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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 BĂ©langer-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 OutbreaksÂ
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.
VULNERABLE
The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Titel
- VULNERABLE
- Untertitel
- The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Autoren
- Vanessa MacDonnell
- Jane Philpott
- Sophie Thériault
- Sridhar Venkatapuram
- Verlag
- Ottawa Press
- Datum
- 2020
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 9780776636429
- Abmessungen
- 15.2 x 22.8 cm
- Seiten
- 648
- Kategorien
- Coronavirus
- International