Pull Quotes S4EP2 Complete Rough Cut
 
Emma (00:00)
Welcome to Pull Quotes the podcast of the Review of Journalism. Each week, my co host, Joe Fish and I, Emma Jones do a deep dive into some of the most pressing issues in Canadian journalism. This season, each episode features a topic or person our resident journalists came across while reporting on their feature stories. This week, our story comes from our very own Scott McLean.
 
How are you [Scott]? Where are you right now?
 
Scott (00:27)
I'm good. I'm currently in my friend's basement. I'm living with him during the pandemic, we decided to move in together for pandemic based reasons, and we're just hanging out down here. It's good. I mean, I'm enjoying it so far but you never know what's gonna come during a pandemic. 


Emma
So, right, yeah, for right now this works, we'll see what the future holds. 


Emma (00:47)
So why don't you tell me a little bit about your story that you're working on and how you came across Nora?
 
Scott (00:55)
Well, she actually came to our review of journalism course, who was a guest from our professor Sonia Fatah, and she spoke to us about a number of different subjects. But I'd actually heard Nora on Canadaland. 


Nora's quite tenacious as a reporter, she's got an activist background too, and, and obviously, she has her opinions and biases. But that tenacity, I think, has served her well. And so it was suggested to me by Sonya because I'm doing a story on credit in the industry, or the lack thereof, and how that process works. Both like just in terms of linking back to a source, or, you know, getting credit for possibly, you know, volunteer work, or however you term that. It's important for on my end, the reason I'm doing the story is it's important that, you know, credit is recognized within our profession, and we're supportive of each other within the profession, so that then we have better opportunities to get jobs and to bolster the industry. 


So Nora, during the pandemic, has been tracking deaths in residential care facilities. I don't at this time, don't 100% know for sure if she's getting paid, but I my understanding is she's doing it on a volunteer basis. It showcases and highlights the issues around data collection in this country currently, because particularly, that health care is a provincial based responsibility. So you don't have the best current cross country access to health records and that kind of thing. The process isn't that smooth and I think a pandemic has showcased that in terms of, you know, just things like vaccine rollouts, but also how we track information around death in this country. 
 
Emma (02:46)
I'm really excited to hear what she has to say about the spreadsheet that she's put together that carries, some really, really heavy numbers and some heavy information about what's going on in long term care homes, which is something that we don't see,
 
Scott (02:56)
I actually have been to a long-term home before my grandmother was in one, it was a very nice one in Ottawa, she was fortunate that she had a retirement plan. I think that's another issue within the story and within these numbers–what is, you know, the retirement plan for people in the end, the standards around long term care homes, because if we don't have high quality standards, what are we saying about how we treat our vulnerable elderly people who are at that stage of their life, you know, reliant somewhat or almost entirely on the assistance of essential workers. So, how those facilities are cleaned and maintained and what are the other standards because we've seen other issues in those types of facilities throughout the years. So it's so important.
 
Emma (03:40)
Thanks so much. And thank you so much for suggesting Nora.
 
Scott & Emma (03:44)
Cheers. Cheers.
 
Emma (03:48)
In Canada, the COVID-19 pandemic has not hit all communities equally.
 
News Clips (03:53)
In Ontario. 86 long term care facilities now have outbreaks and more than 1900 residents have died in that province. Nationally, about 80% of COVID-19 related deaths have been in long term care 


To date, the vast majority of the 159 residents at Guildwood have been infected and nearly 50 residents have died from the virus. 


One of the provinces hardest hit facilities was Herron on Montreal's West Island. Dozens died in horrible conditions.
 
Emma (04:33)
In May of 2020 a report released by the Canadian Armed Forces detailed cockroaches, rotting food, lack of personal protective equipment and lapses in sanitation protocol in various long term care homes in Ontario and Quebec. By far, the hardest hit residences were run by for profit corporations, increasing public scrutiny on the role profit motivations play in these homes. 


Nora Loreto is an activist, writer and podcaster based in Quebec City. Since the start of the pandemic, Nora has been compiling reports of COVID deaths in institutions across the country. Her data shows the raw and inescapable experiences of one of Canada's most vulnerable populations. 


I was wondering, how is the pandemic going for you? So you're in Quebec right now, right?
 
Nora (05:16)
Yes, in Quebec City. So we are in a city that has been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. We've had something like more than 20,000 cases, there's been almost 1000 deaths and so you know, that wreaks havoc on everything. So we have basically been shut down, fully locked down, I would say since March. Except there's also a more of a laissez faire attitude to the pandemic here. So while we've been shut down since March, there has been more opportunity to see people outside. Like, people are not at all hesitant to see each other outside. So, like, we spent the whole summer in the public pool, we spent the whole summer outside with our friends in parks and outdoor parties and this kind of thing. And now even in the winter, I mean, we're like drinking beer in parking lots while the kids crawl on snowbanks. So it's, um, you know, of all the places to have to be it sucks that it's the city with like, some of the highest rates of COVID. But it's also nice that it's a city where people are not too scared to go outside, or at least the people in my circles aren't too scared to go outside.
 
Emma (06:19)
Yeah, right. As long as you're following social distancing and being safe that's a really great way. Right now in Toronto, we're really concerned about the mental health from people being stuck inside on their own for months.
 
Nora (06:30)
Yeah. And like, the mental health stuff here is bad as well. I think that, you know, you can attribute it to anything, as in is it people being stuck inside? Is it the pandemic stress in general? At least, you know, a couple of friends in particular, I'm still able see and they’re still able to get out and walk around and see people. But it's not like the system's helping them.
 
Emma (06:55)
Yeah, very true. Wait times, especially for mental health, is very troubling. 


So, speaking of healthcare, can you walk me through the spreadsheet that you've put together?
 
Nora (07:05)
Yeah, so every night, I go through the reported deaths all across Canada, that have happened within some kind of residential facility. And so, most of those deaths are long term care. But there's also deaths that have happened within retirement residences, adult assisted living facilities, rehab hospitals, public hospitals, you know, there's more than 400 people who have died from COVID that they caught inside of a hospital while they were a patient. And other facilities like prisons and jails, shelters and other locations that people might spend a couple of nights at, for whatever services they need to access.
 
Emma (07:43)
And what drove you to start this spreadsheet?
 
Nora (07:45)
It was a little bit selfish, I just wanted to have a list so that I can refer to what I was writing, because I know that when you're trying to come up with an analysis, and you need to see very quickly how many people died at this one facility, or where's the largest set of deaths, or where's the largest set of deaths in Northern Ontario or whatever, you have to go to something that's quick and easy to reference. There's this obsession in journalism right now with data journalism, and data visualizations. And a lot of people like to experiment and do artistic things with data. And on the one hand, it's often quite beautiful, you can come up with these incredibly compelling stories through data. But on the other hand, that's not super helpful if you're a researcher or a journalist, and you just need a number. You don't want to go through a bunch of dancing figures to find out how many people died at this one facility. And so I started it, because on my podcast with Sandy Hudson, we were talking about deaths in long term care and there was no central location, like no media organization had a central location where they had a list of these deaths. And I knew that if we weren't keeping track of them, they would just fall into the ether. And public health units, some of them collect the information of how many people have died long term care but that's usually a lump sum. And so then you have to know all of the facilities within a health district to know who may be connected to those figures. You don't know if it has retirement residences as well, or you don't know public hospitals are in that because it's not always the case. So having just a very basic Google spreadsheet with all of this information, I did it primarily for myself, on the selfish side, but also for just record keeping in this country, knowing very well how quickly people forget about massive figures when they stop making sense because you get them every single day.
 
Emma (09:34)
Yeah, it's becoming very difficult to put this into context, because it's just we're getting numbers every day and it's hard to remember like, ‘Okay, what was last week like? Are we doing better? Are we doing worse?’
 
Nora (09:41)
Yeah, yeah. And journalists aren't putting that into context. Like, the reporting has not shifted over the course of the entire pandemic. There's two kinds of ways to do COVID reporting, you're either doing some sort of investigation, which is going to be longer term, is going to dig deeper, is going to cover a couple of days or weeks or months or even years, and then the other kind of reporting is has is effectively steganography is effectively the notes that are handed to journalists from public health officials, and then they publish it verbatim. And, you know, there's a role that journalists play in making sure that people understand what public health is saying. But what I find very frustrating is like, oftentimes, I'll go through the nightly news and find out you know, I see ‘Oh, two people have died in Ottawa,’ ‘oh, every single news outlet in Ottawa, from, from CBC to the [Ottawa] Citizen to like the Sun to whatever have all said two people have died long term care, and no one has named what long term care facilities.’ And so then I have to go back to Ottawa Public Health, where they got their initial information as well, and find out that they just didn't add that - they just didn't name the facilities. That's a huge problem, right? And so you can ask yourself, like, is this kind of stenography useful anymore in this pandemic? It was probably very useful. I remember it being useful in March, where every day you would be shocked by these numbers. But what does today's numbers mean in relation to yesterday, that's a story that most journalists on the daily COVID beat are not telling. They're literally giving you the figures, and then maybe delving into some aspect of the pandemic that is like hot today that politicians or the public health decided to make an issue of today. And that's the kind of reporting we're seeing [that] most often passes as, like, COVID journalism.
 
Emma (11:28)
Why don't you think that these organizations are reporting where these numbers are coming from? What do you think is just like a blanket number and then moving on?
 
Nora (11:36)
I have no idea. And it isn't, it isn't all media lists, right? It really depends. So even like Global Hamilton. Global Hamilton consistently posts data from all of the public health units around Hamilton and they name it, they name everything that the public health unit says. And so when there's data missing from their report, it's because the data is missing from public health. It's not because they chose not to add it. But there's other places in this country. Like, as I said, Ottawa, there's others as well, where journalists are just not putting it in. And I think it probably comes down to editors not expecting that information to be in stories. So there's just not a habit of doing it. Because it's really just a question of habit. Like you're already looking at the data, you could just add it, it's not hard. But that habit is actually very, it goes deeper than that, because it isn't just about not naming these facilities all the time. I mean, actually, the absolute worst example of this is in Alberta, where the Ministry of Health and Alberta hands out their daily list of who dies and media outlets don't always publish that. And so I usually have to crawl through six or seven media outlets. So the Calgary Herald and Edmonton sun and City News Edmonton and CBC and CTV and Global, before I find one outlet that's actually named what the ministry handed to journalists that day. And I don't know if it's a word count issue, I don't know if it's just deprioritized, but it is consistently left out of news reports for some reason. And so that's very frustrating. But there's other information as well, that's consistently missing, like ownership information. So it is far more often the case that in reporting deaths in long term care or residential care, the journalist does not say who owns the facility. It does happen sometimes. But by and large, it's left out of the story. And that's a really big problem, because then it doesn't tell Canadians who is responsible for the deaths that are appearing in today's news. 


Emma
And so, when you go through and you're putting this together, what sorts of trends are you noticing in regards to ownership? 


Nora
It's not, It's not the profit that's the problem, I mean the profit is a problem, but it's not the profit that's the problem. It's that the fact that the market within this country is so saturated by for profit operators, Quebec included, and these operators often operate long term care and retirement residences, right, retirement residences are far less regulated. The residents tend to be more autonomous and need fewer services, although oftentimes there are services given to them, very significant health service is given to them, private for profit care dominates retirement residences. But the presence of these organizations in the national scene means that there's been a race to the bottom for standards and that it absolutely has pulled with them public and private, not for profit operators, including, of course, that there are homes that are public and private, not for profit that are also managed by these for profit operators. And so the race to the bottom means that every government gives the same amount of money to every facility that operates long term care, except some are for profit and some are not for profit. So to be for profit, that means you have to skimp off of your services, you have to skimp on your foods, on cleaning services, contract all that stuff out. Consistently, like shave off how much time you're spending with every resident so that now it's like on average, like just over two hours a day, which is like really insufficient. And then that has an impact on the public operators as well, because the public operators are then expected to do just as much as the private operators for the same amount of money and always trying to save, save, save, save, save, save through this logic of austerity that has dominated our lives. And so you can really see that in the numbers because you know, the private for profit homes are at the top of the list for the number of deaths. But the public homes in Quebec are not too far below that, if you just look at Quebec alone. And then when you add the retirement residences into that, of course, it makes a big difference, because then the numbers of the for profit, private residences with deaths can continue to rise. We look at the United States and a bit smugly in Canada and look at their private for profit health care system and say that is a ridiculous way to organize health care forgetting that we've fully done that in long term care.
 
Emma (16:07)
And so when you say, private versus public, all of these places are getting grants from the government?
 
Nora (16:12)
Yeah, yeah. Funny, eh? [laughs]
 
Emma (16:14)
So is that they're getting a grant. And then they're also charging residents on top of that. Yeah,
 
Nora (16:19)
yeah. So think about, think about University, right? Every student at university represents a pocket of public money, but you also have to pay tuition fees. And in the last 10 years, the balance of public funding to private funding has actually shifted such that universities are more privately funded than publicly funded. It's a bit different because university system’s been around for a century and has had many years to evolve into the public system that Canadians know today. Long term care, of course, is a lot more new as people were living longer, these facilities, a lot of them evolved out of decades and decades and decades of benevolent societies or religious organizations caring for the sick and the elderly, right. And then where those institutions find themselves today really just depends on the on the way that that's evolved within the province. And so, you know, some of Alberta's biggest operators are private, not for profit, because they were connected years ago to the church, but operate almost as if they were public facilities, versus facilities that are owned by Rivera, or by Extendacare, or by Chartwells, which are the three largest operators in this country, that are actually like formally constituted as real estate holding corporations.
 
Emma (17:28)
So you're saying that you're finding reports of them like skimping back on cleaning and care? What sorts of reports have you seen on that?
 
Nora (17:35)
Well, that actually goes before the pandemic, that there were always worker organizations and unions demanding more money be put into the system because these operators had put so much strain on management to cut back – to cut back on everything that they could within these facilities. And so you'll see that like haircuts are not free, you have to pay for haircuts, sometimes you have to pay for extra grooming, sometimes you have to pay for just extras that you would expect would be part of the living package. Especially because these facilities are not at all inexpensive, right? They're also quite expensive. So you're paying extra for certain services that you think would be part of the package. Over the years as these corporations, these large corporations take more and more of a share of the operations within long term care, that puts downward pressure on the services and the quality because they're operating with the primary goal to pay shareholders because that's how they're set up. Their primary goal is not to care for people, it's to pay shareholders. And then obviously, there's going to be an interplay between how much money that they receive from government, how much money they receive from the people that live there, the services that they give, and the money that they're able to push out to shareholders.
 
Emma (18:49)
And so this public versus private issue with long term care homes, it hasn't really been covered in the media until this pandemic, like now we're hearing a lot of private versus public death rates. But why do you think that the media didn't come around to reporting on this until now?
 
Nora (19:03)
There has been some very good coverage before 2020. And it's really important to look at reporters like Teresa Boyle at the Toronto Star who has been writing about long term care for decades. And in long term care, mostly it was relegated to scandal reporting, so there would be a bombshell story of a resident who fell out of their bed and died, right. Or in Quebec, there was a really big story because the former leader of the Bloq Quebecois, Gilles Duceppe, his mother died outside of her retirement residence, because the fire alarm had gone off and she didn't realize it was a false alarm, and she left and she died in the snow. Right. And so that created a huge amount of attention on the conditions and the policies within long term care. Like don't also forget and I'm not sure maybe listeners don't know this, but it was not that long ago that 43 seniors died in a long term care facility fire in it. L’Isle-Verte in Quebec. And the story of that disaster was horrific. L’Isle-Verte is not very big. And so you can imagine as this place is on fire, there were people in the town that had tried to bring ladders and rescue people from their balconies because they couldn't get out. 


Emma (21:19)
A quick editor’s note before we get to the ending of this conversation. Nora quoted 43 seniors died in the fire. That number is actually 32 people declared dead and 13 taken to hospital.


Nora (21:21)
And that had happened in the shadow of the disaster at Lac-Mégantic, when that train exploded in the downtown and obliterated the downtown and killed so many people. So there have been stories of scandal, Elizabeth Wettlaufer is another one of them and all the stories that came out of the inquiry and journalists like Kate Dubinsky at CBC in London, covered Elizabeth Wettlaufer, covered the investment inquiry really, really closely, showing the inadequate problems within long term care. So it's not as if it hadn't been covered. But these were again, like in that theme of investigations or crisis coverage, or as they pop up, not something that is mundanely happening all the time. And I think that just is a problem with how our media is set up, right. Journalists are always searching for something that is considered news. And when have a system that is just so, so broken, and has been so consistently broken for so many years and creating the exact same problem year over year over year, by definition, that's not news, right?
 
Emma (21:19)
Oh, gosh, yeah.
 
Nora (21:21)
So that poses a real problem, I think, just for how the news industry has evolved. And also, there is a limit to how much blame mainstream news corporations will lay at the feet of the owners of these corporations, because the owners are very powerful people. Some of the biggest names of the Conservative Party in Ontario, the Progressive Conservatives, run long term care facilities, businesses, corporations, these REITS, these real estate holding firms, and they make a lot of money from them. I don't think journalists themselves have any problem criticizing these people. But certainly, their bosses do.
 
Emma (21:55)
Also too if these homes are being publicly traded, like there's a financial interest there, potentially, depending on what organization you're with.
 
Nora (22:02)
Oh, yeah. And then in smaller markets, like, you can imagine that these facilities are really important advertisers as well, right, like Roberta place in Barrie was still advertising people to move in while like 30 people had died, and everybody in the facility had COVID. Right. So the problems go very, very deep. And we're seeing the extent, and the depth of the depravity within these facilities that have been widely known. I mean anybody in the last like two decades who's had to make the decision with a family member, or on the behalf of a family member to live in long term care, knows very well, the problems that have plagued the system.
 
Emma (22:43)
Yeah. Honestly, I think a lot of times, we don't want to think about long term care, we don't want to think about, you know, getting older and end of life. And then suddenly, you're confronted with it, while also trying to take care of a parent or help an elderly relative through this.
 
Nora (22:59)
Yeah, it there's two things going into that fear, I think. There's the very obvious fear of mortality and our discomfort with mortality and losing people that we love. And then there's the very deep ableism that is built within our society of the fear of, well, I don't want to be disabled. Part of that is I don't want to be disabled because you know, you don't want your life to change because none of us like change right, in any changes to our lives are usually not welcome. But far bigger than that is the fear that if we're disabled, we will be discarded, we will be mistreated, we will be injured by the system, because we know very well that is what happens because our systems are so ablest. And so like, what would designing Long Term Care look like if all we were contending with was the fear of death. I imagine it would look a lot more kind, and it would look a lot more supportive, and that people's last years could be spent in total comfort, because who wouldn't want that. I'm sure none of us want to think about our parents or our grandparents or our friends or siblings dying. But if we are forced to think about that, we obviously want them to die in comfort. And so then you can then see that that ableism creeping in and saying, oh, but we also are afraid for ourselves, and the time that we might spend in one of these institutions, treated inhumanely or treated without dignity, and just, you know, left to die effectively.
 
Emma (24:23)
Yeah, it's a horrifying thought. I have some friends now, especially who are going through this. Their parents are just starting going homes needing this help and then they're seeing it. And so, you have this divided attention as well, where it's you want to fix the system but at same time, your priority is your parent or your relative, and then the system itself there's not a lot of public focus on it.
 
Nora (24:43)
Mm hmm. You touch on the exact conundrum that faces people who want social change in this country. And that is, it will never change by the actions of an individual, right? There's never going to be an individual who stands up and says, you know what, I'm going to sacrifice my time, I'm going to, unfortunately not pay attention to my loved one, and I'm going to change the system, right? That's a false dichotomy. That's not how it works. What we need are coalitions of people who are finally ready to scare government into changing action on this. And I say scare quite deliberately, because I think that is what it takes is that politicians know right now that that combination of ableism that combination of desire for lower taxes, and all this kind of bullshit that plagues politics, is enough to stop people from scaring politicians, is enough to accept what is unacceptable, we have got to see this as a warning and make us – make you and I and people listening to this and average people who look at the system – and say this is completely unacceptable. We have to start scaring politicians such that they either listen to us, or they are kicked out of office. And only when they start to feel kind of that kind of heat, will we actually see action on long term on long term care because the solutions to this problem are very profound. They exist, they've existed for years and there's experts and activists that have called for changes for years. But it takes a political courage that is just so absent from our national political scene, it's probably been absent since like, I was like, freaking two years old and I'm 36, right like it's just it does not exist, hasn't existed in in a couple of generations. But that doesn't mean that it cannot exist. And I think that this moment is going to change for a lot of us how we engage with politics, how we understand power, and what we are willing to do and not willing to do to force politicians into changing course.
 
Emma (26:49)
And so what are the solutions that these experts and activists are calling for?
 
26:53
There are a lot. I think at the at the base, there's a funding problem. And the funding problem, of course, is also tied to the profit problem. So obviously, we need to get rid of the profit motive within Long Term Care, period. That has to go. And there's so many examples for how you can do it and why we should do it. And that would that alone would fundamentally change how care is delivered. But it's not it, because as I said, the most deaths have happened in the public system in Quebec, and so there are big problems within the public system as well. We need to see Long Term Care added to the Canada Health Act, we need to like see long term care as part of public health care, and not a Frankenstein-esque add on to health care, which is basically what it is and what it's grown into, especially as people have lived longer and had gotten more and more complex health needs. We also, then, need to look at deinstitutionalization. Like, why are people moved into long term care? And what are the reasons for why they have to leave their homes? Or what are the reasons for why they're not moving in with family? Like is it the case that if a family had the supports necessary that they would absolutely want their relative to live with them, are people saying move to this this facility because we cannot care for you 24 hours a day? There is a policy intervention that can be made there. And so I think that not only are there solutions that people have been calling for years, but there are solutions all across the OECD that we just have not implemented that we have not tried to implement. And it's because this is such a moneymaker for a few powerful people in this country. So maybe we also just need to get those guys round them up into a little cage or something, and like leave them in jail because I do think that we have to start talking about criminal responsibility for this number of deaths as well.
 
Emma (28:38)
Yeah, absolutely. Right, especially too when you mentioned that there are other countries that have a successful model, and it's working for them. And so when we're looking at our numbers, and we're thinking like why isn't this working for us?
 
Nora (28:49)
Absolutely. And you know, there's a there's a Canadian chauvinism, that like we're the best, right? We're the best and everything, we’re the best country, we’re the happiest country, we’re the nicest people in the world. And I mean, other than like that just being such, like such…It's so bogus to say that. But like, we have so much to learn, and we have so many models that we can follow that it's just unacceptable for us to, you know, throw up our hands and say, Oh, my God, this is too complicated a problem, because it's really, really horrifying. We have gotten so comfortable with it in Canada that you know, when Elizabeth Wettlaufer murdered seven people and tried to murder you know, several others and got away with it. The only reason why she didn't get away with it was because she confessed, right, she confessed to a mental health nurse in Toronto, that should have been the moment that we were like, Oh, my God, this system is literally enabling serial murder. And it wasn't that moment. And that moment came a year and a half later in the form of this pandemic.
 
Emma (29:48)
And it's a What a terrible lesson to learn that it had to come to this for us to stop and look at it and say, okay, something's not working. 


Nora Loreto is the editor of the Canadian association of Labour Media and author of Take Back the Fight: Organizing Feminism in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts Sandy and Nora Talk Politics with Sandy Hudson. 


A link to her data on deaths in residential care in Canada is available in the show notes. 


If you enjoyed the show, you can subscribe to pull quotes on Spotify and Apple podcasts. 


Check back for a special episode of the Pull Quotes Podcast, coming out on March 9th. You can also pick up the 2021 edition of the Review on newsstands and online this spring.


Pull Quotes is produced by me, Emma Jones and Joe Fish. Special thanks to the Pull Quotes faculty advisor, Sonia Fattah, Ryerson’s digital specialist, Lindsay Hanna, and our very own Scott McLean for sharing his research with us.


This episode featured clips from Global News and CBC’s the National.