GETTING ACQUAINTED
AND FIRST THOUGHTS ON LONG-TERM CARE
Kathleen Wynne
I am writing this on a blustery day in February looking out over snowy fields outside of Alliston, Ontario. I’m excited to be part of this new Herle Burly endeavour, fan as I am of David, Scott, Jenni and the Air Quotes Media crew!
As a politician on the brink of retirement, I come to you with many opinions and over 25 years in politics, 21 of those in elected office and five of those as Premier of Ontario. I am a mom of three adult children, grandmother of four, spouse of the wonderful Jane, eldest sister of four daughters and child of a 92-year-old mom.
I have had many jobs in my life—some of them paid, others not. Early on my dad told me to try lots of things, and so I did. I have worked in a factory; I have worked in retail; I have worked at camps, at schools, at a community college and with tiny community organizations and one summer on a reserve in northern Ontario. I have taught swimming, ESL, language skills, mediation and conflict resolution. I have been a community mediator. I have organized protests and rallies, served on committees of church and school and not-for-profit, facilitated hundreds of community discussions and debates, written press releases and policy for education advocates and have stirred the pot on the issues I hold dear.
Born and raised in Richmond Hill, I have lived in Ontario my entire life with the exception of September 1979-April 1982 when I lived in the Netherlands in a town outside The Hague called Voorburg. It was in Voorburg that I bore my first two children and learned to live in Dutch. My children’s dad and I returned to Toronto with our two very young kids to settle in North Toronto where I lived from 1982 until this past summer when I moved into this intergenerational house on the edge of a field outside of Alliston.
And that fact, that intergenerational living arrangement is my way into what I want to talk about today. We are living here for a whole raft of reasons, not least of which is that my daughter, Maggie and her partner, Dan, made a decision in 2019 that they were headed out of the city to find a country property. They wanted dogs, open space and a house that they could both love and afford.
Jane and I were happily ensconced in our midtown Toronto semi-detached house perched on the edge of Sherwood Park in the riding of Don Valley West which I represent in the Ontario Legislature. No news to anyone in Ontario, I had won my seat in the 2018 but our government and Party had been devastated. I was adjusting.
Immediately after the election loss our family was thrown into turmoil by illness and old age. My sister and my niece both spent long stints in hospital. My dad, 92 and my mom, 90 both started to deteriorate quickly. They needed more care but were highly, and I mean highly, resistant. And money was an issue. My parents were not big planners so although they owned a lovely wooded property on one of Richmond Hill’s old streets, there was not enough cash to provide the live-in care they needed for more than a couple of years, if that. Luckily my sisters and I work well together and we were able to execute a plan to keep Mom and Dad safe in their home at first. And then we worked together to find a place for them to live so that we could sell the house to provide income to support them.
This was the hardest, most emotionally draining transition of my life—way worse than my divorce or coming out in my 30’s. This was full-on family drama, dredging up the worst of our relationships, angry recrimination and suspicion on the part of our parents that we were betraying them. It was a painful, shameful, distressing mess.
I had the opportunity to go away for a month in 2019 to help with the adjustment, maybe do some writing and thinking which I did with all of this as my backdrop.
When I returned in early March, 2019, all of the family drama continued but in the midst of it, Jane and I made a quick decision that our plan to some day move out of Toronto to the country could not wait. My time away and the chaos of my family of origin had convinced me that I wanted to do everything in my power to avoid the same situation for my own children. We needed a plan. We needed to at least try to envision how we might create a happy situation. And so the idea of our family building an intergenerational household was born.
Maggie is a nurse. She was always the one who said she would take us in if need be as we aged. Her brother and sister are loving and supportive but the relationships are just different. Of course, we never imagined that we would set up a joint living situation as early as this—Jane and I are in our 60’s and healthy. But this is when their house was being built so we expanded the plan and here we are.
So why am I telling you this? A couple of reasons.
First of all, there are going to be more and more baby boomers who want to create alternative living arrangements like this one. Maybe not with adult children, maybe groups of couples or individuals who will provide care and companionship for each other into their dotage—the arrangements will be varied and they should be encouraged.
As it stands now, neither our by-laws nor our cultural expectations encourage communal aging in place. Builders have to find work-arounds to put in a second kitchen, or build a shared wall. We have to not only remove impediments, we should be building encouragement into our building codes and municipal by-laws. We should create a provincial framework that would require municipalities to find ways to support these living arrangements including Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities where older adults can age in place with the supports coming to them rather than dislocating them to an institutional setting.
The cultural issue is tricky. When I describe our new living situation to non-white, non-Anglo friends and colleagues, I don’t ever need to explain it. They get it because most of them have examples of the same thing in their own families. Not so with our white, Anglo friends. At the very least they are surprised but for many, they can’t or don’t want to imagine how it might work. For years, my youngest sister and I tried to convince our parents that it would make sense for them to live with one of us. No way. They rejected the idea out of hand. They hated the idea and we are not really sure why. It was something about being independent but more than that, being free. Sadly, as I watch my mother deteriorate in a retirement home, she is the opposite of independent and free. And on top of that she is angry, frustrated and lonely. COVID has exacerbated that state but COVID didn’t start it.
There’s a big debate about long term care that has been inflamed across the country by COVID. It’s a debate about how much money is needed to buy adequate care which is usually defined as four hours of care a day on average. It’s a debate about adequate pay, paid sick days and healthy working conditions for the incredibly hardworking (mostly) women who care for the elderly. It’s a debate about whether private homes can ever be trusted to deliver good care.
These are all really good questions that we need to explore and resolve. No government has adequately addressed them, although it’s fair to point out that the current Ontario government reversed our policies on paid sick days, froze the minimum wage that was scheduled to go up and cut investments that were scheduled to take us closer to an average of four hours of care per day in long term care homes.
But let’s say we have those debates and we have a government that is willing to make the investments, change the laws, provide the protections. Does anyone really believe that we will then have solved the problem? Most of us never want to live in a long-term care home. Most of us don’t even want to live in a retirement home because we fundamentally don’t want to be surrounded only by people our own age. We don’t want to be alone but many, many people would choose loneliness over a warehouse, no matter how luxurious or how good the care.
We must allow ourselves to imagine other models, look to other countries, look at the creative solutions that people are struggling to establish across our own country. And then we need to figure out how to encourage and support them. We will save money by not over-building institutions and we will enable happier, more productive families.
This is a big subject so I will come back to it. Thanks for listening!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kathleen Wynne - Kathleen Wynne was first elected to the Ontario legislature in 2003 as the MPP for Don Valley West. She was Ontario’s 25th Premier and leader of the Ontario Liberal Party from January 2013 to June 2018. Kathleen has dedicated her professional life to building a better province for the people of Ontario. She is guided by the values and principles that knit the province of Ontario together: fairness, diversity, collaboration and creativity.
The views expressed belong to the author.
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