Couple in their 80s forced to live apart because of cruel long-term care rules

Spousal reunification a lower priority, Cambridge couple told

She lives in long-term care at Hilltop Manor, a 25-minute drive away

If Jim and Joan McLeod were 42 instead of 82, what is happening to them would be unthinkable.

The couple have been married 63 years. But for the last five of those years, they’ve been forced to live apart thanks to an inhumane rule that prevents couples from staying together in long-term-care homes.

Jim lives independently in an apartment at Fairview Mennonite Home in Cambridge. Joan has more health-care needs since having two strokes, which affected her vision. She lives in long-term care at Hilltop Manor, a 25-minute drive away on the other side of the city.

All Jim wants is to be able to move her to a long-term care bed at Fairview Mennonite so that they can be on the same property. Then they could have more of a normal life, being together any time they wanted.

Jim’s request is so small, and yet it has been denied over and over again.

Joan is on the waiting list, but never gets to the top. Jim has been told that moving patients with critical needs into long-term care is more important than spousal reunification.

But, Jim says, he isn’t asking to take a bed away from the overburdened long-term care system. If Joan moved, her bed at Hilltop would be free for someone else.

Yet his explanations are met with silence and inaction from officials and most elected representatives.

“I don’t know where to turn,” Jim said.

His only hope is a proposed new law, created by Waterloo MPP Catherine Fife, that would enshrine in legislation that spouses have a right to be together in longterm care.

Fife has been a New Democratic Party opposition MPP for 10 years. Her private member’s bill, titled “Till Death Do Us Part,” would amend the Residents’ Bill of Rights in the Long-Term Care Homes Act.

It would state that residents have the right not to be separated from their spouses upon admission, but to have accommodation made available so they can stay together.

In December 2019, this bill went quickly to second reading, then stagnated in committee. Then, in the fall of 2021, all the progress that had been made was wiped away when the legislature was prorogued because of the federal election campaign. What a waste.

“Once again, politics failed seniors in Ontario.”

Fife reintroduced her bill, as Bill 95. But the provincial election has pushed it off the table once more. She will introduce it a third time, if she gets re-elected, when the legislature resumes after the June 2 provincial election.

But why should it be up to one singularly focused opposition MPP to make this obvious change? Why didn’t the Progressive Conservative government just do it?

The answer isn’t easy to stomach. At the beginning of the pandemic we all watched in horror while elderly people died horrible, lonely deaths in long-term care — sometimes dozens of them in one home. We learned that long-term-care homes were too crowded, with sometimes four people to a room. And those homes were staffed with poorly paid health-care workers who didn’t have enough access to personal protective equipment. We vowed that we would fix this, once society was back to normal.

But then the vaccines came, fewer people died, and we started thinking about other things: soaring home prices; how to pay the bills when work had been so thoroughly disrupted; racial and social injustice; the mental health of our children.

And, as so often happens, our focus on the needs of elderly people melted away, like snow in a warm spring rain.