‘I want people to see that this terrible thing happened in Canada’: Toronto exhibit honours COVID dead

In her Vancouver nursing home, during the early waves of COVID-19, a tiny woman named Moon spent her final months mostly alone, in lockdown.
Originally from Hong Kong, Moon taught her daughter and grandchildren her culture with its age-old values that directed family to care for its elders.
“The expectation was for the children to take care of the parents, through acts of service or physical touch, or gifts,” said her granddaughter, speaking in an audio recording connected to a “storytelling chair” decorated in memory of Moon, part of a multimedia exhibit created by historian Megan J. Davies called, “COVID in the House of Old.”
During early COVID lockdowns, those acts of service were not allowed for Moon. By December 2020, after she caught the virus, Moon was allowed visitors and when she took a turn for the worse, her family rushed to her bedside and held her hand.
“We are here,” they told her, as she died. “We are here.”
Thousands of moments like this unfolded throughout the pandemic and the trauma left from residents’ lonely demise and debilitation is captured by “COVID in the House of Old.”
As a historian, Davies wants to ensure that Canadians don’t forget the failures in long-term care so she created the cross-country exhibit with personalized chairs, a website, podcast and individual stories to be archived.
“I want people to see that this terrible thing happened in Canada. We were the global leaders in deaths in percentage of population in the first wave,” said Davies, professor (emerita) at York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies.
“There were bad decisions, bad priorities and ageism.”
More than 56,000 residents and 22,000 staff in nursing and retirement homes were infected with COVID between March 1 and Aug. 15, 2021, leading to 14,000 deaths, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
In the height of the pandemic, particularly after Canada’s military exposed care problems that advocates have known for years, governments promised change.
During the 2021 federal election campaign Liberal leader Justin Trudeau said government would create a Safe Long-Term Care Act, but was vague on details. Public consultations on the proposed act closed in September. New long-term care national standards that the federal government funded remain voluntary, except in Quebec. In 2021, Ontario’s Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission, led by former associate chief justice Frank Marrocco, released a report with 85 recommendations, calling for a “reimagining” of the way older adults live to avoid “warehousing” them in institutions.
Davies’ exhibit took shape in British Columbia in early 2022, and would later travel across the country, stopping in Saskatoon, Winnipeg and Manitoulin Island. “COVID in the House of Old” opened last Tuesday at Christie Gardens retirement community in Toronto where it will remain until Oct. 10, with stops at the Active Adult Centre of Mississauga and the City of Toronto’s Castleview Wychwood Towers long-term-care home before ending its run on Nov. 30, at Montreal’s Concordia University.
Individual stories collected from the public, a history of everyday Canadians’ experiences through the pandemic, will be archived in Montreal’s Archives Passe-Mémoire.
As one woman’s “story” contribution said, “After a lifetime of being surrounded by those who love them, my parents had to fight alone without each other, confused, vulnerable and without their families who love them beside them holding their hands. This to me is the true cost of COVID.”
At Christie Gardens this week, residents of the retirement home used headphones to listen to the spoken stories connected to the exhibit’s storytelling chairs. Nine in total, the chairs held belongings representing an individual long-term-care resident, worker or in the case of Manitoulin Island’s Wikwemikong Nursing Home, the community.
Maggie’s chair held a leopard spotted scarf and cards from her grandchildren that said, “Miss you, love you forever, My Grammie.”
Maggie, the exhibit said, was born in Toronto to parents from Trinidad and Jamaica. She was “a secretary, a single mother, a volunteer and a devoted grandmother.” She died of COVID in a Toronto nursing home in April 2020.
In Davies’s opening-night speech at Christie Gardens on Tuesday, she said the ageism that left so many older adults to die from COVID in long-term care has its roots in the “houses of industry,” that originated in England and migrated to Canada.
“In my historian’s view, what happened in residential care during the pandemic, the staggering death statistics here in southern Ontario and parts of Quebec and B.C., the lack of PPE in some facilities, the way in which elders were shut off from their loved ones for extended periods of time, in some cases, often with no regard for human rights or for the trauma that was being inflicted, for me, all of this was scripted by a past that intersects with colonialism and its injustices,” she said.
“These were an English model where older poor people, people with disabilities, people who were just very poor, were separated from society and put in institutions where they had to work for their keep.
“These were shameful places. They were punitive and they were part of a colonial apparatus that included ‘lunatic’ asylums, prisons and residential schools. Each institution was characterized by large or small acts of brutality and the negation of personhood, and this ethos has lingered in residential care,” she said.
During the pandemic, many advocates and lawyers argued against the government-imposed lockdowns that forced the isolation of older adults in independent-living retirement homes (which fall under the Residential Tenancies Act and the Retirement Homes Act) and nursing homes (a separate government-licensed system), requiring they remain in their rooms where many declined from loneliness.
The philosophy behind that old English model still prevails, Davies believes, and enabled those government directives.
“That really struck a chord with me,” said Raza Mirza, assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Life Course and Aging, who attended the event.
“This is one of the largest systems of institutionalism across our country … I think what is really key here is that partially because of the institutionalization of older adults in these settings, that they were stripped of their rights,” Mirza said.
“Older adults, once you are no longer considered of value to the capitalist system, you’re sort of warehoused in these places. Where does that take us? I think we need to have a better consideration of human rights and, age is a real priority area.”
Florene Shuber is an independent living resident at Christie Gardens. The exhibit, said Shuber, 89, brings back bad memories of the lockdown directives, which she considered an infringement on her rights.
The directives, filtered through Ontario’s Medical Officer of Health, public health officials and the Ontario Ministry of Health among others, were focused on limiting COVID infections and deaths at a time when hospitals were overwhelmed with seriously ill or dying patients. Those early directives did not consider the research that shows social isolation and loneliness, especially among older adults, can also kill.
“I was very angry,” she said. “I actually left for three months. I couldn’t bear the thought of being locked up in there. My own feeling is that if you live to be in your eighties and you are well, you can make your own decisions.
“And I’m disappointed that older persons didn’t fight back. You know, we have power and we’re a voting bloc. We pay taxes. Many of us are very smart still at our age. And I think a lot of damage happened during that period. People being locked in was unbelievably horrible.”
Ann James, another Christie Gardens resident, said a few residents found a way to remain social, however clandestine.
“I think it was originally it was supposed to be a total lockdown. Like you weren’t supposed to go out of your apartment. But we sort of snuck around,” said James, 90.
“Eventually it became a little group and we would get together once or twice a week and have a drink, some wine or coffee.”
Long in the planning stage, Heather Janes, CEO of Christie Gardens, said she welcomed the exhibit as a way of ensuring that the people who died are not forgotten.
“What is important are the individuals whom we lost,” Janes said. “What is important is how society and our policymakers treated some of the most vulnerable members of our communities. The CIHO exhibit tells us some of their stories, but more importantly, it creates a space for us to reflect on our own stories.”
Before Davies took “COVID in the House of Old” on the road, she created seven chairs. Along the way, she added Kayley’s chair, representing younger people living with disabilities in long-term care and Alf’s chair, for queer nursing home residents.
The stories told through the chairs, Davies said, expose a deeper issue within a system that doesn’t easily adapt to the traditions of non-Western cultures.
Davies said the family of Moon, was devastated by their inability to provide the hands-on care that is natural in their culture.
“There was no accommodation made for that,” Davies said. “Why not? Why not find a way to facilitate that in the pandemic? It isn’t colonialism versus Indigenous … It hits in so many ways. Alf, who is gay and has a chosen family but not a legal family. It hits with Moon’s daughter and granddaughters who cannot do acts of service for their grandmother and take care of her. And literally, there was no one left in that home that spoke Cantonese when (Moon) was getting sick.”
It was on Manitoulin Island, at the Wikwemikong Nursing Home, where most of the residents are Indigenous, that Davies said she saw people able to embrace their culture as a natural part of everyday life. During her visits, she saw residents cleaning smelts, drumming and enjoying a feast of moose.
During lockdowns, staff got a water slide and pulled the residents down a (slight) slope. Later, there was a water fight between residents and staff.
“They take risks,” she said. Traditional homes are decried for an obsession with safety that, advocates say, destroys the fun of living.
Davies noted the new models and philosophies in some long-term-care homes but said the overall system needs a “radical reshift.”
Ultimately, her goal, through “COVID in the House of Old,” is to change the way Canadians look at aging and long-term care.
“I would like people to take action and the action that they really need to take is to make it a political priority because this will not change unless politicians feel like ‘Oh, we’ve got to deal with this.’
“And it’s not just an abstract thing, it’s not even for our parents, really. It’s for our future selves.”