company Southbridge was permitted to expand the home, renew its operating licence for 30 years, and change its name. In 2023, the minister for long-term care at the time permitted the home to develop a new 15-storey building with more than 500 beds. But as recently as last year, Orchard Villa was among the top ten homes in the province being written-up after the ministry found it failed to meet long-term care quality standards.

“It felt like we had a chance to speak, but we weren’t really heard,” Parkes says of the relicensing consultation process with the ministry and Southbridge. During that time, a few years ago now, it had seemed like the ministry and the operators were focused only on the future, and blind to the home’s past. “We were saying, ‘But you have to look at the history, this home has not run things properly. How on earth can you give them more beds?’ And it was ignored at every turn.”

After the pandemic, the Ford government promised 30,000 new long-term care beds and 15,000 upgraded beds to meet the massive demands of Ontario’s aging population. The waitlist for long-term care is estimated to be 50,000 strong today. But critics say that the province seems willing to meet that goal at any cost, regardless of the quality of care the homes may provide.

“The notion that competition creates quality really doesn’t apply here,” says Pat Armstrong, a York University professor emeritus and scholar on long-term care. In an environment of scarcity, where the population is aging more rapidly than long-term care homes are being developed, desperate people seeking care are forced to endure terrible conditions. Homes aren’t incentivized to improve, and the province isn’t incentivized to turn down any development opportunities. (The Local could not find any proposals in the province’s registry that appear to have been rejected. The Ministry of Long-Term Care did not respond to The Local’s request for comment.)

“You’re not supposed to renew or expand the licence of a place that has a bad record,” Armstrong explains. “So it makes you wonder what constitutes that record.”

The Fixing Long-Term Care Act states that a licence to operate a long-term care home should only be issued if the past conduct of the owner indicates “that the home will be operated in accordance with the law and with honesty and integrity,” and ”not be operated in a manner that is prejudicial to the health, safety or welfare of its residents.”

The act also gives the ministry the option of taking into consideration “the balance between non-profit and for-profit long-term care homes” when they make their licensing decisions. There’s no indication this has been the case. New proposals and approvals have been posted to the province’s licensing site in the last three years, but The Local’s analysis shows the proportion of for-profit homes has remained steady since 2022, making up the majority of all proposed or approved projects as the Toronto Star reported at the time.

Lisa Levin, chief executive officer of AdvantAge Ontario, the organization representing the province’s non-profit homes, attributes this to the significant financial demands that come with proposing a new long-term care build or expansion. “Not-for-profit homes, especially small, standalone operators, generally do not have the same access to equity as for-profit chains, which makes it harder to secure financing,” she told The Local in an email. Government funding only kicks in later in the process, once the project has been approved, she wrote.

In collecting data from the provincial registry, The Local did find new real estate developers and private equity companies entering the long-term care sector. Though there have been improvements in up-front funding by the province, Levin says, the not-for-profit sector cannot meaningfully keep pace with the overwhelming commercial interest in long-term care unless the province provides dedicated funding to support the early steps of a development proposal, alongside guaranteed financing programs and access to public land for non-profit homes.

Unless there’s a sea change in how the province makes decisions about senior care—unless there is a real willingness to hold homes accountable for their failures, critics say—the next generation of seniors will have to endure the same indignities as this one.

In November 2025, redevelopment began at Orchard Villa in Pickering. Cathy Parkes can’t bring herself to even drive by the site. “To go now and see them building would probably break my heart,” she says. “There’s no morality to any of this.”

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