June has been designated Seniors' Month in Ontario. Of course, this means paying particular attention to "seniors", not ignoring them and issues that have particular resonance for seniors the rest of the time! The Law Commission of Ontario has been paying particular attention to older adults almost since we began through our project developing a framework for the law as it affects older adults. This project is almost completed (although that is not true of our attention to older adults!), with a planned release date of July 11th.
The project was approved by the LCO Board of Governors in November 2007 and work began in the summer of 2008. Lauren Bates is the project head whose attention to the project has not flagged throughout the course of the project and will not flag even after July 11th (although she will breathe a huge sigh of relief). The project's Advisory Group is composed of a range of experts who have been invaluable in their collaboration with us, generously sharing their knowledge, experience and contacts. For the views of Advisory Group members on the potential impact of this report, see the story in the Spring/Summer 2012 Liaison.
The project's objective is a very broad one and we began by consulting on its scope in May 2009. This was followed by a Consultation Paper in January 2009, consultations and the resulting Interim Report in June 2011. We continue consultations throughout our projects, not only during the time "allocated" for the primary consultations, and we receive feedback on all our documents. For this project, in addition to our regular process, we used an online questionnaire to which we received some 300 replies and held a stakeholder event in November 2011. To enrich our own research, we also commissioned three research papers on particular issues. We co-hosted the 2010 Canadian Conference on Elder Law with the Canadian Centre for Elder Law and the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly. The papers from the Conference are posted on the LCO's older adults project website, as are the commissioned research papers.
The Board of Governors has now approved the Final Report which is currently being translated into French, the graphics designed and the printing scheduled. The Framework will be released as part of the Final Report, but also as a separate document. Even after its release we will not be finished. We intend to develop a plain language Framework that will make it easier to apply.
Although the Report talks about the "law", we're clear that we designed the Framework to apply to policy and practice, as well. It may also be useful for anyone whose work affects older adults particularly or who wants to be sure that what they do doesn't disadvantage older adults: advocacy groups, service providers, the courts and private actors. The Framework is adaptable to different contexts.
This isn't a Report that offers recommendations for particular areas of law. It discusses many circumstances facing older adults, those that are positive and those that are challenging. For example, it makes it clear that many older adults are healthy, financially secure and full participants in their communties. At the same time, other older adults find themselves in ill health and poverty, having to deal with disabilities of various kinds, cut off from their communities or the world beyond a long-term care home. Of course, life is more complicated than those two extremes and for most older adults, life is a mix of good times and difficult ones, as it is for us all.
We also recognize and respond to the reality that older adults come from the same communities that young members of society come from: they live in different parts of the provinces, they may be immigrants or associate with different ethnic communities, they are members of First Nations, they may have lived with disabilities all their lives or as part of the aging process, they may be gay or straight, they have experienced different life courses from childhood to older adulthood, influenced by changing societal circumstances as well as their own, and on and on.
We cover many different circumstances in older adults' lives in the Report, but I'll mention only one because today (June 15th) is the United Nations World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. It illustrates how we discuss various issues. We identify elder abuse as one of the problems facing some older adults, discussing the type of abuses, the sources (too often family members), the special efforts to address it by policy and Crowns and mediated forms of dispute resolution, all affected by the reluctance in many cases of older adults who have been victimized by family members to pursue charges against them, as well as the reality that achieving a remedy might take too long.
With the release of the older adults final report, the LCO will have completed one of its original and most challenging projects (to date, anyway). It will be joined in a few months by the final report in the sister project developing a framework for the law as it affects persons with disabilties. More on that later. And it will join the four final reports we have previously released, on division of pensions on marriage breakdown, charging fees for cashing government cheques, joint and several liability under the Ontario Business Corporations Act and the Modernization of the Provincial Offences Act. You can also expect releases in the vulnerable workers project in August and the family law project in the fall.
For now, check out the older adults final report when it's released in July!
