Page - 349 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

349Fault Lines: COVID-19, the Charter, and Long-term Care told me she didn’t want to go there… But they were telling her that was the only option she had.”52 The violations of long-term care residents’ s. 7 rights can be ascribed to where they receive care. As the Globe  and  Mail averred: “If COVID-19 has shown us anything, it’s that whatever is done to protect hospitals during pandemics also needs to be done for seniors’ facilities.”53 The infringement of long-term care residents’ s. 15 rights are, on the other hand, a consequence of who they are. More than anywhere else, long-term care residents in Canada bore a disparate and unfair share of the cost of pandemic preparedness.54 Unlike other Canadians, they did not receive the “equal protection and equal ben- efit” of that pandemic planning, or of the publicly funded health and hospital system it was trying to defend.55 Instead, “most of the nurs- ing—and retirement home residents who have succumbed to COVID- 19 in Canada died inside the virus-stricken understaffed facilities, while many of the hospital beds opened up for coronavirus patients sat empty.”56 Whether intentional or not, governments’ pandemic-related actions and inaction amounted to differential, adverse, treatment that perpetuated disadvantage on a number of prohibited grounds of dis- crimination—most obviously on the basis of age. As Martine Lagacé, Linda Garcia, and Louise Bélanger-Hardy contend in Chapter D-2 of this book,57 the role of ageism cannot be overstated: “The COVID- 19 pandemic may be unprecedented in recent times, but its impacts are being felt in [long-term care facilities] because of the way seniors’ care has been undervalued, underfunded, and privatized.”58 Carole Estabrooks summarizes a more insidious dynamic: “About 95 per cent 52. Grant & Ha, supra note 5. The facility in question was one singled out in the Canadian Military’s damning report on conditions in five Ontario nursing homes the military was called in to support; Brewster & Kapelos, supra note 27. 53. Globe and Mail, supra note 25. 54. Adelina Comas-Herrera et al, Mortality  Associated  with  COVID-19  Outbreaks  in  Care  Homes:  Early  International  Evidence (last modified 21 May 2020), online (pdf): International  Long  Term  Care  Policy  Network <ltccovid.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/05/Mortality-associated-with-COVID-21-May-6.pdf>. 55. Eldridge, supra note 40; Quebec  (Attorney  General)  v  A, 2013 SCC 5 at para 332. 56. Brewster & Kapelos, supra note 27. 57. Martine Lagacé, Linda Garcia & Louise Bélanger-Hardy, this volume, Chapter D-2. 58. Andrew Longhurst & Kendra Strauss, “Time to End Profit-making in Seniors’ Care” (22 April 2020), online: Policynote <www.policynote.ca/seniors-care- profit/>; Susan Bradley, “Our Long-term Care System is Failing Because we are Ageist”, Ottawa  Citizen (26 May 2020) A9; Susan Mintzberg, “Long-Term Care: Please Let Families Back In”, Ottawa  Citizen (15 May 2020) A7.