Random Access

Angela Shaw and Julie Curitti don’t look like the types to start a food fight.
But, in their own quiet way, they have initiated a scrap that could end up reverberating in the halls of Queen’s Park and in every single long-term care home in every single municipality in Ontario.
Angela and Julie are old friends who first got to know each other 35 years ago when they were students at the Credit Valley School of Nursing (now Bronte College) located just south of Trillium Health Centre.
When Julie’s parents and Angela’s mother-in-law went into the Cawthra Gardens long-term care home on Lolita Gardens, the friends were asked to become co-chairs of the family council, a group of advisors to the administration who represent the residents and the community.
Like any responsible members, the RNs who both have full-time jobs, set about educating themselves about how long-term care works.
When they were being given a tour of the kitchen at Cawthra Gardens by the dietician, they asked about how the allowance for food costs works in senior homes.
The allocation – a formula of $5.46 per resident per day — absolutely stunned them. “Our mouths just dropped,” said Shaw at her long-time Erin Mills home this week.
That was the start of a journey of discovery, education and now — advocacy — that has filled every nook and cranny of what used to be their free time.
On Angela’s dining room table are piles of petitions, some 8,000 signatures collected in just three weeks, after they met with Mississauga East MPP Peter Fonseca and he asked them to prepare something he could present at Queen’s Park.
The pair have been regulars at masses at Julie’s church, St. Christopher’s on Clarkson Rd. N., for the past few weeks. They have been to the convention of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario, where they quickly got the endorsement from its 23,000 members (the Peel chapter sponsored the motion) to up the “Raw Food Cost” allowance to $6.75-a-day now, as recommended by the Dieticians of Canada and 25 cents more this fall.
Everywhere they have gone, the reaction has been the same. When people hear that number, $5.46 per senior per day, which includes three meals (with two choices at each one), three snacks and all the beverages, they recoil in disbelief. Then they ask where they can sign up.
“It’s taken on a life of its own,” says Julie of the little campaign that snowballed. They fold out a map on the dining room table. Outlines in yellow highlighter are all the municipalities where people have supported their effort. Most of the map is covered.
“Twenty five to 60 per cent of seniors are at moderate to high nutritional-risk,” says Julie, a Lorne Park resident. “Nutrition is even more important for seniors because they are not able to fight off illness as well.”
Angela and Julie don’t want to use inflammatory language to get their point across. They even point out that the Liberals increased the allowance during their term of office. The problem is, it is just not enough.
They characterize their campaign as more about health teaching than protest.
Whatever it is, it is working. All kinds of people are approaching them to sign on.
Linda Dietrich, regional executive director of Dieticians of Canada, says the Mississauga women’s home-made campaign is gaining momentum across the Province. It is likely to have more traction with the politicians than all the papers and recommendation and studies that her group has submitted over the years to support the same cause, says Dietrich.
“People are shocked by that number ($5.46-a-day) and they should be shocked,” she says. “This is a public campaign. These are the daughters of residents. We’re thrilled they are doing this.”
Can two courteous, but quietly angry nurses make the Ontario government do something it knows it should do? We can only hope.
Whether they are successful or not, Angela and Julie have promised to make the voices of seniors’ and their concerned children heard, and you can be positively certain they are going to do that.
A little daunted and surprised by how deeply they have touched the public nerve on the issue, Angela says, “we promised we’d take very good care of all of these voices, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”