Crisis in Ontario Nursing Homes

Nursing home, Braeside, Ontario, 1947

The military had to be called in to Ontario nursing homes when the regular staff walked out in fear of coronavirus. Now, unsurprisingly, they are reporting terrible conditions.

We are, as a society, dangerously ignorant, if not in deliberate denial, of the fact that there are people in the world who get satisfaction out of controlling other people and making other people suffer. These are, more or less, in modern psychological terminology, “narcissists,” those who wish to feel superior to others. The problem is common, because it is a common, indeed inevitable human impulse: to be as gods, as the serpent promised Eve. It is, simply, the impulse to evil.

Because we are ignorant of, or in denial of, the reality of evil, we no longer put up any barriers against them.

Anyone who gets satisfaction out of making others suffer will naturally gravitate to jobs in which they get to deal with especially vulnerable people, ideally people under their full, unsupervised control. Nursing homes are perfect for such purposes. Unless we set up a system to prevent it, we should expect that anyone in a nursing home is being abused.

Other obvious opportunities for such predators are, of course, orphanages, hospitals, mental hospitals, or schools. Especially residential schools.

We are in the habit of blaming the eternal scandals around orphanages and residential schools on the religious groups that had been running them. But religious groups cannot be blamed in the present case. The media narrative instead seems to be that the problem is with their being “private” and “for profit.” The problem will be solved, then, by having the government run them.

This will, of course, make the problem worse. Just as secularizing the schools and hospitals made the problem worse. It will reduce supervision, improve job security, and raise the pay, rewarding the predators and making the job more attractive to them. Private employers must please the customers: family members, if not the residents themselves. Bureaucrats get to do as they want.

We used to prevent or minimize such abuse by making such jobs part of a religious vocation. The churches ran the hospitals, the nursing homes, the orphanages, the asylums, and the schools. This was so obvious a strategy that it was followed, not just in North America and Europe, but everywhere, in Buddhist lands or Muslim lands as much as in Christian lands.

This approach meant staff were selected and vetted from the outset for their moral character. They were closely supervised at all times; not just on the job, but outside the job.

We have systematically removed all such protections.

Now the vulnerable everywhere must pay a heavy price.