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Justice Denied & No Improvements After LTC Disaster
Posted: February 21, 2025
(February 21, 2025)
By: Saima Desai, The Grind
Thousands of seniors died in Ontario’s long-term care homes during the COVID pandemic. One daughter calls Doug Ford’s actions since then “a slap in the face.”
The last time Cathy Parkes saw her dad alive, it was through the second-floor window of a long-term care home where COVID was running rampant.
It was April 2020. Parkes drove to the Orchard Villa long-term care (LTC) home in Pickering. She and other families had been locked out of the home. Staff told her that her 86-year-old dad had a fever, but it wasn’t high enough to test him for COVID.
“I knew something was very wrong,” she remembers. “It got to the point where my dad wasn’t answering his phone.”
As she watched from outside, “the PSW, who was not a regular, she lifted his bed up. He had a bed by the window, second floor, and I could see him and he was just comatose, just lying on his back unable to respond. So she held the phone to his ear. I told him that I loved him and that I would help him,” Parkes says through tears.
She tried to order an ambulance to take him to the hospital. Orchard Villa’s management told her she wasn’t allowed to. Her dad died the next day.
Seventy-seven patients had died of COVID in Orchard Villa by June 2020.
But the Canadian military’s report about the conditions inside painted a picture that was worse than Parkes had imagined.
Infestations of cockroaches and flies. So few staff that residents were left sitting in their own feces. One senior who choked to death while being fed while lying down.
In a press conference after the shocking military report, Doug Ford appeared to cry. He committed to restoring the comprehensive annual inspections that had dwindled under his government. He promised a full investigation and possible criminal charges.
The inspections haven’t returned to their promised levels.
And the investigation never happened. Instead, Ford has granted 30-year licences and massive expansions to the same for-profit long-term care chains responsible for the worst cases of abuse and neglect. That includes Southbridge, the owner of Orchard Villa.
Ford also introduced Bill 218. It made it much harder to sue a nursing home to get monetary damages. Families now have to prove there was not just “negligence” but “gross negligence.”
“That was just a slap in the face,” says Parkes. “It was absolutely contradictory to the tears that he had cried in May. And I realized at that point, Doug Ford is not someone who keeps his word.”
The Ford government has issued a Ministerial Zoning Order to help Orchard Villa expand.
Meanwhile, Parkes has been working with the Ontario Health Coalition on a court challenge to stop the nursing home’s new licence.
“It’s disgusting,” Parkes says of the licence and expansion. “It’s like a free pass and taxpayers’ dollars to help pay for it. So essentially I’m paying for what killed my father.”
