Failures in private and public long-term care (LTC) homes in Canada have resulted in 15,000 deaths from COVID-19. Calls to reform LTC through nationalization have spread, garnering support from trade unions, national rights organizations and political parties.

Although LTC is often seen as a necessary institution to meet the complex medical needs of the elderly, LTC facilities are used to house people with disabilities who require round-the-clock care, regardless of age. And the nationalization of long-term care fails to adequately address the ableism of warehousing the disabled, ultimately maintaining unfair and inadequate care structures.

Long-term care is debilitating for people with disabilities who are forced to rely on institutionalized daily care. It’s time to abolish LTC in Canada.

It is time to dismantle and replace the LTC system with deinstitutionalized options that prioritize the development of people with disabilities and address the complex care needs of older and younger people with disabilities outside of institutional boundaries.

Disabled Storage

At the forefront of the call for the abolition of LTC facilities in Canada is the Disability Justice Network of Ontario, a disability-run organization based in Hamilton that advocates for accessible and fulfilling living conditions for disabled people.

His most recent campaign to abolish LTCs seeks legislative action to deinstitutionalize the nearly 200,000 people with disabilities (including 260 children under 18) living in LTCs and begin closing all institutions with a history of harm and abuse. violence.

They also call on leaders to support the nationalization of home care, hospice care, pharmacare and accessible housing that would give people with disabilities, young and old, the ability to choose where and how to live in the community with fully funded supports.

Read more: Canadians want home care, not long-term care facilities, after COVID-19

The government’s continued reliance on confining young people with intellectual, developmental and physical disabilities to LTC facilities has sparked protests from young disabled occupants of the system who are demanding deinstitutionalization – like Jonathan Marchand in Quebec, Vicky Levack in Nova Scotia and Tyson Sylvester in Manitoba.

In June 2018, Sylvester built a jail cell in downtown Winnipeg to protest how Manitoba’s healthcare system “cut him out of his own life.”

Marchand also camped in a makeshift cage on the lawn of Quebec’s National Assembly in August 2020, and in August 2021 was able to move into his own apartment after receiving in-home support.

In addition to the urgent calls for change coming from youth with disabilities caged in LTC facilities, the deplorable living and working conditions in LTC facilities across Canada have also been well documented in more than 150 scathing reports.

The scale of deaths recorded in LTC facilities during the pandemic is another indicator of the system’s inability to provide needed care and support to its vast clientele. However, the harm suffered by people with disabilities, old and young, who continue to live in these spaces deserves both punishment and condemnation.

Prisons by another name

Nationalizing LTC, sometimes referred to as system advertising, would undoubtedly take benefits away from LTC and could create system-wide changes to improve conditions for residents. However, these calls ignore the fundamental character of LTC facilities as an extension of the prison state, essentially prisons by any other name.

For example, LTC facilities frequently use prison control mechanisms such as the use of psychotropic drugs, locking residents in their rooms, and the use of physical restraints.

Residents cannot choose what and when they eat, when they wake up or bathe, or when they can receive visitors. LTC facilities seek to maximize resident monitoring and control while minimizing staffing costs.

In order to create a national home care program, workers need higher pay, job security and strong benefits. When working conditions are poor, staff shortages will occur, whether due to low wages, precarious hours and physically demanding work, or due to accident or illness at work (as this is the case exposure to COVID-19 in the workplace).

Staffing shortages mean people with disabilities do not receive adequate or consistent care, leading to malnutrition, dehydration or untreated pressure sores. Abolishing long-term care is about establishing better working and living conditions for social workers and people with disabilities.

Read more: Long-term care after the COVID-19 disaster: 3 promising ways forward

Philosopher Shelley Tremain refers to public nursing homes as the “showcase” of the nursing home industrial complex that “operates in the service of ableism, ageism and racism.”

It is clear that regardless of ownership – by private companies or public agencies – the warehousing, caging and incarceration of people with disabilities, old and young, is an act of violence.

In Canada, solidarity is being built between prison abolitionist movements and disability justice in the face of the shared injustices of prison incarceration and institutional confinement of persons with disabilities. These movements help us build the political will needed to move towards a world without more LTC institutions.

We must support the call of people with disabilities to end long-term care and develop a national system of home care, palliative care and pharmacare that funds and prioritizes the desire of older and younger people with disabilities to live in the community.