A lack of vision in municipal politics

Jeff Green | Feb 10, 2021

For a number of years, volunteer board members from Pine Meadow Nursing Home in Northbrook, usually accompanied by local councillors from North Frontenac Township, made an annual trip to Glenburnie to plead for support from Frontenac County Council for a nominal amount of support for Pine Meadow, somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000 for necessary infrastructure upgrades, things like new windows and doors.

They would argue that Pine Meadow is the long term care home of choice for many residents in Central and North Frontenac. Although Pine Meadow is located in Lennox and Addington County, most of the time, half of the 64 residents in the home are Frontenac County residents.

Frontenac County owns a long term care home, Fairmount Home, and provides significant funding from Frontenac County and Kingston ratepayers, to augment provincial funding at Fairmount.

Partly because they have their own home to support, partly out of fear about the precedent they would be setting by supporting an outside healthcare organisation, and partly out of indifference, Frontenac Council always turned Pine Meadow down.

Frontenac County staff would take pains to explain that Pine Meadow is a private long term care home,  not a publicly owned  home like Fairmount, and on occasion, said it is a for-profit home.

Politicians from North Frontenac would argue that the county was turning its back on a portion of its elderly and infirm residents, even as it spent millions of dollars supporting other elderly and infirm residents, to no avail.

The way Ontario classifies long-term care facilities is part of the problem. There are three categories: publicly owned homes, which are owned by municipalities, privately owned for profit homes owned by corporate long term care providers, and so called private, not-for-profit homes such as Pine Meadow.

Pine Meadow is, in fact, owned by Land O'Lakes Community Services, a not for profit corporateion, overseen by a volunteer board made up of community members. Calling it a private home is misleading, at best. It has none of the backing of the national and multinational corporations running the for profit, long term care sector, and it has none of the municipal funding that the municipally owned homes have. It operates on a shoestring. Yet it provides care, including end of life care, under the same set of standards, as municipal homes such as Fairmount provide, with no top up funding from municipal taxpayers.

Long term care in Ontario is a hot button topic now, since its failings have been revealed through the COVID pandemic.

The Eastern Ontario Wardens Caucus (EOWC)  has known about funding shortages in long term care for many years. 

They commissioned a study in 2019, before COVID shined a light on failings in the long term care system, on how long term care is funded by the Province to support their lobbying efforts from a better funding model.

The study followed the normal practice of municipal organisations such as the EOWC by looking only at the municipal sector. 

In the preamble to the study, KPMG, the company that conducted the study, made note of the three categories of homes, and then said they had been given instructions to look only at municipal homes.

It is understandable that an EOWC would tell KPMG to ignore the for-profit sector. Why not let the corporate sector handle its own research and lobbying efforts.

KPMG was also told to ignore the not-for-profit sector, because municipalities are concerned about their own jurisdiction, their own mandate responsibilities.

While this is understandable, it is also a failure of the EOWC and its members to take on the needs of all of their residents, who depend on long term care and don't necessarily know or care if the home they move into is owned by Frontenac County or Land O'Lakes Community Services.

Ask any municipal politician why they got involved in municipal politics and they will all say a version of the same thing, to help and support the people living in their communities.

They will not say they got into municipal politics merely to look after the corporate interests of their particular municipality, which is caught up in a web of conflicting fiscal and political relationships with the Province of Ontario. 

But in reality, that is what municipal politicians spend most of their time doing

For a group like the EOWC, to limit their concern to the  well being of only one group of aging residents, those living in municipally owned homes, and ignoring those living in homes run by community based not-for-profit corporations, is both an illustration and a consequence of that reality.

It is both a consequence of our municipal system and a failure of imagination among those people who we elect to oversee that system.

(Note – As residents of Frontenac County and Lennox and Addington, we need to be extremely grateful to the efforts of everyone working in long term care in our communities at this time. Whether at Pine Meadow, Fairmount, the John Parrott Centre in Napanee, or in the retirement home sector that receives neither provincial nor municipal funding, they have kept residents safe and secure since March of 2020, an enviable record given what has taken place elsewhere in the province.  Here's hoping they can maintain the vigilance that has been the cornerstone of that success.)