Seniors’ Long-Term Care in Canada: A Continuum of Soft to Brutal Privatisation

Abstract

We situate the contemporary crisis of COVID-19 deaths in seniors’ care facilities within the restructuring and privatisation of this sector. Through an ethnographic comparison in a for-profit and nonprofit facility, we explore what we identify as brutal and soft modes of privatisation within publicly subsidised long-term seniors’ care in Vancouver, British Columbia, and their influence on the material and relational conditions of work and care. Workers in both places are explicit that they deliver only bare-bones care to seniors with increasingly complex care needs, and we document the distinct forms and extent to which these precarious workers give gifts of their time, labour and other resources to compensate for the gaps in care that result from state withdrawal and the extraction of profits within the sector. We nonetheless locate more humane and hopeful processes in the nonprofit facility, where a history of cooperative relations between workers, management and families suggest the possibility of re-valuing the essential work of care.