Senator Sharon Carstairs has had it. Over the past 16 years, there has been no fiercer a Canadian advocate of better care for the elderly. She has spearheaded two ground-breaking Senate reports on aging, and remains in demand as a speaker, preaching the need for action.
Yet even now, with the first baby boomers turning 65 this year, almost nothing is being done to prepare for the demographic bulge of seniors. There is no comprehensive plan, no national program, not even a firm commitment to deal with frail elders already trapped in the system, many of whom are doomed to spend their final days in misery.
With a sigh and trace of despair in her voice, Senator Carstairs says she is giving up. This fall, she will retire.
“The passion is still with me, but I’m tired,” says the former leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party. “You can only do this so long. I give speeches, speeches, speeches … and we continue to do badly. I will be 69 in April. I’m burnt out.”
As a last political gasp, the veteran campaigner is looking to the looming federal election as a way to finally thrust elder care into the national spotlight.
“I would like to see seniors right across the country go to every single meeting and put these questions to all the candidates,” Senator Carstairs says from Brussels, where she is the keynote speaker at a conference on aging. “What are you doing about home care? What are you doing about caregivers? What are you doing about an integrated health-care system? Are you going to sit on your hands or are you going to step up and be counted?”
She and other advocates welcomed modest measures in this week’s federal budget to aid seniors, including the $2,000 Family Caregiver Tax Credit and $100-million for research on degenerative brain conditions such as dementia, which afflicts an estimated half-million Canadians, most of them over 65.
But the proposed tax break amounts to just over $5 a day, says Rosanne Meandro of the Alzheimer Society of Canada, and applies only if caregivers have a taxable income.
As well, the call for a national dialogue on how Canadians will live out their final years has been echoed at Boomerangst, an influential convention held in Vancouver last month, and at a packed town-hall meeting in Toronto this month. What does the public expect and how much are people prepared to pay? No one knows, although the issue touches almost every family in the country.
“We have not been able to mobilize the public,” admits Carole Estabrooks, a prominent researcher and board member of the federal Institute of Aging. “We need a champion, someone who gets the bit in their teeth and won’t let go,” she told the audience at Boomerangst, organized by researchers at the University of British Columbia.
The statistics are depressingly familiar:
- 65 and over is Canada’s fastest-growing age group, expected to hit 23 per cent of the population by 2031.
- The number of people in their eighties is increasing even faster, with each costing the system an average of $18,000 a year.
- Among its 68,000 doctors, Canada has fewer than 300 who specialize in geriatrics.
But a solution is not even on the drawing board, while existing programs barely keep pace.
