A Life in Limbo

This is a cautionary tale about what happens when you try to do something good and it goes bad and could have been much worse.  

We have an elderly relative in another province.  She has no other family there and sometimes she says she would rather be living in Ontario, closer to us. We take turns making the day-long trip to see her and get there a couple of times a year.  There are phone calls in between and she does have friends close by.  She flip-flops on whether she would actually want to move. Some days she will, some days she won’t.

So we made some phone calls and asked some questions about what it would take to find her an appropriate place to live in Ontario. We “opened a file” on the topic with the government agency in charge of such things: CCAC: Community Care and Access Centre.  These are the same people who managed my home care when I was recovering from a serious illness in the winter of 2011.

Then the trouble began.

Our Aunt’s pension was cut off.  The bank called. Her drug plan, cancelled. The pharmacy called about her monthly medication bill that’s in the hundreds. This all occurred because we asked questions.  Now we have to prove to the government of her province, which happens to be Quebec, that she still lives there before they will restore her pension and health-care coverage.  We are paying for her medications until that situation gets sorted out, too.  The onus is on us to satisfy them that she hasn’t gone anywhere.  It’s ridiculous.

All we did was ask how the process works and give some identifying information of our Aunt and some overzealous government wankers took her off the books. No one is saying “sorry” or fixing what they’ve broken. It’s up to us, her advocates, to restore what never should have been lost.  The only saving grace is that our sweet 93-year-old Aunt knows nothing about any of this.  She doesn’t know that asking for info on her behalf prompted her home province to decide she no longer exists. It’s now in the hands of a surly Quebec ombudsman.  Stay tuned.