Ontario seniors’ group fighting expansion of LTC home that saw 85 pandemic deaths

“The worst operators often received more beds. The public has a right to ask why.”

That’s the message from Seniors for Social Action Ontario, an organization trying to understand why a 15-storey addition to a long-term care home in Pickering that saw 85 people die during the first wave of the pandemic due to mismanagement, was approved and even fast-tracked by the Ontario government.

A Freedom of Information request about the Minister’s Zoning Order awarded to Orchard Villa long-term care home on Valley Farm Road took more than a year for a reply, according to the group’s chair, and that response was heavily redacted with “whole pages blacked out,” including information on why the addition was approved at all.

“With 85 people having died in this facility during the first wave of the pandemic, the Durham Region Medical Officer of Health having ordered it to work with the local hospital to try to manage the serious COVID outbreak, the Canadian military having to be called in, and its report having described horrific conditions, it should be obvious that this is a matter of significant public interest,” said Patricia Spindel.

“Yet the Ontario government granted, over the objections of families of the dead and a subsequent lawsuit. a license with ‘conditions’ that the public is not allowed to see.”

Spindel said research during the pandemic showed that a handful of chain-operated nursing homes had the highest death rates in Ontario, with Orchard Villa operator Southridge Care Homes – which runs 25 long-term care homes across the province, as well as other retirement facilities – the worst offender of them all.

“When it came time to make funding decisions, the Ontario government inexplicably chose to expand the for-profit institutional sector rather than non-profit assisted living programs that would have offered integrated care to elders in their own homes and communities.”

Spindel noted that the private deals made between the province and chain-operated nursing home companies with “poor track records” are shielded from full public accountability.

“These deals – who authorized them, why were these lucrative contracts awarded, and what criteria were used – is largely unavailable to the public.”

Non-profit organizations make their financial statement public, Spindel added.

Not so for private, for-profit chain operations that care for thousands of vulnerable people and receive billions in funding from the Ontario government, she said.

“This is a way of funnelling billions in taxpayer funding to Ontario’s predominantly for-profit long-term care institutional sector while largely shielding it from transparency or public accountability requirements.”

Taxpayers have to go through a lengthy and sometimes costly Freedom of Information process to receive almost no information about the licensing and funding arrangements.

“The public is left trusting no one.”

Southbridge currently has a temporary licence for 233 beds at Orchard Villa that expires at the end of 2027. The new addition would add 320 more beds to the facility.

More than 70 of the Orchard Villa residents died directly of COVID-19, but still others were lost to negligence, dehydration and starvation. In one case a resident choked to death because staff fed them improperly. Across the board Southbridge lost nine per cent of its residents, the highest rate of any for-profit chain.

The state of Orchard Villa and four other homes across Ontario got so bad the Canadian Armed Forces and the Red Cross were called in to support the staff and the army later released a scathing report about the homes after finding cockroach infestations, food left out to rot, residents left for extended periods in soiled diapers, unsafe medical distribution and unaddressed serious injuries like a broken hip.

A court challenge was filed against the Ontario government’s decision to expand Orchard Villa last year, following protests at Queen’s Park and lobbying by Pickering’s City Council, which rejected the application to expand.

Cathy Parkes, a woman who lost her father Paul at Orchard Villa, has filed for a judicial review of the proposed expansion.

“Long-term care homes with repeated failures do not deserve a free pass,” Parkes said, “After the deaths of so many loved ones, including my father, and the continued failures detailed in incident reports, Southbridge should not have received the award of extra beds and a 30-year license for Orchard Villa. Ontarians deserve to know that care is the primary focus of long-term care.”

Pickering Councillor Maurice Brenner said council remains firmly against the expansion but is powerless to stop the province and Southbridge from proceeding.

“It didn’t matter what we said, the ministry was going to move ahead anyway,” he said. “Our position has not changed. The people who lived there lived through hell.”

The timeframe for the expansion is still unknown as the application would still have to go through a site plan review at Pickering Council.

No site plan has been received.