The British Columbia Northern Exhibition (BCNE) opened Thursday, Aug. 14 with hundreds of guests exploring the midway, riding rides and enjoying the live entertainment.
One of the centres of activity was Kin 3, which hosted the annual BCNE Seniors Fair.
Kin 3 was filled with 42 different booths, all sharing information and engaging with hundreds of local seniors and their families.
The theme of this year’s BCNE is Come and Knock on Our Door — a reference to the opening of the hit ’70s sitcom Three’s Company. Seniors and members of various organizations at Kin 3 celebrated by dressing in their favourite ’70s attire — bell bottoms and all.
Booths at Kin 3 shared information about senior services, critical safety information and community connections. These included the Prince George Council of Seniors, which hosted the Seniors Fair, provided information on senior resources in the city, and offered a dementia simulation for interested locals.
The City of Prince George and FireSmart teamed up to teach the importance of wildfire mitigation and fire safety, and also provided a cooling centre for seniors.
As well, booths such as the Prince George Hospice Society, Centre for Technology Adoption for Aging in the North, Northern Health and the Prince George Schizophrenic Society showcased new resources and demonstrated the reality of senior care in Prince George.
Seniors were also taught exercises by members of Comfort Keepers Home Care, and the Spruce Capital Seniors Centre led interested locals and seniors in a new form of cardio drumming, which involved drumming on yoga balls to classic hits.
The Council of Seniors also hosted a passport program, which led visitors on a tour of the 42 booths at the fair. Seniors who completed their passports were entered to win door prizes.
The executive director of the Prince George Seniors Centre, Malhar Kendurkar, spoke with The Citizen about the information offered at the fair.
“Council of Seniors is just one organization,” said Kendurkar. “We organize the seniors day, but we invite other organizations to be part of the community, so seniors can come out here and get as many resources as they want. They can get information from Comfort Keepers, Spruce Capital or the Seniors Activity Center in Brunswick. It’s a one-stop shop and they will get lots and lots of different information about different organizations and supports that are available in Prince George.”
Lisa Traicoff, the volunteer co-ordinator at the Prince George Council of Seniors, saw firsthand the reactions of families and seniors who discovered new resources they didn’t know existed.
“Most of them are positive and enthusiastic,” said Traicoff. “They’re just excited about all the different opportunities that are on offer. A lot of them have questions they didn’t know there could be an answer to — and that’s the exciting thing.”
Melanie Babbitt, the community connector at the Council of Seniors, echoed Traicoff’s comments and added that putting all these resources together under one roof improves accessibility for seniors in Prince George.
“Prince George Council of Seniors has been passionate about co-ordinating this fair for many years,” said Babbitt. “We know that it’s a fun way for seniors to connect with agencies that sometimes they don’t have the ability to access or get transportation out to. All these different venues through the city would be really difficult. Bringing them all to one place for seniors to access is a way to ensure that seniors are less isolated and that they know these services are available to them.”
Prince George-Valemount MLA Rosalyn Bird and Prince George-Mackenzie MLA Kiel Giddens also had a booth set up at the Seniors Fair and spent the day meeting constituents and hearing concerns from local seniors.
“The big challenges, of course, are housing and definitely affordability,” said Bird. “It’s nice to be here and have an opportunity for them to come and speak to Kiel and me about those challenges. It gives us an opportunity to collect that information and take it back in the fall and really advocate for some change for this group of our society. Kiel mentioned it earlier — these are people who have worked their entire lives. They’ve built this country and they deserve to be respected and looked after.”
Giddens also said there are critical gaps in senior health care in the area that need attention.
“Long-term care is something that we desperately need,” said Giddens. “There is a plan with Providence Health to build a new long-term care facility, but we need to make sure we’re advocating to have an HR strategy that fills that facility so we have the resources and professionals to help seniors.
“We need more than that, though. We need seniors’ housing availability. We need seniors’ access to surgical care here in the North. We’re the only health authority in the entire province that doesn’t have cardiac care. That’s something we desperately need in the region. These are things we’ve constantly been bringing up and we hope to keep raising when the legislature resumes in October.”
One of the specific concerns brought up by seniors was affordability — especially the cost of groceries — something Giddens said is critically important.
“I spoke to one very kind woman who brought up the affordability challenges,” said Giddens. “That’s one of the biggest things. The price of groceries — the price of everything — has gone up. But when seniors are on a fixed income, we need to find ways to help them. As MLAs, it’s incumbent on all of us to make sure we’re making things more affordable and not adding more taxes and more challenges for people.”
Bird also said that in order to reinforce the senior care sector, there needs to be a focus on education to support long-term development of the industry in the city.
“We also need to work with the colleges and post-secondary institutes,” said Bird. “One of the things that would help reduce some of the stress on the health care system is if we had more home care assistance and home care availability. The longer we can keep people living and aging in their homes in a healthy, helpful way, the less pressure there is on the health care system. So we need to make sure we’re working with post-secondary institutes to make sure we are training people who have the availability and the desire to do that. It’s a huge help for families and it’s a huge help for our community.”
