Government inaction let legitimate cases of seniors abuse slide By: Tom Brodbeck Posted: 2:42 PM CDT Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023

Opinion

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This article was published 01/08/2023 (769 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s highly probable hundreds of seniors are physically, sexually or verbally abused every year in Manitoba’s long-term care facilities and their cases are swept under the carpet.

It’s hard to conclude otherwise after reading several years of annual reports from the Protection of Persons in Care Office, the recently discredited Manitoba government agency that will soon be disbanded.

It’s also a mystery why the office stopped producing annual reports in 2016, the year the Progressive Conservative government took office.

The reports published until then show more than 2,000 cases of abuse or neglect were reported every year to the PPCO between 2011-12 and 2015-16. Only a minority of them (around 20 per cent) were fully investigated. An even smaller fraction of allegations (more than five per cent) were deemed to be “founded.”

Investigation of the Protection for Persons in Care Office

 

It’s not because most weren’t legitimate cases of abuse or neglect. It’s because the PPCO has been using a flawed interpretation of what constitutes abuse.

In some cases, managers changed the conclusions of investigators from “founded” to “unfounded” and discouraged subordinates from keeping records of discussions that led to the changes.

Those were some of the findings of auditor general Tyson Shtykalo’s report on the PPCO released last week.

The province has known for years about the flawed application of the law that governs abuse and neglect in care homes. Recommendations to amend provincial legislation to fix it have been made numerous times but were ignored by government.

The matter was first brought to the Tory government’s attention in an internal service review by Manitoba Family Services in 2016. The report recommended, among other things, “Staff and management have pointed to a need for changes to be made to the legislation, specifically to the definitions of abuse and neglect.”

Despite that, no action was taken by government.

 

The same year, the PPCO stopped publishing annual reports, including statistics showing the number of allegations of abuse and neglect and how many were investigated. The Tory government has not explained why that occurred.

In 2019, the PPCO began drafting a proposal to amend legislation to change the definition of abuse and neglect. However, the proposed changes were abandoned without explanation.

In September 2020, Premier Heather Stefanson, then minister of families, announced the creation of a task force to provide recommendations on services for adults with intellectual disabilities, including how abuse is defined in law (which would also apply to seniors living in long-term care facilities).

Among the members of the Vulnerable Persons Act task force was Tory MLA Janice Morley-Lecomte (a backbencher at the time, now minister of mental health and community wellness). Similar to the 2016 family services report, the task force recommended legislative amendments on how abuse is defined.

“Manitoba legislation requires that abuse or neglect be reasonably likely to cause serious physical or psychological harm,” the task force wrote. “This means that a slap in the face is not necessarily considered abuse under the legal definition in the act, since it does not lead to lasting physical consequences.

“Such examples are at odds with common sense. The task force strongly believes that the act creates an overly strict test to prove that a person has been abused.”

“The task force strongly believes that the act creates an overly strict test to prove that a person has been abused.”

The recommendations were presented to Families Minister Rochelle Squires in 2021, but government still didn’t act.

It wasn’t until after the office of the auditor general concluded its investigation in July 2022 that the Stefanson government made changes to the legislation earlier this year.

In the meantime, thousands of reports of abuse and neglect have either not been investigated or were deemed “unfounded” because of the PPCO’s faulty interpretation of the legislation and/or the need to amend the law.

According to the PPCO’s 2014-15 annual report: “For a file to proceed to investigation, the PPCO must be able to satisfy Subsection 5(2) of the Protection for Persons in Care Act, which says that there must be reasonable grounds to believe that a patient is or is likely to be abused or neglected before a more extensive investigation can be conducted.”

Because the PPCO wrongly interpreted that to mean abuse doesn’t occur unless the victim exhibits long-term emotional or physical harm, thousands of cases were never investigated, which allowed abuse and neglect to continue.

This also occurred under the former NDP government. A 2011 investigation by the provincial ombudsman found problems with the way the PPCO interpreted abuse, which may have contributed to cases being wrongly dismissed. Despite that, the government of the day failed to make the necessary legislative changes.

The Stefanson government has since announced changes to the system (two months before a provincial election), including replacing the PPCO with an independent investigation office that will report directly to the legislative assembly.

That’s an appropriate response.

However, for more than a decade both NDP and Tory governments ignored persistent calls for change.

That is shameful.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca