All this tariff talk mustn’t ‘Trump’ discussion of other serious problems as Ontario voters go to the polls next week.
The 2025 Ontario election is in mid-flight and already it is shaping up to be a missed opportunity.
Election campaigns are a unique chance to put forward ideas to solve the biggest challenges facing society. They are a competition of ideas, one that often leads to innovative solutions.
This provincial election campaign has been dominated by the spectre of sweeping U.S. tariffs and the devastating impact they could have on Ontario. This needs to be taken seriously.
But tariffs can’t trump everything.
There are too many important public policy issues currently not being talked about. From where I sit, the most important one is how to prepare for a demographic tidal wave heading our way. Ontario’s official projections show our population aged 75 and older will more than double in the next 25 years.
Right now, if you’re a senior in Ontario and you require care, the options are limited.
You can choose between long-term care homes, which should only be reserved for the most serious cases, and home care, which is woefully underfunded. If you have sufficient resources, you can move to a retirement home. However, that option is not available for the lower- and middle-income people who make up the majority of Ontario seniors. For them, assisted living homes are in such short supply, they’re virtually a non-option.
As a result of those limited options, too many seniors are ending up in emergency departments, which is the costliest and least appropriate destination for them.
This is the conversation that we need to have with our political representatives: What solutions will they implement to help seniors live at home longer?
For my organization, which includes non-profit seniors’ housing providers, the answers are surprisingly simple and often affordable. They start with us adopting a “home first” approach, whereby every decision is filtered through the goal of keeping people living independently in their own homes for as long as possible.
Currently, there is too high a reliance on family caregivers for the health care supports seniors should also be getting elsewhere. We know that family caregivers are experiencing increased levels of burnout. We need more structural supports.
Innovative programs such as New Brunswick’s Nursing Home Without Walls can help with that goal. The program uses a local long-term care home as a hub of support for older adults living in the surrounding community. Seniors living independently can get information, and be linked to health services and social activities in their community or their local long-term care home. That includes help from a system navigator who works with seniors on an outpatient basis, coordinating their care. Results show this program is an effective way to enable aging in place. It also reduces non-urgent visits to the emergency department.
We’d like to see government convert thousands of units of affordable seniors’ housing built in the 1980s into supportive housing. The province could easily make these into community wellness hubs by adding inexpensive supports to keep their residents healthy and engaged.
The homes would hire personal support workers and nurses to help residents with personal care, medication management, light housekeeping and more. They would also offer opportunities to socialize, including, for example, a diner’s club in the building.
These are a couple of the important ideas we’d like to see discussed in the current Ontario election campaign.
Let’s keep talking about solutions to the threatened U.S. tariffs. But at the same time, let’s create space to talk about other important issues too.
Lisa Levin is CEO of AdvantAge Ontario, a non-partisan association representing more than 480 providers of non-profit long-term care, seniors’ housing, supportive housing and community service agencies.
