Federalism and Long-Term Care in Canada: A New Approach

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled demands for national threshold standards of quality for long-term care in Canada. The federal government, however, lacks jurisdiction for and experience with the provision of long-term care, which rests constitutionally with the provinces. A creative approach to providing new funding and effective regulatory standard setting would seize the potential of an area of jurisdiction shared by federal and provincial governments - old age security - to establish a long-term care insurance program administered by the federal government and jointly governed by federal and provincial governments.