Liberal MP tables bill that would criminalize long-term care neglect but concerns linger

Posted: July 18, 2022

(July 16, 2022)

By: Marie-Danielle Smith, The Canadian Press

Cathy Legere saw firsthand the conditions that elder residents of long-term care were enduring, and the intense pressure that personal care staff were under, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The retired infection control nurse volunteered her services at the Orchard Villa home where her father-in-law, Nick, was a resident, in April 2020 — and said she witnessed a deeply “broken” system before contracting the virus herself.

As she isolated herself at home, she was horrified to learn that her father-in-law, Nick, was left in a room for almost 24 hours with the dead body of a resident he’d watched slowly succumb to the disease over two days.

The appalling stories that emerged out of long-term care settings during the early pandemic, especially as reported by Canadian military members who were brought in to help, prompted the Liberal government to promise in its 2020 throne speech that it would work on Criminal Code amendments to “explicitly penalize those who neglect seniors under their care.”

Nearly two years later, the government hasn’t made any major moves.

That makes Legere, who is party to a major class-action lawsuit against Ontario care homes, feel all the more cynical about seeing any accountability: “Is this something that is going to do anything, or is this just the Liberals going, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll do this,’ and everybody will just coast again?”

Liberal Hedy Fry, the longest-serving female MP in the House of Commons, is trying to take matters into her own hands and propose changes that could form a road map for the government’s approach.