Revera Inc., the international chain of for-profit long-term care homes owned by the Government of Canada, is in the news again – and, as in the early stages of the pandemic, it is not good news.
This time the bad tidings come from England where a Revera subsidiary, Signature Senior Lifestyle, owns and operates 36 high-end LTC homes, said to be the most expensive in the United Kingdom; residents pay nearly £100,000 a year (or roughly $12,250 Cdn per month) for what the operators promise will be “luxury living, exceptional care.”
On Thursday, the UK Guardian, using footage from a camera hidden in her room, dramatically documented the “exceptional” care afforded to one patient, 88-year-old Ann King, who suffers from dementia, at a Signature home, Reigate Grange in Surrey. King’s children had planted the camera earlier this year when they suspected that their mother was being mentally and physically abused by her caregivers.
They got, and passed to the Guardian, more proof than they had anticipated or ever wanted. They saw and heard her being taunted, mocked, sworn at, and manhandled by staff members until she cried. One day, she was left lying helpless on the floor for 50 minutes. She was lying in bed when a cleaner hit her with a rag he had used to clean a toilet. The same cleaner threatened to empty a trash basket on her head and made obscene gestures in her face. When King, frightened and disoriented, asked where she was, a male support worker bent over her face and told her, “You’re in a fucking home.”
King’s son and daughter took the footage to the Surrey police who charged the cleaner with assault. One care worker has been fired, two resigned when confronted with the allegations, and one has been retrained. The manager was transferred laterally to another Signature home with a vote of confidence – “a committed and values-driven home leader” – from the company, which blamed “rogue individuals” for the incidents. Signature offered the King family compensation approximating the cost of a one-month stay at Reigate Grange. They declined.
Of course, elder abuse can occur anywhere in any facility for seniors. But what happened in Surrey matters here because it involves a Rivera company. Rivera is not just another LTC firm. It belongs, lock, stock and barrel, to the people of Canada; it’s a consistently profitable jewel in the $230-billion portfolio of the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, the crown corporation that invests the pension contributions of federal civil servants and members of the military and RCMP. Revera’s size alone – about 500 properties with 50,000 employees, in Canada, the U.S. and the UK – makes Canada one of the leaders in what is known as the “senior living sector.”
Yet Revera is cause for concern. Canada’s LTC sector performed poorly in the early stages of the pandemic. LTC homes accounted for 81 per cent of the COVID deaths, double the average in other developed countries, and the for-profit segment, of which Revera is a prominent part, performed especially poorly. Inadequate supervision, short-staffing, and cutbacks in spending on patient care were common criticisms. One of the most dangerous places in southern Ontario for a senior to be in those months was Revera’s Forest Heights LTC home in Kitchener; the provincial government finally stepped in to replace its management.
There were calls from labour and other groups at the time for the PSPIB to divest itself of Revera. It’s time for more calls. The sacred independence of crown corporations be darned. Think ethics. Trudeau government should be asking itself whether it really wants to be in the business of owning outfits dedicated to making money by squeezing a profit out of senior citizens in their declining years.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com