Alberta Government's Subsidies to Private Seniors' Care OperatorsThe Alberta government announced on May 20 that it would provide $170 million to private operators of long-term care facilities, designated supportive living facilities and seniors' homes across Alberta. The government stated that the funding was "to help support vulnerable seniors in Alberta amid the COVID-19 pandemic" and would go towards enhancing staffing, providing more cleaning supplies, and addressing lost accommodation revenue.
The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) called for a suspension of profits and executive bonuses at continuing care facilities, saying that "profitable corporations should not be rewarded for their pandemic failures." "During the announcement, Health Minister Tyler Shandro acknowledged more than 70 per cent of Alberta's COVID-19 deaths have been in continuing care," says Kevin Barry, Vice-President of AUPE. "What he left out was that a disproportionate majority of those deaths and outbreaks have occurred in for-profit centres.[1] Providing this money while still allowing multi-million dollar corporations like Revera and Chartwell to run a profit is rewarding them for their failures..." "Residents and staff have had to sacrifice their safety during the pandemic, and to do right by those residents and staff, for-profit providers should have profits suspended and to dip into their revenues to manage this crisis instead of expecting a publicly funded bailout," says Barry. United Nurses of Alberta (UNA) said the announcement showed the failure of seniors' care operated for private profit, which the United Conservative Party (UCP) government has announced it will expand. "While the money is necessary as an emergency measure to protect vulnerable residents of private long-term care facilities that have been hit hard by COVID-19, it amounts in many cases to a bailout for businesses with a conspicuously bad record of protecting the people trusted to their care," UNA President Heather Smith said. "In essence the government is rewarding private operators who have diverted public funding to profits instead of paying fair wages and ensuring adequate staffing." Speaking to the fact that the majority of deaths in seniors' homes across Canada are linked to privately owned facilities, Smith stated, "In most cases, these were needless, preventable deaths. The current system is broken and the Alberta government's priority should be to fix it by returning it to the public sector, not by shoring up for-profit private operators with public funds for ideological reasons." The Alberta government has promised funding for a $2 an hour raise only for personal support workers or nursing aides in private and not-for-private-profit facilities. All other staff, including licensed practical nurses, housekeepers, food services workers, maintenance, and clerical workers will receive nothing, and even the aides in public facilities and those managed by Covenant Care have been excluded. The fact that they all have risked their lives to provide care and services to patients is not recognized, the unions point out, nor the fact that staff who do not normally provide direct patient care have been doing so during the pandemic. Several private operators have withheld funds, including Chartwell and Rosedale Development, claiming that they are only required to pay for hours worked in publicly funded beds. "This is utter nonsense, of course," says AUPE Vice-President Susan Slade. "All these residents live side by side in the same units. The work these HCAs do, and the risks they are taking, are exactly the same. The pay they get should be the same." One particularly obscene aspect of the announcement was that operators who have empty beds in their facilities as a result of patient deaths would be compensated for the loss of revenue from "accommodation fees." When private operators' negligence, greed and indifference to the seniors under their care is rewarded by government, it shows there is no governing authority fit to rule. Money given retroactively to facilities for extra cleaning due to the pandemic, all goes into the hands of the private operators, not housekeeping staff and others who have risked their lives to keep the seniors' care homes clean. While Albertans, together with all of Canada and Quebec are calling for increased funding for social programs and an end to privatization, the Alberta Health Minister's obsession is to guarantee the profits of the wealthy owners and shareholders. It is, as the workers and their organizations point out, one more compelling reason why the Minister should resign, and why the UCP government has shown itself unfit to govern. Note1. Of the 102 deaths identified by Alberta's Medical Officer of Health in long-term care and seniors' residences, the facilities are not identified in five deaths. Seventy-one of the remaining 97 were in for-private-profit facilities.
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The funding is
retroactive to March 15 and is only available to
"contracted operators," not to publicly-owned
facilities or those managed by Covenant Health
(Catholic hospitals and continuing care
facilities). United Nurses of Alberta, the
Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the
Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Alberta
Federation of Labour, and Friends of Medicare
all denounced the decision to guarantee the
profits of the private operators, while refusing
to recognize the contribution of all staff
working in seniors' care.