Strengthening advocacy for seniors

A coalition of seniors’ groups and community organizations hosted a webinar in October 2025, featuring British Columbia’s seniors advocate, to learn more about the role of their province’s seniors advocate office. One of the major take-aways from the presentation was that without strong community and political advocacy, the influence on provincial government policies of the seniors advocate is limited.

Given this knowledge, it will be important that Manitoba’s new seniors advocate establish a seniors advisory council to inform the work of our province’s seniors advocate office and to acknowledge the critical role for older adult voice and advocacy in shaping government policy.

Manitoba’s recently appointed seniors advocate has the power to set up this council, which should be given real and not token powers. This would include the decision-making power to establish strategic plans, as well as the mandate to monitor and evaluate the impact of the initiatives of the seniors advocate office.

The webinar presentation by the B.C. seniors advocate focused on the reviews and recommendations of the office for greater accountability and transparency regarding government contracted long-term care services.

In 2018 and again in 2023, the B.C. seniors advocate undertook a comparative review of for-profit and non-profit long-term care facilities. Provincial funding for contracted long-term care facilities grew from $1.4 billion to $1.9 billion per year over the five-year period, an increase of 35 per cent. The reviews identified that contracted funding for long-term care facilities was one of the largest government transfer to the private sector across government departments.

Fittingly, the title of the 2018 review was A Billion Reasons to Care and the 2023 report was entitled A Billion More Reasons to Care.

The findings of these two reviews produced alarming data, including: (1) non-profit facilities spent 25 per cent more per resident on direct care as compared to for-profit facilities; (2) non-profit facilities delivered 93,000 hours more care than they were funded to deliver in 2023, up from 80,000 hours in 2018; (3) for-profit facilities delivered 500,000 hours less care than were funded to deliver in 2023, up from 207,000 hours in 2018; and (4) there was a 113 per cent increase in profit involving provincially contracted long-term facilities over the five-year period – 80 per cent of total profit was concentrated in 20 per cent of the facilities, of which 82 per cent were for-profit facilities.

In 2018, the B.C. seniors advocate made five recommendations to increase transparency and accountability involving the quality of services and use of taxpayers’ dollars, including: standardizing the provincial financial report form; ensuring funding for direct care must be spent on direct care; improving the accuracy and transparency of monitoring and reporting for compliance with publicly funded hours; defining profit; and making revenues and expenditures for publicly contracted long-term care facilities available to the public.

Five years later, the B.C. seniors advocate’s second comparative review identified that only one of the five recommendations — standardizing the provincial financial report form — had been implemented. The 2023 report made four recommendations which simply restated the four recommendations that had not been implemented in the 2018 review.

It is disturbing that the B.C. provincial government has essentially ignored these low-hanging recommendations made by the seniors advocate.

If the seniors advocate was unable to influence the government to make administrative policy changes that would not require much public funding to promote greater transparency and service efficiencies, the capacity of the office on its own to impact policies for older adults that require significant public investment must be brought into question.

The B.C. seniors advocate office played a critical role in collecting important evidence-based data and identified common-sense recommendations for the government.

However, without robust and vocal advocacy by seniors and the community at-large to create sufficient political pressure, the impact of the recommendations made by the seniors advocate was negligible.

A meaningful collaboration between the Manitoba Seniors Advocate and older adults in our province will serve to better address the needs and aspirations of seniors, along with the added benefit of mobilizing community capacity to influence changes in public policy. Establishing a seniors advisory council to support the work of the seniors advocate office would be an important step in building this authentic partnership. “Nothing about us without us” should be a guiding principle of policy and service development for older adults in our province.

Sandra Sukhan is co-chair of the Manitoba Seniors Equity Action Coalition; Marnie Strath is chair, Canadian Association of Retired Persons – Manitoba Chapter; and Paul Moist is president, Manitoba Federation of Union Retirees.