Hello. My name is Laura Tamblyn Watts, chief executive officer of CanAge, Canada’s national seniors’ advocacy organization. We are a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization that works to advance the rights and well-being of all older Canadians. We thank you for the opportunity to make submissions to you today on this bill.

We know that the context of COVID-19, the long-standing pre-COVID-19 challenges in long-term care and the seniors' health staffing crisis weigh heavy in everyone’s mind for this discussion.

By background, I am a lawyer. I spent more than 20 years working in the field of elder law and elder abuse. I'm past chair of the national elder law section of the Canadian Bar Association. I was a member of the national standards for long-term care advisory and technical committees. I'm also a faculty member at the University of Toronto's faculty of social work, where I teach law and aging. As head of CanAge, I supported the previous JUST committee inquiry in 2021, being in favour of creating a very carefully worded criminal elder abuse charge.

Given that background, it may be quite surprising to hear that I am here to respectfully submit that this bill should not go further. In common parlance, this bill has been heralded by some as very good-hearted but wrong-headed. We thank the sponsor for her passion and commitment to seniors, and we appreciate the emphasis on the issue of institutional abuse. The idea is important, but in our respectful view, the issue does not achieve its stated goal through this legislation.

It also seems, based on the background explanation of this bill, to try to use the Criminal Code as punishment for what we at CanAge believe is a failure of the Canadian funding system or attention on seniors care generally. Seniors need a system that works, not a system that is underfunded and ignored. We need a robust long-term care system, not to punish individuals for working in a system that is actually set up to fail.

Very specifically with regard to this bill, our concerns are threefold.

First, like so many other witnesses have said, we believe that this bill is overbroad in its wording and will have significant unintended negative consequences. The language of long-term care itself does not adequately capture the provincial terminologies, which range from “residential care” in B.C. to “personal care homes” in Manitoba, for instance. The language is imprecise.

Second, there are already existing tools and methods combined with ones we hope and expect to come down from our federal and provincial governments, such as a seniors safe act and perhaps the new promised Criminal Code provisions that we discussed so deeply in 2021.

Third, we also have the adoption of national standards, which have only been introduced in the last few months. While there is a $14-billion price tag, about 67% of long-term care homes have already committed to or are in the process of actually adopting those national standards.

Very specifically with regard to the overbroad wording, we believe that the proposed amendments are drafted in a loose way. We have heard from others that the language around “manager” and the lack of definition for “owner” expose existing and future professionals to increased liability. They would certainly discourage participation in the long-term care sector.

Nobody enters the long-term care profession with the goal of hurting seniors, and the staff are already so traumatized from what they had to go through with COVID-19 that the idea they're going to have additional criminal liabilities targeted specifically at them would, in our respectful view, be catastrophic to recruitment and retention in this area.

Specifically, we also take note of the nurses and their recommendations for a deeper consideration of the impact this would have on them. We note, with some great concern, that this could have even captured our federal Minister of Seniors, who went back into long-term care at a very challenged home in her jurisdiction to help out during a pandemic. Under some of the wordings of “manager”, she might have been captured inadvertently.

We also would like to think about the word “vulnerable”. I note with great pleasure my colleague Marie Beaulieu and her discussion that vulnerability is not an intrinsic issue. Indeed, to call an older person vulnerable as an intrinsic issue, we believe, is ageist. We do underscore the importance of understanding social vulnerability.

Our second point is that the qualifications for criminal misconduct are overbroad and vague as well. These amendments, in our respectful view, do not provide greater clarity. They perhaps trod on the existing Criminal Code and its deep provincial legislative provisions. The problem is not that the authority does not exist. The problem is that nobody uses the existing authority.

Additionally, there's the very well-thought-out and promised charge of criminal elder abuse that we discussed in 2021. We urge the committee to consider that robust set of conclusions instead.

Last, we believe that Canada is unique in the OECD in not having a national seniors strategy. We don't have a national long-term care strategy. We do not have a national elder abuse strategy. Funding to combat elder abuse has not been substantially done—

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