The Graying State: Elder Care Policy in Canada

The central argument of this paper is that although the Canadian state remains committed to ensuring that veterans are provided with programs and services to meet their changing needs, the same cannot be said of the rest of Canada’s elderly population who have also made significant contributions to Canadian society. What is commonly termed the ‘crisis in elder care’ highlights the issue of responsibility of caring for Canada’s growing elderly population (Cancian and Oliker, 2000, p. 69). There may be more demand for elder care than the current pattern of caregiving can provide, and there are fewer options for increasing informal care, however, this is not necessarily an indication of unsupportable demands for care. This paper begins with an examination of the public/private divide, social reproduction, and the distinction between an ethic of care and one of justice. This discussion of key concepts from feminist social theory is important in analyzing the ‘care deficit’ for elderly Canadians. Secondly, the paper highlights that Canada is about to have a disproportionate number of elderly and explains how this affects elder care recipients and informal caregivers. Next, the paper explores the policy challenges presented by Canada’s aging population with emphasis on the influence of the neo-liberal market on social policy making in Canada. On this basis, I advance a social policy model based on a national home-care program called The Veterans Independence Program (VIP) that provides care for some of Canada’s elderly so that they can remain independent, healthy and living in their own homes. I argue that in efforts to rectify the care imbalances and uncertainties experienced by many of Canada’s elderly, a positive amendment would be to extend the VIP home care benefits to all elderly Canadians. This would offer a future where senior citizens are taken care of. This model can/should be applied to all Canadian senior citizens (V.A.C. 4). The final section of this paper considers how the pursuit of alternatives requires an active rather than a retreating state presence in the development of social policy, how the discourse of elder care should be reframed to guarantee access to basic levels of specified services for all elderly Canadian citizens, and how the costs of those services could be more equitably distributed.