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Nora Loreto
76 Plays3 years ago
Every day for the past 14 months independent journalist Nora Loreto has tallied up COVID deaths in residential care. We chat with Nora about her incredibly valuable but unpaid journalism, the long-term care disaster and the state of Canadian media. Don't miss it.
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Transcript
Introduction to Off-Court Pod
00:00:01
Speaker
The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network. A podcast on the network that I want to highlight is the entire first season of Off-Court Pod featuring friend of the show Abdul Malik and A.T. Antobin. It tells irreverent but also deeply researched and interesting stories about the history and political economy of sports.
00:00:19
Speaker
And that's just one show. There's a ton of other amazing content on Harbinger, and I can't say how much of a fantastic project that it is. So to support it, to get access to exclusive shows and other supporter-only content, go to harbingermedianetwork.com. Now, on to the show.
Meet The Progress Report Hosts
00:00:47
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiskwichiwa, Skaigan, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty Six territory on the banks of the Kasis-Kasau, Wannasipi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today is independent journalist and co-host of the Sandy and Nora podcast, and someone who I'm just incredibly glad exists and does the work she does. It's Nora Loreto. Nora, welcome to the pod. Hey, thank you for having me.
Pandemic Reflections
00:01:16
Speaker
So small talk question, the primary small talk question of the next few months is, uh, have you gotten your shot yet? Have you, have you got it scheduled or have you been vaccinated? What's your, what's your status? Yeah, I have my appointment that is up in almost a week, just under a week. So by next Monday I will have had my first dose. So I'm pretty excited about that. What about you? Yeah, I got vaccinated like literally the first day that people in my age group could get vaccinated. So last Thursday,
00:01:44
Speaker
So I am on it. My partner got vaccinated a few days after me. And, um, yeah, no, it's just, uh, I mean, shit is fucked up here, but getting vaccinated is like a thing I can control. Yeah. And so, so here we are and I, for one, I'm ready for what did, what did Justin Trudeau call it? One dose summer.
00:02:05
Speaker
Sure, it's like whatever. Yeah, I'm ready as well for a summer that doesn't look like last summer. Although, you know, we still made the best out of an okay situation, a shitty situation, but it was okay.
00:02:19
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, if you're outside, it's your summertime. You know what I mean? I mean, if my circle of people is less, that sucks. But I mean, winter got pretty fucking dark. I gotta say that. Yeah. Yeah. Here too. Especially in like December when our fucking cases were peaking and people were dropping dead and it was, and just Jason Kenny was like, did not give a fuck.
00:02:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, we, um, you know, the sun sets here at about two o'clock and, uh, our, our winter got pretty, pretty lonely and cold as well. And, uh, and what made it worse was that we had such a little amount of snow that it was like, Ooh, this is weird. We could even go sledding or do like skiing. No, we had, I mean, it's Quebec city, we had a good amount of snow, but like, it was like 10% of what's normal. So it was a bit weird. We didn't have that much shoveling, I'd say, I guess.
00:03:10
Speaker
I mean, Jason Kenny has been trying to frame this as the best summer ever. And I think that might be a little ambitious. I think one summer might be a little more realistic and doable, but I don't like either of those politicians. So let's stop talking about them. So, okay.
Tracking COVID-19 Deaths
00:03:27
Speaker
So Nora, the big reason why I wanted to have you on is the work you're doing tracking COVID deaths and particularly tracking COVID deaths in regards to residential care.
00:03:40
Speaker
Can you just give us a sense of the scale of what you've done and like how many deaths have you actually tracked down to residential care? And like, what do you kind of classify as residential care? Like give us the kind of like explanation of this work that you've been doing.
00:03:56
Speaker
Sure. So I started more than a year ago when news reports started to come out of really high mass death counts within some facilities. And the first facilities that were on people's radars were, well, I mean, the real first one was the residence Aaron, the Heron in Dorval in Quebec. And the Montreal Gazette broke this news with the stories that were just like horrific from people dying.
00:04:26
Speaker
on the floor, in their beds, in their own waste, and all these kinds of things that we've since heard from many other facilities as well. At the same time, there was a massive outbreak in a very small town in Ontario called Bob Cajun, and some larger centres were starting to see mass deaths as well, because of course, there's a delay between the virus showing up at all, and then the virus showing up in residential care, and then the delay that it requires to actually result in deaths.
00:04:53
Speaker
I was counting this every night. In the beginning, it was very hard to get this data because most public health agencies were not releasing it. You would hear stories of certain facilities in Quebec having a lot of deaths, but there'd be no official count. What I started to do was to go through obituaries to try and see if there was obituaries that mentioned someone had died from COVID and where they had been living, which was not a super precise measurement.
00:05:20
Speaker
It at least created kind of like a skeleton of where the real hotspots were. And so by the end of May, when the Quebec Ministry of Health actually started to issue this in daily briefings, how many people had died in each residence, the numbers were way low because of course most families wouldn't say this kind of thing in an obituary, but the ones that were high, I had already been able to track. There was several deaths associated with that facility.
00:05:45
Speaker
So that's how I started. Um, and since, uh, it has evolved somewhat because the data has changed, it has gotten better and it's also gotten worse depending on where you are in Canada. And sometimes it's as simple as Quebec, which is, I don't have to search anything. I just have to go to the Quebec ministry website and add the information for the day, although it's not cumulative. So I have to do it every day. So I don't miss one.
00:06:06
Speaker
And then there's situations like Alberta where it's kind of like whether or not the ministry or Alberta Health Services wants to just mention new deaths and if they were connected to an outbreak. And so you get this weird situation where sometimes Alberta says like a lot of information and it's really great and it says exactly where the person probably got COVID and died. And so like, for example, I know that thanks to one report from AHS, there was at least one death related to an outbreak in Lethbridge.
00:06:33
Speaker
In a church gathering of some sort. That's not the kind of information that we've gotten anywhere else, but it also only happened once. And so I don't know what's going on with the HS and why we're not getting or the Ministry of Health and why we're not getting, you know, daily consistent reporting, but that means that I also then have to crawl through media reports.
00:06:51
Speaker
And I started to crawl through GoFundMe, which is pretty fraught because it means that I'm reading between 25 and 50 pages a night, whether they're public health pages or news sites or GoFundMe. And I make mistakes and I miss stuff and it's really tedious and it's really time consuming. But that is what I have been doing every night now since about April 13th.
00:07:15
Speaker
And so residential care facilities, like what falls under this rubric that you have kind of created here.
Understanding Residential Care
00:07:23
Speaker
Right. So residential care facility is like a long or a shorthand, I guess, way of describing any facility where someone is sleeping inside of it. It's not an official term because within like the hospital care, the hospital system, there's different ways of talking about different levels of care, but essentially it's any facility that someone has died within and they were in that facility's care.
00:07:51
Speaker
And so the majority of what's on the list is long-term care, which what people would associate with the highest number of deaths in Canada. And so long-term care is an official term. It's long-term living for people who have complex medical needs.
00:08:08
Speaker
And then after that, the second largest group is retirement residences, which are not long-term care facilities, but often have very similar kinds of services. And they also have the same operators oftentimes. And so it is a bit confusing to figure out if a facility is long-term care or retirement, if you're a layperson and journalists haven't really been that great in making sure people understand the difference.
00:08:29
Speaker
Um, there's a bunch of jargon there too, right? Like in Alberta, we have like supportive living, which is like kind of like long-term care light or whatever. And every province has this kind of do these different.
00:08:41
Speaker
know, designations and nomenclature, right? Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of like the most important question is how regulated are they? And so, you know, long-term care is very highly regulated. But then depending on where you are, retirement living often just looks like apartment living. And, you know, there might be some regulations related to food or related to the care that you might get living in one of these facilities, but by and large, it's like an apartment complex and it's really treated as such.
00:09:07
Speaker
Then you have adult assisted living which sometimes is long-term care or sometimes you know rehab facilities specifically for adults who are who are expected to live for many many years but that might need complex care to help them with their daily needs.
00:09:23
Speaker
And those also range from being regulated to not at all regulated. And, you know, and then as I'm collecting this, it's like, well, I'm seeing all this stuff every night, so I might as well just make a list of everything I see. So, you know, so jails and prisons are on the list. There are shelters and group homes are on the list.
00:09:42
Speaker
And increasingly, hospitals are on the list because there's been a lot of cases that have been caught in hospital that have led to death.
COVID Deaths in Care Facilities: A Breakdown
00:09:51
Speaker
So I've tracked just over a thousand, and that number got a huge bump thanks to work that journalists at, I think it was La Press, but now that I'm saying it, I'm like, oh my gosh, was it La Press or I do Canada? I don't remember. It just came out this past week.
00:10:04
Speaker
But anyway, through an FOI, journalists got government data that showed that more than 400 people had died within hospital in Quebec that hadn't been previously reported. And you know, there's some situations like one hospital in the town of Saint Jerome, which is north of Montreal, there's been at least 76 people that died from getting COVID in hospital. So these are really big outbreaks oftentimes, but they're just not consistently reported. And so that's also a part of my list.
00:10:33
Speaker
Interesting. And so what, what does the final tally come to? Like what percentage of total deaths in Canada are happening in these residential care facilities?
00:10:44
Speaker
Well, that, you know, I actually hesitate to give you a number because, so what I've tracked overall, if you look at overall residential care, the numbers that are about 70%. And, you know, you take the total number of officially, you know, counted COVID deaths and, you know, make a percentage out of that based on however many I've added up and I've added up more than 17,000 deaths.
00:11:06
Speaker
But the problem with giving an exact count for long-term care versus retirement care versus blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is it assumes that we even have good numbers. And so for a lot of this pandemic, it was in the high 80s that we were identifying people were dying in residential care, specifically long-term care from COVID.
00:11:26
Speaker
But as the numbers have continued to shift and as more information has come out about excess death information, and this is something that I'm working on with researchers from different universities, excess deaths in this country are far higher than what they should have been. And there's good reason to believe that a surprising number, a huge chunk of deaths, of COVID deaths have not been reported.
00:11:53
Speaker
And so there's been a lot of attention in the third wave on just how many younger people had been hit by COVID that hadn't been hit in the first two waves. But I'm not totally convinced that that's what's happening. It seems more likely that actually deaths that had happened in the first wave especially and then also in the second wave.
00:12:12
Speaker
that they presented potentially atypically or the person didn't have a COVID test once they died. And so we missed a lot of deaths, even among working age people that otherwise should be in our account, which is a long way to say. I mean, we are at 70%, but the number is probably closer to 50%. And that's just kind of like an educated guess based on everything that I've been staring at for the last two weeks.
00:12:39
Speaker
Interesting. And so one of the other things that your spreadsheet keeps track of is, you know, whether these are private for-profit facilities, whether these are publicly owned facilities, what has, you know, you've been keeping track of this longer than anyone and staring at this spreadsheet for a long ass time. What have you found when it comes to, you know, deaths of people in private facilities versus, you know, not for profit or public facilities?
00:13:06
Speaker
Yeah, so generally, and I'm going to have to say generally because there is a caveat to that, but generally long-term care facilities that are operated at a for-profit model have been more deadly than public ones. And the reason why I say generally is because the one system that kind of throws a wrench into that, you know, I guess that analysis is Quebec where the overwhelming majority of deaths happened within public care homes.
00:13:33
Speaker
But I think what's much more important to talk about than public versus private is the private sector logic, the profit-driven logic that has infected all aspects of long-term care, whether or not that's public or private. And that is really, I think, what has led to the most death and the most suffering. When the military report came out last spring in the first wave, it was really interesting to see the difference in
00:14:03
Speaker
depraved descriptions of the facilities in a private versus a public facility. So in the Ontario facilities, they're all private and the practices and the descriptions of what was happening were really horrific, like, you know, just the filthy kind of disgusting unsanitary practices that were happening.
00:14:24
Speaker
Whereas in the public facilities in Quebec, you didn't have that level of horror. It was much more like people got COVID and we couldn't stop them from getting COVID and they died. Part of that is related to architecture and there's a lot of research that's looked at this and it makes obviously a lot of sense.
00:14:43
Speaker
that the more people you have crammed into a facility like into a room, the more likely you would have had deaths. And there's a direct correlation between those two things, usually with an attention paid to like really large rooms, so like rooms of eight or fewer than eight. But it still exists as well when you've got people sharing a room, like two people sharing a room as well.
00:15:06
Speaker
And so the really horrific carnage in the Regina Parkside extended care, I believe that is off the top of my head. I could triple check that, but in Saskatchewan, a government, a jurisdiction that has had the absolute worst death reporting. I mean, it's just been like abysmal what they're not really sharing with people.
00:15:29
Speaker
There was one facility, yeah, the Parkside Extended Care, where 43 people died and a lot of those residents were sharing a room for a room. So, you know, could you have a publicly funded, not profit situation with five people in a room together and have them all not get COVID?
00:15:48
Speaker
No, probably not. But what is it about the private sector, the private system that makes it so much better for them to have people sharing a room? Well, it's because it's profit maximization. The public version of that is to say, well, it's going to save money. And especially because the private system drives down the cost and it drives down the quality. And then the public system is constantly trying to keep up because of that logic, right? Because of austerity logic.
00:16:13
Speaker
Yes, there's really no question about the for-profit approach to long-term care as being it's a disaster, but the logic of for-profit care appears in public care as well and has been just as much, if not more, of a disaster in a province like Quebec where there's a really large proportion of publicly operated facilities. The idea that this is something that you can make money off of, that there should be dividends and a highly paid CEO,
00:16:42
Speaker
that are essentially making a living an incredibly well-paid living off of an absolutely essential service. When our elders age and they need to be taken care of and they can't live in their homes anymore, this is something that we all need to consider as a society. Instead, we've just been like, well, these people can make a buck off it, so I'm just going to download
00:17:06
Speaker
a certain percentage of it, especially in the dense cities, right? Especially in Alberta, you were saying a lot of the publicly owned facilities end up being in rural Alberta because it's not profitable for these operators to exist there. And it's just this absolutely psychotic approach to, again, what is an absolutely essential public good, right?
Profit vs. Care Quality
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's really horrific and you can draw a straight line between the logic that maximizes profit and someone not being able to get toe care for an entire year. I was just in touch with someone who's talking about how one of their loved ones did not have toe care. How is that
00:17:50
Speaker
not part of the core services of a long-term care facility. Oh, it's because it's seen as supplemental, right? Even if it's like a life or death situation for someone that's got diabetes, even though it's a critical health service that people rely on. Oh, no, no. It was just like, well, someone else came in to do that and the pandemic started, so then there was no one there to do that. And so your loved one just didn't get this care for a whole year.
00:18:13
Speaker
It's really horrible. The more you look at long-term care and the logic behind long-term care, the more you can really see that this is Canada's real example of market-driven capitalist healthcare. This is what it looks like. Sure, it's regulated. It's an industry full of people that care.
00:18:37
Speaker
But that's not enough. It is literally a system that is built to profit off of misery, whether that misery is the people, the residents themselves, or that misery is the people working in these facilities. The double benefit of basically theft from both of those people,
00:18:56
Speaker
has created this incredibly horrific system that just allowed for mass death to sweep it while politicians were able to sit back and go, oh shit, like, oh my God, there's nothing we can do. Oh, this is so tragic. Oh my God, let's have a Memorial Day. And it's like, fuck off.
00:19:12
Speaker
You've known about these issues for so long. It's not even funny how long these issues have existed and they've been undeniable. And yet there's been absolutely no serious attempt to deal with the core problems here. And in fact, the core problems have been exacerbated further.
00:19:28
Speaker
Yeah. So we were talking, you know, private V public and, and all of that. And, and, and there is a single private operator that I want to dig into a little bit and we could pick any of them, you know, you could pick age care or Rivera or any one of these schools, but the one that I want to take a bit of time to talk about is a extended care.
00:19:45
Speaker
And again, we could have picked anyone, but I wanted to talk about extended care for one reason, and that is because one of the co-owners of the Calgary Flames is a man named Alvin Leiben. And he's also a co-founder of extended care and sat as a director for 32 years on the board of the company. Wow.
00:20:03
Speaker
And so, um, before we get into even all of the death and destruction that extended care had happened at their facilities across Canada, uh, during the pandemic, even pre pandemic CBC, like February, 2020, like a month before everything shut down in February, 2020, the CBC was reporting that an extended care facility in Alberta had locked up their diapers so that workers, uh, would, would be limited in handing them out.
00:20:28
Speaker
And while this was happening, incontinent residents sat in urine soaked pads, suffering from severe bladder and yeast infections, rashes, and open wounds. Just again, pre-pandemic, this is the kind of care that extended care was offering to the people. And so, I don't know, did you look this up? Do you know what the CEO of extended care made in 2020?
00:20:50
Speaker
I need you to tell me his name and tell me how much he made. Doctor. His name is Doctor. He's a doctor, apparently. Dr. Michael Guerriere. Yeah. Okay. So Mike Guerriere and I have a history, if you can believe that. Oh yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. He used to be on the Ryerson board of governors while I was there. And when I started to do this research and I saw that he's the CEO of extended care, I fucking like fell over. I couldn't believe it. I was like, Mike, you're like that guy? Are you kidding me?
00:21:19
Speaker
I don't have any positive memories of him. I was on the Board of Governors with him for two years managing Ryerson University, and you can imagine that we were not on the same side on, I don't think, a single fucking issue. I also don't remember him being very interesting. There was at least some interesting characters on the Board of Governors, and he wasn't even interesting. And I don't also have any recollection of him coming from healthcare. I was like, what the fuck? Really, that was his background? Even though I did know the background of most people around that board.
00:21:46
Speaker
So yeah, uh, and he made a lot of money. They, these people make a lot of fucking money because they are paying, like they're maximizing profits and they're getting bonuses and that's what they are paid to do. But I, when I saw that I actually knew him, I was like, Oh wow, that, that really makes me want to vomit.
00:22:04
Speaker
So Mike Guerriere, and he's a doctor, I don't know what kind of doctor he is, whether he's a doctor of philosophy or sociology or an actual medical doctor, it's not important, but he pulled in a cool $1.7 million in 2020. That's down slightly from his 2.09 million that he made in 2019, but he did see his bonus increase from year to year by $137,000. So bang up job there, Dr. Mike.
00:22:33
Speaker
And their body count across Canada is they've had 390 people die in their facilities across Canada.
00:22:40
Speaker
And that's high compared, I think the last time I tallied up Rivera, it was maybe about the same, maybe a bit lower. Sienna Senior Living, which is like a notoriously deadly facility chain in Ontario, I think has had like 320 or 310 or so. And Extendacare has like this dubious title of being one of these facilities that actually still has deaths happening in it. At Extendacare Medex in Ottawa,
00:23:07
Speaker
One of the very few, Ontario, Alberta's gotten a couple of smaller outbreaks where people have died in the period of vaccination, let's say. But to see extended care kind of appear again and again and again and again on this list, it's really shocking. And I think what's really shocking too is the deaths...
00:23:26
Speaker
are really spread out with extended care. Like it wasn't like, I mean, I think that they certainly had some high, high deaths. In fact, I believe that they even had maybe the highest, uh, in Ontario. And I'm saying this slowly so that I can, you know, check myself here. Yeah. Look it up. So they were, so they own the tender care living center, tender care. Oh my God. It's 81 people died at tender care.
00:23:51
Speaker
And this was just around Christmas. You can just imagine 81 deaths just around Christmas and in the New Year. Really horrific, but then it's like spread out quite a lot all across Canada, which is not the case for a lot of these operators. Often they operate only within one region or within one province.
00:24:08
Speaker
Hmm. Yeah. And it wasn't just a, you know, highly paid CEO of extended care that was making out like abandoned as well. The shareholders of extended care were paid handsomely in dividends in 2020. They, they, uh, they paid out just under $43 million in dividends extended care did in 2020. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's like every single one of those is someone family saying, please like take care of my loved ones toes, literally. Yeah.
00:24:35
Speaker
And it's, it's, you know, this was in the context of, I think, I think the Globe and Mail reported this out, which was that the variety of these, uh, these executives at these, you know, publicly traded, uh, long-term care operators received bonuses and were paid quite handsomely and saw absolutely no effect on their income. Uh, despite the fact that like death and destruction and misery were like literally
00:25:03
Speaker
like coming out of their buildings at an incredible rate over the past 14 months. What do you think is the proper way to describe those executives? I mean, I don't know. I'm really only good at insults when they're coming at me on Twitter as someone that's making this kind of money off of death. I mean, I would be so embarrassed. I would literally fucking like find a way to live at the bottom of the sea. Like I just.
00:25:31
Speaker
I don't know how anybody exists. It's just so impossible for me to imagine. Someone started a GoFundMe to support my work today, and I have felt nothing but gratitude, but also like, oh my god, this is really uncomfortable. How do people do this? How do people get money given to them?
00:25:50
Speaker
Um, and so what, what, what words would I call them? I mean, they're just, they're, it's just, it's just the absolute worst example of greed. And honestly, it's so bad that it makes me think of religion and like, what should be done with people who are extremely. Terrifyingly greedy. I don't, I mean, I don't believe in hell, but like these people are going to hell. So it got to go right to religion when you start to think of how fucking evil these people are, right? Absolute scum is another way to describe them, but.
00:26:20
Speaker
I also think it's worth doing a bit of a little mini dive here on Alberta because I got you on and you've done all this work and you know, I've, the, the Alberta numbers are relevant. You know, we've got, we've had just over 2,100 people, 2,117 people have died of COVID as of May 11th. Uh, according to your spreadsheet, um,
00:26:43
Speaker
The Alberta death count in residential care is 1236, so around 58% of COVID deaths have happened in these residential care facilities. And of the top 10, seven of the top 10 are privately owned with Mackenzie Town making its appearance owned by Rivera. They've had a bunch of stories written about them, both pre and post pandemic. There's been a bunch of horror stories coming out of Mackenzie Town.
00:27:11
Speaker
Edmonton General, which is actually where I was born. It was a hospital that's been converted to a continuing care center, has had a bunch of deaths too. Unfortunately, that's owned by Covenant Health, which is like, it's publicly funded, but it's run by the Catholics. I don't understand why we do that in Alberta. We got Age Care, Walden Heights, had 28 fatalities.
00:27:36
Speaker
Um, this is, I'm just kind of looking at the top 10, the, the one, the largest one was a publicly owned facility, capital care Linwood. It's owned by Alberta health services had 21 of their 21% of their members in a facility, 59 out of 276 beds die over the course of the time of you keeping track of, uh, of this. And like, this is.
00:28:00
Speaker
Again, the logic that you were talking about of private healthcare, even when it's ostensibly publicly owned by AHS, it's
00:28:09
Speaker
No guarantee that these people are, that you're going to fare any better, right? No. The system is just what it is. Well, it's been created to be this way, right? So long-term care has always existed outside of the public healthcare system, right? It's outside of the Canada Health Act and that allowed it to evolve completely outside the bounds of what we would consider the public healthcare system.
00:28:33
Speaker
And this was happening at the same time as Canada's welfare state was being dismantled. So you can think of like from the 1980s to the 1990s and then all of a sudden people start living longer and when they live longer they have even more complex needs and so care has to complexify at the same time as the people are demanding it or the people need it.
00:28:54
Speaker
And so the result of that is that you have this Frankenstein system that has got history in churches or benevolent societies. It has history in taking care of the infirmed or people who have been institutionalized.
00:29:12
Speaker
They're expected to provide hospital level care oftentimes, and they just don't have the resources to do it. One of the things that I was surprised by in Quebec was when the Quebec government started clearing hospitals, like all governments started to clear hospitals last March, March 2020, expecting an influx of patients. Basically, they prepared in March 2020 for what happened in March 2021.
00:29:35
Speaker
But they cleared hospital wards out so that there were beds that could accommodate people. And the way they cleared out units was they sent people to live in long-term care, which is what they do. When someone's in hospital and they are a patient that's called ALC, Alternative Level of Care, it means that they need to still be in a hospital-like setting.
00:29:58
Speaker
but that it's just too long term for the hospital. The hospital needs the bed. And so that's oftentimes where you'll see people discharged into long-term care. And if you've ever seen a loved one go through this process, you'll know what I'm talking about. And so by emptying hospital rewards and pushing people into long-term care facilities, that was the state exercising the control that it has over its own institution, a hospital, right?
00:30:26
Speaker
And what didn't really get reported at the time, although it's been since reported in Quebec, was in long-term care facilities in Quebec, they're just not set up to provide the level of care that hospitals are. And so there was a lot of situation where homes didn't even have oxygen. Like, they just aren't normally equipped with oxygen. And so when you have this massive respiratory crisis where, you know, there's some, say, a chassele days, which is what, that's what they're called in Quebec,
00:30:49
Speaker
Um, where like more than a hundred people die and you have an oxygen crisis and your facility literally doesn't have oxygen. Like obviously what's going to happen. It's going to be a complete nightmare. And like, that's the fault of the system to an extent for not being set up to protect its residents in the case of a massive emergency, like a pandemic. But it's also the result of the fact that this is a system that grew up outside of hospital settings.
00:31:15
Speaker
And it does not have the same regulation. Of course, there are regulations around pay and around services and around levels of care, but they're clearly not enough and they are not to the level that we would expect or we would see within a hospital setting.
00:31:30
Speaker
And then you of course look at the hospitals and see more than a thousand people have died even in hospital acquired COVID and know that there's still gaps within the public system, the public healthcare system. But that's why long-term care is such a Frankenstein body because it's just like this complete afterthought that governments have had no political will to design. This should have been really the last big public
00:31:54
Speaker
Program that was created, but it just never was right like the 1980s 1990s 2000s There's been no public programs created in this country other than you know, you talk about Quebec's childcare system But aside from that this should have been as big as the healthcare system creating a public service for people to live within a care setting or care situation and it wasn't and as things got worse and worse and worse and
00:32:18
Speaker
for-profit companies swooped in and were like, oh, this is sweet. We actually can make a lot of money off of this. And they just kept on consolidating and consolidating. And so, you know, then that's where you get extended care, owning residences and towns and communities in cities all across Canada, oftentimes purchased from other settings. Extended care also manages public facilities. That's a whole other kind of Frankenstein situation that we have as well, where you have a public facility, but they hire private management and therefore the facility is de facto run as a private facility.
00:32:46
Speaker
And the oversights really lax. And so, you know, we've had a serial killer operate within these facilities in Canada. And that barely made any change. I mean, the ink had barely dried on the wet law for report in 2019, in the summer of 2019, when we were hit by the pandemic. And, you know, this was all very provisible. I was in French. It was all very foreseeable, right?
00:33:12
Speaker
And that's where we are today is it's like, okay, so then what gets us out of this mess?
Call for Long-term Care Reform
00:33:19
Speaker
And the sad answer is that it's going to take an incredible political will that literally does not exist, that needs to be built from the ground up.
00:33:28
Speaker
Yeah you know we've got Justin Trudeau in the fall, you know at his throne speech promising to establish national standards for long term care homes and then absolutely jack shit happening on that file since the throne speech, you know, especially and with the pandemic still going on you know like the time to do it is now.
00:33:46
Speaker
I don't think the solution here is something that needs a ton of nuance or counterfactuals or a bunch of nuance-mongering. It's like expropriate their facilities, start paying the workers proper wages, start offering a standard of care.
00:34:02
Speaker
that where you set benchmarks and that ensures that people live a life with dignity and comfort. If federal healthcare has all of this system around it, we need just as much bullshit as we do around long-term care.
00:34:17
Speaker
Well, or yeah, just as much. Absolutely. Because these are people who are in extremely vulnerable situations and, you know, unlike hospital settings where you are in and everybody's goal is to get you out as fast as possible. And I don't say that from the perspective of the healthcare system just wants to clear a bed, but
00:34:32
Speaker
Literally, no one wants to be there. Patients want to be out as soon as possible. Families want to be out there as soon as possible. Doctors want people out at home as possible. Physiotherapists want people improving as fast as possible. That is how the healthcare system works. But long-term care is the opposite of that. Long-term care is you will be here for a very long time. You actually want to be here as long as possible because the alternative to this location is death.
00:34:54
Speaker
And so what is the way that we support people to live full and dignified lives in a care facility or care setting? The problem in Canada is there's a massive block on what it takes for us to make sure that people live long and dignified lives and support lives, and that block is ableism.
00:35:17
Speaker
Like, that is the thread that really goes through this pandemic in the most profound way. And we can talk about racism and colonialism too, because those are also threads that have very deep impacts on how this pandemic has unfolded. But ableism, I think, is probably the most important because it explains why this has gotten such little attention, why abuse has been so rampant, why public attitudes towards this hasn't created any change.
00:35:43
Speaker
and why the users of these residences, the people that live there, the people that live there for a long time, their voices have been completely ignored from this entire discussion. And you can blame politicians for that, you can blame journalists for that, but at the end of the day, it's just explained by ableism in this incredibly ableist society that we live in.
00:36:04
Speaker
I mean, you are someone who kind of, God bless you, like actually listens to CBC and The Current and all their other programs on a regular basis. And I remember you were tweeting that you were shocked to actually hear the voice of an elderly person in long-term care, like on one of their news stories or in one of their broadcasts, right?
00:36:20
Speaker
Yeah. And they still fucked the story up because the whole story was like situated around communities, like physical communities where just a lot of old people live. And they're like, how do we provide services for communities that just have a lot of old people in them? And it's like, sorry, there's a fucking difference between old people and people who live in long-term care. Like the Venn diagram might be very big. Like there might be quite a lot of overlap.
00:36:43
Speaker
But when someone's got reduced capacities and needs assistance to live in whatever way they might need that, you have to build some sort of support structure. And there's debate, if it can be home care, there's debate, what does dementia care look like and how do you provide
00:37:01
Speaker
a humane dementia care, and then the debate who pays for all of this. But fuck, our media won't even engage with that. They're like, oh, we're going to talk about long-term care. Here is a woman that created a really nice rec room in her facility that she lived in. And it's like, what the fuck? These are different issues. And if you want to have that discussion with elderly people in this country talking about their struggles and the activism that they're engaged in to have services and access to classes and access to whatever,
00:37:31
Speaker
pastimes and activities. There's just so many ways that you can take that conversation. But to build that segment, I'm talking about a segment that happened this morning as a segment in long-term care is just so indicative of how the CDC especially, but mainstream media in general, has this
00:37:46
Speaker
It is impossible for them to engage with the core problems that this is a system that literally profits off of people dying. Obviously, they're not going to give them quality food. It profits off of their death.
00:38:02
Speaker
This is really, really basic. And we heard so little from the people who live in these facilities throughout the pandemic that I think that just really does show how incredibly marginalized they have been during the pandemic, but of course before that as well. Yeah. You spoke about how ableism is one of the things driving this.
00:38:26
Speaker
But you also mentioned, you know, racism and white supremacy. And I think it's worthwhile to bring up, you know, the fact that the mainstream media is now finally cottoning onto the fact that ever since Nahad Nenshi and Jagmeet Singh have now said out loud,
00:38:41
Speaker
that something that everyone who has been paying attention is known for quite some time, which is that the anti-mask, COVID-denier, anti-lockdown activists are rife with fash and white supremacists. Now the media is like, oh, wait a second. Is what Jagmeet saying and Nihad Nenshi saying correct? Oh my God.
00:39:04
Speaker
It's so pathetic because it's like, sorry, why is it up to someone like Singh to have to say this? I mean, the NDP should have been saying this a year ago, but he's also in a bit of a catch-22, right? As a racialized man, the only one who holds, well, I shouldn't say that, one of two national racialized leaders now, of course, with the Green Party and enemy Paul.
00:39:24
Speaker
Obviously, when he says something like this, journalists are like, oh, oh, oh, Jagmeet Singh is claiming there's racism. And a third of the reporting will be like, yeah, yeah, he's claiming there's racism, of course. And then two-thirds of the reporting will be like, huh, what's he basing his claim on? Brown person uses race card sexually. Exactly. It's this completely bullshit kind of approach to race.
00:39:45
Speaker
Like I don't know what journalists have been waiting for because we not only have had like fucking kids, Sig Heiling in the streets of fucking Calgary or all of the hate crimes against black hijabi women in Edmonton or all of the hate crimes that have happened with the Tiki torch. Like, I mean, there's so many examples that have happened. And, and you know, I'm, I'm writing a book about this moment.
00:40:09
Speaker
When I say I'm writing, I finished the manuscript actually about six weeks ago, so it's done and it's in someone else's hands and I'm really excited for it to be out next fall. But my chapter on vaccines looks at the coverage of the vaccine hesitant and the anti-mask rallies. Aside from the fact that I've been writing about this, Sandy and I talked about this on the podcast a year ago, I still went into the media coverage to see
00:40:33
Speaker
How these events are being covered and it'd be like a journalist would be literally in a crowd having people spit on them and they'd be like What why are you spitting on me? Don't you want your news covered? Get the fuck out of the crowd. Why are you?
00:40:52
Speaker
You know, it was just still covered as if it was like a Santa Claus parade or some kind of fun event or whatever. And even the disconnect between like there was one rally in Kelowna where the journalist who was present like had some really horrible stuff happen to him and he posted it on Twitter. But if you read the report that he wrote, you'd have no idea. It just was like, oh, some people came together in downtown Kelowna today and
00:41:13
Speaker
Some people were in favor and some people were opposed. It was like, guy, you fucking were like attacked. Like they were threatening you and that somehow didn't get it into your story. Like why not? So yeah, it's really annoying. I mean, that's the weakest word that I can come up with to explain how I feel about this whole situation, but it is very annoying and it's very obvious that the far right would see this moment in these movements as being perfect
00:41:38
Speaker
perfect locations to organize around just because statistically speaking, white people have more distance to the carnage and the horror of this pandemic. Yeah. I mean, you wrote about it in passage. You know, we had Kurt Phillips from Anti-Hate Canada on, yeah, like this is a moment for the far right to organize, right? People are mad about COVID. People are mad about the subject X. COVID is the one hot one at the moment and lockdowns.
Far-right Exploitation during the Pandemic
00:42:03
Speaker
and they're in there like they are with everything, whether it's anti-Muslim at the border stuff or whether it's yellow vest or whatever. There's always the fash and the white supremacists are always in those movements because that's where they know they can find new recruits. It's not hard. Yeah. Well, no, exactly. It's not just like they're in any movement. They're very, very sharp. They know exactly what they should be doing. This is where I would look right at the left and say, what the fuck? Where are you? Where's the labor movement? Where's the fucking
00:42:32
Speaker
Where are people in the streets trying to help give another expression to the ways that the anti-vax movement has expressed itself? Because there's obviously a hardcore tier of racists within these movements.
00:42:50
Speaker
And then there's the white people who have no understanding of how to connect what they believe towards racism. And instead are like, oh, Big Pharma, Bill Gates, these billionaire piece of shit, I don't trust them. This is all about restoring a global order that's anti-human. And it's like, I can give you that perspective from the left. That is all stuff that is well
00:43:12
Speaker
and easy to explain from a left-wing perspective. You're right, Bill Gates is a piece of shit. You're right that this will be a moment where all social forces are going to be reorganized to make sure that people are kept down. All of that stuff is true. Where it stops being true obviously is created in a lab and all this kind of fucking shit that I'm sure a lot of us are hearing from loved ones.
00:43:32
Speaker
And, you know, but again, where's the left to catch those people, to give those people the fucking resources that aren't like Dr. fucking McGillicuddy's good time fucking blog, right? Which so many of these people are, I mean, that's not literally the name of the fucking blog, but you know, a lot of these people are consuming media that is just so fucking
00:43:51
Speaker
bullshit and I have a personal kind of connection to this stuff where, you know, we're like, this is right wing, this is right wing tripe. This is, this is right wing organized garbage. And it's like people who would normally be horrified to be associated with her like, no, it's not. Okay. Well, here's the connection to info wars.
00:44:08
Speaker
No, you anybody can make that connection. It's not and you're just like, oh my god. Okay, fine. So like the the right and and of course, this is globally connected, right? This isn't like Chris guys a fucking genius and therefore he decided to jump into this movement himself. This is this is a globally coordinated effort to fucking, you know, really destabilize social cohesion.
00:44:28
Speaker
And we can talk about why that might be, but, um, the, the, the far right has like, is very connected and very, um, like they're, they're very stealth, right? They know exactly when and what and how, and you know, what we saw in Quebec was all of the organizing that existed with.
00:44:47
Speaker
LaMertes and the other like really far right groups just jumped right into action again. But we're all like wearing an anti-fucking flag mask rather than an anti-mask flag rather than a fucking anti-immigration flag.
00:45:00
Speaker
Yeah. When there are these moments in time, these waves, uh, you know, you have to take advantage of it and, and, uh, for your cause, right. And, and the, the far right, the white supremacist, the fash definitely took advantage of the pandemic to get their message out, to increase their numbers, to organize, to demonstrate power in the streets. And, uh, I agree with your analysis that like, you know, we also have to take advantage of these times as well. Yeah, absolutely.
00:45:29
Speaker
And finally, Nora, we couldn't have you on and simply and not talk about just an absolutely hilarious and atrocious thing that happened over the weekend, which was for journalists from the Toronto Star who all
00:45:49
Speaker
look very similar. I think three of the four are like blue haired, brown, uh, blue eyed, brown haired, like dudes. And I think one of them is just like a brown eyed, uh, white dude. Anyways, incredibly similar. And they won a national newspaper award for their work, uncovering how death rates from COVID-19 were higher in for profit homes rather than in other types of longterm care residences.
00:46:16
Speaker
Where do you think they got that information from, Nora?
00:46:21
Speaker
Yeah. So this whole situation is very annoying to me, to say the least. Different kind of like, differently annoying than talking about racism and race and being ignored by mainstream press. But you see, I rely on that word a lot. Where did they get their information? So, you know, this is a group of journalists who are like all well-known. If you've read them at the Toronto Star, some of them have no idea who I am, even though I know that like their literal family connections. So it's kind of funny like how a one-way streety this kind of goes sometimes.
00:46:49
Speaker
But they took ministry data and they looked at the ministry data that was like how many deaths has happened, how many beds per facility, and a whole bunch of other stuff that they compiled and they came up with this report. They did not plagiarize me. I think that that's important to say. If they had plagiarized me, the numbers would be higher because I've been collecting data.
00:47:12
Speaker
that isn't just ministry reports, right? As I said earlier, I've been collecting data to go beyond the ministry reports because frankly, we cannot trust the ministry reports. We need to verify the ministry reports with whatever research that we can do ourselves. That is journalism. But anyway, but they stuck with the ministry data and that would be where they would have lifted my numbers, which they did not. They took it from the ministry.
00:47:29
Speaker
But it isn't really about that. It's more that like in this country and actually with Sandy Hudson that said this on the podcast and I hadn't really thought about it in this way until she said it, which comes out this week. So, you know, take a listen if you have any more time after listening to this.
00:47:44
Speaker
She was like, wow, it's really amazing how quickly the Canadian media world works to erase the contributions of people and to bestow credit for having done something.
00:48:00
Speaker
that is not just theirs. It's not just theirs to own. And it's not just me either. There's been a lot of other people that have uncovered this. And when they were doing that data analysis, my dad had already clearly showed that. I mean, it was fucking obvious. I was saying that. Other people were saying that this is very clearly what's happening within private care. And so one of the four of them has been quite, I don't know, friendly, I guess, to say, reminding people that, oh, no, no, Nora's great. Her work is great. So that's been really nice.
00:48:30
Speaker
But I know that the other ones are like, who? I've never heard of this woman. Why are you saying I plagiarized? I know one of them is actually like being in touch with people, telling them to delete their tweets, which is just such an ungracious fucking thing to do. Cause it's like, they didn't ask to win this award, right? And they've won this award. They've got this recognition and they obviously are feeling a bit called out because they should fuck. Right.
00:48:53
Speaker
And rather than being all hurt that someone's hurting their feelings or lodging allegations against them that are not true, maybe what they should be doing is appreciating the fact that people don't know how this works. People don't know how journalism works. And people certainly don't understand how they can see someone doing this work every single fucking day for free and be 100% shut out by the mainstream media, including by the Toronto Star. Those guys knew about the data that I was collecting. I mean, at least one of them did from the start.
00:49:20
Speaker
And they were never in touch. The Toronto Star is one newspaper of people that I don't think I've been in touch with anyone from The Toronto Star. I've been in touch with lots of people from the globe, lots of people from CTV, lots of people from global and other publications. But oddly, not The Toronto Star. Or the CBC, actually, now that I say that.
00:49:38
Speaker
Well, it took four dudes all named Brad or whatever their names were. And to do the work of one Nora, which is a very funny as well. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's very annoying. Like, like as, as, as I've already said, it, it would be nice.
00:49:57
Speaker
if good work was rewarded in this country, and it's not. These awards are obviously an attempt to reconstruct how people remember what happened, right? And so that the trauma star can say, we are the ones that did that. And it's like, nah, that's not entirely true.
00:50:12
Speaker
I mean, yeah, you and I both know that Canadian media is this like incredibly insular space, right? And that the people who rise to the top of this industry tend to be people who are not great, right? I wouldn't call it a merit-based industry, you know what I mean?
00:50:32
Speaker
No, but it's also like, even if they are great, like have some fucking grace, right? Like, I mean, maybe I shouldn't say it that way. Cause it doesn't like I very much grace, but for fuck's sakes, like, like you guys got paid to do this work and I've done more work than you and I've not been paid. Like at the very least be like, Oh, Hey Nora.
00:50:49
Speaker
Man, it was so shitty that there's literally no mechanism for you to even be nominated for these awards, right?
Critique of Canadian Media Industry
00:50:55
Speaker
Something like that. But I think that the fact that people are making fun of how they all kind of look the same, it is true. There's a certain white guy journalist that is so fucking clueless and so out to lunch that they're just not paying attention to what's immediately in front of their face. And I completely understand why they feel like they're 100% justified in fucking telling people to delete tweets rather than engaging with what people are saying and saying,
00:51:19
Speaker
You know, we didn't plagiarize Nora. Um, this is how it works. And yeah, the way she's been treated by media is really shitty. Like they could just say that that's not fucking hard to say. Yeah. And I mean, I went to journalism school. I don't know if you did, you know, I mean, I, I, I got a degree, but it's irrelevant, right? The work is the work, but it
00:51:41
Speaker
The media itself is such a small ecosystem of people who actually are employed to be journalists. And by and large, the people who are actually doing the work don't see themselves as workers. They think that if they are very clever and that if they say the right things, that they'll be able to
00:52:01
Speaker
be elevated to a very special place. And it's just like the vast majority, are you just going to get chewed up and spit up by this machine? And the ones that do rise are only going to, are like what, like the Jen Gerson's of the world or the like Colby cautious, like only the most kind of like psychotic and, uh, and wrong, uh, people would kind of rise to the top, especially on the kind of like opinion world, right?
00:52:25
Speaker
Yeah, the opinion world is a complete fucking wasteland and it's weird to be an opinion writer in this country because I'm just never ever going to be in that world. But news reporters need to fucking get their fucking heads around the world as well.
00:52:43
Speaker
I mean, it's just totally clueless, right? Fuck. I actually nominated myself for four awards this past season, I guess, since winter, because I was like, oh, what the fuck? Why not? I was like, well, at least I'll win. I'll probably win the Canadian Association Journalist Award on feminist writing that advocates change and leads the path for change. I was like, I just wrote a book on that. I will at least win that. No, no, no. They gave it to Toronto Star Reporters, who
00:53:13
Speaker
Covered crimes like Sexist crimes, right? I mean the reporters that that one are excellent reporters But it's just like like you've got to be kidding yourself Canadian Association journalists If you think that reporting on crime is is a feminist act that's gonna change anything Like you can do feminist reporting, but that's not changing shit. It's not through awareness that anything changes There's no amount of fucking pros talking about some guy that's murdered some somebody that's gonna change anything It's going to take organizing and if any of you actually read my submission you would fucking learn that
00:53:44
Speaker
So no, yeah, I just, there's just no, no way in hell, right? Like it's, it's just an impossibility because the gatekeepers have decided what is and isn't social change and their idea of social change is fucking literally not social change. Yeah.
00:53:57
Speaker
And speaking of awards, I would be remiss to not mention that the progress report, this podcast has been nominated for the incredibly prestigious and extremely well-known Canadian podcast awards in the current affairs program, which I was unaware of. I did not nominate myself. Someone must have done it for us, but, uh, but I look forward to losing to, uh, whichever podcast wins out of Rosie Barton's podcast or Steve Payton's podcast. Oh my God. Talk about like living in podcast hell, right?
00:54:25
Speaker
Yeah. But this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate you coming on, Nora. How can people kind of find you on the internet and support your work and order your book and plug your pluggables? How can people find you? Sure. Well, you can find me at norlardotes.ca. That's my website. And there you can find my writing or you can look at how to buy my book. You can find my book pretty much in any independent bookstore in Canada, I guess. I mean, who the fuck knows? I haven't actually seen it in a bookstore because I live in Quebec City and there are no English bookstores here. Okay.
00:54:53
Speaker
Um, and so that's called take back the fight. It's published by Fernwood. You could buy it direct from Fernwood too, if you'd like. And you can check out my podcast with Sandy Hudson at sanianore.com or anywhere where you get your podcasts. We come out every Tuesday and we are not an award nominated podcast.
00:55:10
Speaker
But, you know, we have fun anyway and we'll definitely be voting for you if anyone asks, which they won't. Which they don't know. It's not a people's choice thing. I have no idea who's behind it. No, I know. I mean, they have a people's choice category and it's like, what the fuck choice? Who are these people? Like what the, anyway. But yeah, you can find me all those places or like, you know, failing all of that. You can find me on Twitter, probably yelling at a cloud.
00:55:33
Speaker
Yeah, or about CBC coverage. God bless you. I cannot fucking, I cannot do that. It's so, I'm so pathetic, man. Like I know, I know, I know.
00:55:42
Speaker
Whatever, maybe you just put it on and it's like your background noise. I don't know. It is, it is. And then it's like, but it can't be background noise because it's like, Oh my God, that was shit. I have to say something about how shit that was. You know, like Matt Galloway himself yesterday had a tweet that was retweeted almost 400 times where it was like six people have died at the Downsview long-term care facility, according to this military report. And it's like, guy, the number is 26. You fucking didn't copy and paste this tweet right. And now 400 fucking people have retweeted it.
00:56:09
Speaker
God, delete it. You know, correct yourself, say something. Not a single person. The fucking responses were like, Hey, Matt, you missed the operative digit on that fucking six. Just fucking pathetic. But anyway, whatever. That's our country. Keep doing it. Keep, I make fun of you, but you should keep doing it. Um, and folks, if you like this podcast, you want to keep hearing more podcasts by me featuring fantastic guests like Nora. There's a few easy things you can do to help us out. One of which is reviews. Reviews are very helpful. They help people find the podcast.
00:56:38
Speaker
Sharing the podcast is also very helpful, especially if you know someone who has been concerned about long-term care recently. I think this has covered a lot of fucking important ground. The most important way to support this podcast is to join the 450 other folks who help keep this little independent media project going. Go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card, contribute, whatever you can afford, 5, 10, $15 a month. We really appreciate it.
00:57:02
Speaker
The link to that is also in the show notes. Also, if you have anything that you think I need to hear, any notes, thoughts, or comments, I'm very easy to get ahold of. You can find me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. You can reach me by email at DuncanK at Progress, Alberta.ca. Thanks to Cosmic Family Communists for the amazing theme. Thanks again to Nora for coming on. Thank you for listening and goodbye.