Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Immigrant seniors challenge system

It's hard to find Canadians who do not claim to want the best for seniors.
SENIORScol-todd.19.jpg
The federal government has made it easier for the parents and grandparents of new Canadian immigrants to come to Canada, increasing the need for culturally senstive seniors homes.

It's hard to find Canadians who do not claim to want the best for seniors.

It's why the media is full of stories urging Canadians to support seniors as they become fragile, with many entering facilities with jargonistic labels such as "independent living," "assisted living" and "intermediate care."

As Canadian politicians focus on keeping taxes low, many of the faltering seniors who do not have enough family support, cannot afford expensive in-home care aids or are unable to pay for luxurious private facilities end up receiving decidedly average care in government-supported facilities.

Wanting to go further for seniors, many immigrant-advocacy groups are lobbying governments for more "culturally appropriate" residences. That's where residents can enjoy the food they grew up with and, crucially, speak to staff in the only languages they know; those of their homelands.

In addition, as the people who run Guru Nanak Niwas seniors residence in Surrey emphasize, ethnic-specific facilities are also needed for people who require protection from widespread financial and emotional elder abuse in the immigrant population.

Advocates of ethnic-specific seniors residences justifiably argue that, as Canadian citizens, or even as permanent residents, elderly foreign-born seniors have the same legal rights as other Canadians to taxpayer-funded services.

But calling for more money for "culturally appropriate" senior homes also raises tough ethical questions about the immigration policies that largely make such facilities necessary in the first place.

Since people who immigrate to Canada in their 50s, 60s or older are less likely to learn English or French and more likely to want ethnic-specific seniors facilities, such institutions bring up the kind of issues Britons were exploring during the Brexit debate on leaving the European Union.

Are Canadians willing to pay the extra costs associated with immigrants who arrive in their senior years?

Unlike the Australian government, Canada's new federal Liberal government is operating on the assumption that Canadians are ready to spend more on immigrant seniors, even if they generally pay less in taxes.

Justin Trudeau's Liberals have promised to double the number of immigrants who will be welcomed into Canada as sponsored parents and grandparents.

And Immigration Minister John McCallum is making it easier for parents and grandparents of immigrants to become Canadian citizens without demonstrating proficiency in an official language.

Immigration Minister John McCallum is making it easier for parents and grandparents of immigrants to become Canadian citizens without demonstrating proficiency in an official language.

While the Conservatives expected a prospective immigrant under age 64 to show some ability in an official language, the Liberals are moving the age down to 54, meaning anyone older will no longer need to prove language skills.

The federal government is lowering its language requirements for newcomers in response to demands from dozens of mostly Liberal MPs, including Surrey-Newton's Sukh Dhaliwal, who serve large immigrant ridings.

However, the Liberal government's readiness to welcome more elderly arrivals goes against the wishes that Canadians have expressed in opinion polls.

A Forum survey found Canadians by a wide margin favour allowing immigrants to sponsor their spouses or dependent children to join them. But it also found Canadians oppose - by a margin of 2.5 to one - allowing immigrants to sponsor their parents.

Critics suggest the growing push for more culturally-sensitive seniors homes in Canada is a prime example of the costly fallout from parent and grandparent immigrant-sponsorship programs.

And that's not only because, as immigrant support groups acknowledge, ethnic-specific seniors facilities cost a little more since they provide special food and require staff who can speak a range of languages, from Punjabi to Mandarin.

The main reason elderly immigrants are more expensive, according to a report in The Association of Canadian Studies, is that they come to Canada late in life, which means they often don't work at all or for long, don't pay significant amounts in income tax and have more health problems.

What kind of numbers are we talking about? For the three years from 2012 to 2014, the federal Conservatives reduced a backlog by allowing in 70,000 parent and grandparent immigrants. Then they cut the target number to 5,000 new applications a year beginning in 2015.

Yet a study by the late SFU sociologist Ellen Gee found that, while young immigrants arrive in relatively good health, most immigrants over age 65 have much more urgent medical problems than their Canadian-born counterparts.

A Statistics Canada study also found a direct correlation between not speaking English or French and suffering worse health.

"The odds that immigrants with persistently limited proficiency report poor health ... were close to three times the odds for immigrants whose language abilities were persistently good," said the report by Edward Ng.

Australia is stricter than Canada about accepting immigrants in their later years.

Since the justification for bringing in parents and grandparents is to keep a family together, Australia employs a "balance of family" test, under which sponsorship cannot occur unless at least half of the parents' children are already in Australia.

As a result of this test - as well as charging extremely high visa fees and requiring sponsors to post financial bonds and assurances - Australia admits far fewer parents who are likely to incur a significant cost to the public purse than does Canada.

A Fraser Institute report titled Canadian Family Class Immigration: The Parent and Grandparent Component estimates that each parent or grandparent admitted to Canada in their lifetime costs taxpayers roughly $300,000.

Former Canadian diplomat Martin Collacott, the author of the report and a frequent adviser to Parliament, acknowledges some sponsored parents find work and thereby "contribute to the cost of their health care, Old Age Security payments, et cetera after retiring." However, Collacott warns that "older arrivals who paid little or nothing in income tax during their time in Canada receive very substantial benefits."

A problem with taxpayers providing ethnic-specific seniors facilities for sponsored parents and grandparents "is that the rationale for bringing them in is that it is traditional for them to live with adult offspring. On this basis it becomes questionable why they would be placed in such care facilities rather than remain with the adult children," Collacott says.

"I suspect it is because of a combination of circumstances, including that the children of a sponsoring couple have grown to an age where the parents and grandparents are no longer required as babysitters. A separate consideration is that the parents and grandparents may have enough medical issues that the sponsors are quite prepared to hand them over to someone else to deal with."

In the midst of this immigration debate, advocates for increasing the supply of culturally sensitive seniors homes continue to press governments to do more to enhance the dignity of elders in their last days, regardless of whether they have contributed a proportionate share of taxes.

Meanwhile, Canadians are left to wrestle with the difficult choice between two conflicting ethical "goods" - being kind to seniors, and being prudent about taxpayers' ability to pay. It's a Brexit-style immigration discussion destined to continue for years.