Driven by problems exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, election battle lines have been drawn over the future of long-term care in Ontario. How will places that house the elderly look in coming years? Who will own them?
“The biggest difference is they had 15 years to do it, and they didn’t,” she said of Liberal governments under premiers Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne from 2003 to 2018. “These are not things they believe, otherwise they would have already done them.”
Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca, who served as a cabinet minister under Wynne, attributed the Liberal change of heart on long-term care to his “new leadership” and compared the predominance of hospital-style long-term care homes to “warehousing” the elderly.The Ontario Long Term Care Association condemned Del Duca’s remarks that called traditional nursing homes “one of the greatest mistakes” of the last century on par with burning coal as fuel and Canada’s poor treatment of Indigenous Peoples.
“I will not be deterred,” he told reporters, dismissing the concerns as coming from “vested interests” in the long-term care industry. “It has become so clear during this pandemic, profit and in particular eldercare are completely incompatible.”