NDP leader Andrea Horwath will hold a virtual town hall tonight focused on long-term care in Barrie and to hear from the community following the devastating COVID-19 outbreak at Roberta Place which has killed 70 people.
The Official Opposition leader will also talk about what she thinks must be done to keep seniors safe in long-term care.
Since the outbreak at Roberta Place was declared Jan. 8 by the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit, there have been 66 confirmed COVID cases and three considered probable, all of whom are residents. One essential caregiver associated with the 137-bed facility on Essa Road also died after contracting the virus.
“My heart remains with the Roberta Place community as families, workers and caregivers grieve tragic losses — some while also recovering from the virus themselves,” Horwath said in a news release. “The sense that this kind of devastation might have been prevented can only add to that pain.
"We saw how hard COVID-19 hit long-term care homes in the first wave (of the pandemic), and we never should have been back here again," she added.
Horwath says long-term care has been "cut, squeezed, privatized and underfunded by both Liberal and Conservative governments for decades."
"Our loved ones haven’t been getting the quality of life and quality of care they deserve for a long time," she said. "But when the pandemic began, Ontario should have hired thousands of personal support workers (PSWs), put an infection prevention and control expert in every long-term care home, and sent the Canadian Armed Forces into struggling homes. But Doug Ford didn’t want to invest. He was making cuts to long-term care before the pandemic, and he doesn’t want to spend on long-term care now.”
The NDP says it has a plan to fix and expand home care and long-term care. Aging Ontarians Deserve the Best aims to build 50,000 beds, create smaller care home communities, help seniors remain in their homes longer, raise wages for PSWs, and take the profits out of long-term care by transitioning to a fully public, not-for-profit system.
For tonight's town hall meeting, which begins at 7 p.m., Horwath will be joined by NDP deputy leader Sara Singh, who's also the Official Opposition critic for seniors, home care and long-term care.
The town hall meeting on Facebook can be accessed here.
