Jean Wilder still being held unlawfully--update

Jean Wilder still being held unlawfully, Public Guardian and Trustee applies to seize control of her assets

Received from SENIORSAT RISK

Jean Wilder of Invermere, B.C. is still being held unlawfully by the Interior Health Authority, with the full knowledge and apparent approval of the Public Guardian and Trustee of B.C.

No information has been provided to the family, despite repeated requests, about why she is still being held against her will more than three months after she was suddenly confined to Columbia House care facility and her family and friends were banned from visiting.

In our last report on Jean Wilder‘s family’s efforts to protect Jean and her rights, Marc Normand, Jean’s designated power of attorney, had just submitted the accounts for the two months he has been acting as her POA to the Public Guardian and Trustee’s office, as they had demanded.

In his submission to the PGT of the accounting statements, Marc Normand  asked the PGT for information about the unsubstantiated non-specific allegations made about him by the PGT in a “referral”, and requested information that would confirm the legal status of Jean Wilder, who the family views as being held unlawfully and without cause.

To this day, the PGT has apparently not provided one iota of evidence to Marc Normand that he has acted improperly in managing Jean Wilder’s assets. The PGT alleges that someone has accused him of something in a “referral”, but no one from the PGT has provided any substance to confirm, or information about, the “referral” allegations.

Public Guardian misleads Wilder family

The PGT had given Marc Normand to May 10, 2012, a discourteous and unreasonable deadline (one week) to submit the accounting, but he did manage to comply with that deadline.

Then, on May 17th, Marc Normand received a stunning letter in the mail. In the PGT’s response, Launa Monette, a Regional Consultant in the PGT’s Kelowna office, states:

“I have completed my assessment and have determined that our office will be taking steps to apply as Jean Wilder’s Committee of Estate in order to assist with the management of Jean Wilder’s financial and legal affairs. Thank you for the assistance you have provided. … “

With that, the PGT signaled that they will be seeking to declare Jean Yukiko Wilder incapable, and to seize control of her assets. And what is to be made of the threat to manage not just her money but also her “legal affairs“? This is no idle threat;  approval of a PGT application for committeeship is normally just a formality in the B.C. Supreme Court.

It appears, however, that the Public Guardian and Trustee of B.C. has attempted to mislead Mr. Normand and the Wilder family by claiming to have assessed the accounting statements they did not yet have.

Launa Monette’s letter was dated May 10, 2012, the same day the accounts were due. The PGT could not possibly have reviewed the accounting statements as Monette claims she did – because the PGT had not even received the records yet.

Marc Normand delivered his letter and accounts by email at the end of the day on Thursday, May 10th, just before the PGT office closed. He immediately received an autoreply email from Monette that said she was out of the office and would not be back until Monday, May 14th. A few minutes later, Mr. Normand telephoned Ms. Monette’s office and was told that Ms. Monette had already left for the day and would not be back until the following Monday.

The response from the PGT also suggests that the Public Guardian and Trustee’s office had already decided not to accept Marc Normand’s set of accounts, regardless of what they contained, and that the PGT had already decided to seize control of Jean Wilder – irrespective of whether her finances were being properly managed.

The language chosen by Launa Monette appears to be designed to further mislead the Wilder family. She states that the PGT will be applying to become Jean Wilder’s Committee of Estate in order to “assist with the management of Jean Wilder’s financial and legal affairs”.

Who, precisely, will they be assisting? A Committee, by definition, is the person in charge, the person who makes the decisions, not someone who “assists”.

Family sends PGT formal notice objecting to take-over of Jean Wilder’s estate

On May 23, 2012 Jean’s daughter Trina Wilder, husband Curtis Wilder and POA Marc Normand sent a letter to the Public Guardian and Trustee of B.C. formally    objecting to the PGT’s intention to apply for Committeeship of Jean Wilder’s estate.

In their letter the family pleads for information, and expresses the impact of bureaucratic “bullying”:

“The Public Guardian and Trustee and the Interior Health Authority have done quite enough already to destroy her quality of life and well-being, and to disrupt our interactions with Jean.

We oppose your actions. We will take whatever steps we can to stop these bullying and deceptive practices so that we can prevent further harm to Jean and our family.”

Over a week later, there had still been no response from Monette or anyone in the Public Guardian and Trustee’s office.

 _________________________________

Help STOP institutional elder abuse – write your elected representatives, voice your concerns online, let others know what’s happening, or… take whatever steps you think will help make a difference to protect seniors’ legal and human rights from abuse by Canadian health care institutions and public agencies.

The Coalition to Support SENIORS AT RISK

The attack on Human Rights in Canada continues

On June 6,  D day, the conservatives government in Ottawa, moved to destroy the right to be protected from hate speech and they are proud of their action. What next? Many bloggers have said, I among them, that Harper will destroy the social contract between the government and our citizens, by using back benchers to do his work.  There are calls from conservative back benchers to bring back capital punishment, the government has reopened the debate on abortion, with a move to outlaw it. Backbenchers are calling for Canada to leave the United Nations and now they are moving to dismantle the Human Rights Act, one section at a time. There is little if no outrage, and that fact is depressing


OTTAWA — The Conservative government voted late Wednesday to repeal controversial sections of the Canadian Human Rights Act banning hate speech over the telephone or Internet.


In a vote of 153 to 136, the majority Harper government supported a private member's bill from Alberta Conservative MP Brian Storseth that would scrap Section 13 of the human rights code, which deals with complaints regarding "the communication of hate messages by telephone or on the Internet."


Storseth argues the current human-rights code fails to protect freedom of speech, which is guaranteed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and believes Canadians are better off if the government repeals sections 13 and 54 — the latter section dealing with associated penalties.


"At every stage, the Conservative caucus has voted for it," Storseth, a backbencher, said Wednesday in an interview before the vote on third and final reading in the House of Commons.


"I'm looking forward to continuing to have Conservative caucus support."


Senior cabinet ministers supported the bill and the results of the vote generated loud applause from Conservative MPs




Read more: 

Boomers who are Bust is that the norm or exception?

The other day I was listening to radio and the story line was about Boomers who are bust. Older workers who do not have enough fo retirement because they did not save enough. Older workers who did not have enough for retirement because they lost their jobs, etc.

While the press may be waking up to the issue as the boomers start to hit 65, the problem should have been known to the government and planners 60 plus years ago. The problem is now here and people are starting to think about it.

I have friends who are in the position of not having enough for retirement, through no fault of their own. Part of the issue is how the planners see us as investors and therefore plan as such. Another contributing factor is the current leaders think like economists.

My university training is in Economics and one thing I know is that Economists are not really original thinkers and they tend to buy into theories and discount human behaviour in their thinking, which is a shame.


Planners and Government mandarins tend to belive that the ‘economic investor’ is  a dispassionate individual who is unaffected  by emotions such as anxiety, regret, hope and fear. I can tell you that this rational investor simply does not exist. Everyone sees the world from a perspective which is uniquely theirs, and investing is no different.

People have individual goals, requirements, desires, fears and hopes for their wealth. We all have different habits, different people we trust for advice, and different beliefs about the right decision on any occasion. But we all exhibit very similar psychological biases in our financial decision making, which can lead to poor portfolio choices and subsequent investment performance.


The information in this blog has been taken from Pooled Target-Benefit Pension Plans: Building on PRPPs  by Robert L. Brown and Tyler Meredith and from reports from Barclay Banks Behavioural Finance reports.

How you ask is sometimes more important than what you ask. Individuals are extremely sensitive to the way in which decisions are presented or ‘framed’ – simply changing the wording or adding irrelevant background detail can dramatically change people’s perceptions of the alternatives available to them, even where there is no reason for their underlying preferences to have changed. Consequently the framing of questions can often influence the decision that is made.

More than 60 percent of working Canadians currently don’t have a workplace pension. For those who do have one, it does not guarantee them retirement security. With employers increasingly opting for defined-contribution (DC) rather than defined-benefit (DB) pension plans, the burden of managing the risks associated with a pension — such as longevity and the market performance of assets — has shifted to the worker. While this shift may have curtailed pension costs for businesses, it has also left workers more vulnerable financially, since many do not have the wherewithal to plan effectively for retirement.

The world of employer-sponsored pension plans is evolving. While the traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plan remains the primary model for occupational pensions — where they exist — DB pensions have been in a slow and persistent decline for more than two decades. This decline can be measured in different ways: (1) Between 1986 and 2010, the proportion of the Canadian labour force covered by DB pension plans shrank from 39 percent to 29 percent, while over the same period the number of  employees covered by defined contribution (DC) pension plans nearly tripled. (2) The share of registered pension plan members covered by a DB plan fell from 92 to 75 percent, while the proportion in a DC plan doubled from 7 to 16 percent (with the remaining 9 percent covered by hybrid and combined plans) (Statistics Canada 2010b,c).These statistics tell us that there has been a notable shift away from DB pensions,

As in many other countries, in Canada the decline of DB pensions has been felt almost exclusively in the private sector. Among public sector workers, 86 percent have workplace pensions, of which 94 percent are DB. Yet only 25 percent of Canadian private sector workers have workplace pensions, and only 56 percent of those are DB (Statistics Canada 2011). The concern is that for middle-income Canadians, access to a stable, secure and adequate standard of living after retirement increasingly depends on where one is employed.

The 2011 Towers Watson DC Retirement Age Index (figure 3) uses market performance to calculate the age at which an average middle-income worker paying into a DC plan can retire with sufficient asset value to pay for a life annuity guaranteeing an average rate of income replacement. According to the index, workers have had to increase Pooled Target-Benefit Pension Plans: Building on PRPPs their retirement savings by an equivalent of seven years just to balance off losses since the financial crisis of autumn 2008. For many, this means making a trade-off between taking early retirement and achieving the desired standard of living.

A growing number of individuals are now covered by a pension plan that is neither traditional DB nor traditional DC. While it is still a relatively small proportion of total registered pension plan coverage, as of 2010 more than 530,000 workers were covered by hybrid plans as classified by Statistics Canada. Growth in their membership has been nearly tenfold since 1986 (Statistics Canada 2010b). It is important to emphasize that these figures do not include a number of DB regulated plans that possess important elements of hybrid design, such as target-benefit plans. When these are included, as many as one million more workers could be added to the hybrid plan pool, representing a strong cross-section of the Canadian labour force.

Although the optimal rate of income replacement for retirement remains an open question (Mintz 2009; Horner 2009; Wolfson 2011), it is generally accepted that a growing number of modest- and middle-income working-age Canadians are not saving sufficiently to ensure that they will be able to maintain a comparable standard of living once they retire (Horner 2011; Wolfson 2011; Canadian Institute of Actuaries 2007). There are a number of reasons for this. Perhaps most importantly, the propensity to save has diminished significantly over the last several decades. The stagnation of real incomes since the 1980s, combined with increased volatility in financial markets, has made saving more difficult and less secure. Symptoms of this trend are flat real-dollar growth in RRSP contributions and increasing reliance on personal debt as a source of retirement funding (Robson 2010). For the most part, this trend is a middle-class problem (LaRochelle-Côté, Myles, and Picot 2008; Wolfson 2011). Low-income Canadians can generally be assured of replacement rates of 70 to 80 percent, thanks to Canada’s strong foundation of universal and targeted retirement income programs: Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), together known as Pillar 1 of Canada’s retirement income system; and the CPP/QPP, known as Pillar 2 (Mintz 2009)

So the middle class have a large looming pension crises and in response the government is deciding to raise the age of retirement and to cause further distress for the middle class and the boomers. I think they forget we vote.

Canadian Institute of Actuaries. 2007. Planning for Retirement: Are Canadians Saving Enough? Ottawa: CIA.

Horner, K. 2009. Retirement Savings by Canadian Households. Report for the Research Working Group on Retirement Saving. Ottawa: Finance Canada

LaRochelle-Côté, S., J.F. Myles, and G. Picot. 2008. “Income Security and Stability During Retirement in Canada.” =Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series, catalogue no. 11F0019 — no. 306. Ottawa: Statistics Canada

Mintz, J. 2009. Summary Report on Retirement Income Adequacy Research. Federal Research Working Group on Income Adequacy. Ottawa: Finance Canada

Wolfson, M. 2011. Projecting the Adequacy of Canadians’ Retirement Incomes: Current Prospects and Possible Reform Options. IRPP Study 17. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy.

Updated Seniors at Risk in BC

"Just to be clear, in my view this is not about more funding. It doesn’t cost more to treat a resident [or patient, family] with respect and dignity. This is about a change in culture.”

Ontario Minister of Health Deb Matthews, May 2012

For More information on this go here
Two more incidents this week reveal a disturbing and growing trend by health care facilities and health care authorities in British Columbia to intimidate and bully visitors.


Jean Wilder Case – visitor banning and police intimidation
In early March, 2012 family and friends of Jean Wilder were suddenly banned by staff at the Invermere, B.C. residential care facility where she had recently been transferred following complications from surgery. The ban occurred immediately after the family asked the care facility for, and were refused, health and medication records, and an explanation of what pre-authorized payment of fees would cover.


Though family and friends lodged official complaints two months ago, they are still awaiting responses. Neither the care facility, the health authority nor the Public Guardian and Trustee have provided any response to complaints that Jean Wilder is being held unlawfully.


Since the ban was introduced, care facility staff have repeatedly called police in an effort to prevent family and friends from visiting Mrs. Wilder. Family and friends feel they are being intimidated by the police, and say that Jean Wilder is being negatively affected by the separation from friends and family, and by the isolation imposed on her as a result of not being allowed to leave the residential facility.


UPDATE:  Ed and Ida Rivers, long-time friends of Jean Wilder, who submitted an official complaint to the health authority on March 24th, submitted a hand-delivered letter of complaint to the care facility site manager on May 25th. On May 29th, four days after their letter of complaint was delivered, site manager Sharon Carroll handed Ed Rivers this response from Interior Health. The health authority letter is dated May 24, apparently back-dated, misrepresenting the order in which the letters were issued so that it appears as if the the health authority had written their letter first.


The site manager’s letter makes broad, blanket allegations about Mr. Rivers but provides no specific evidence substantiating their claims. Ed Rivers denies Interior Health’s allegations that his behaviour has been inappropriate, that he is a threat to staff or residents, or that he inappropriately requested Jean Wilder’s medical records. He acknowledges that he was present in some meetings with staff in which the family requested medical information but says that Jean Wilder and her family wanted him at the meetings.


Banning decisions by facility staff not constrained by guidelines or substantiation
For any perceived slights and infractions, however minor, or even when asked inconvenient questions, staff in B.C.’s health care and residential care facilities apparently have full authority, accountable to no-one, to restrict or ban visitors from seeing their loved ones.


No evidence is required. No means of appeal is available other than the long, winding route of filing complaints with bureaucratic committees. The B.C. Patient Care Quality Program review board and health authority committees operate at great length from individual health care facility operators who make these decisions to ban visitors. Decisions from Patient Care Quality Committees come many months after-the-fact, sometimes long after patients have left facilities, or died.


Apparently, this trend toward aggressively banning family and friends from health care and residential care facilities is taking hold in Alberta as well. In subsequent postings, we hope to share with you the outcome of the May 4th meeting convened by the Elder Advocates of Alberta.
_______________________________

Help STOP institutional elder abuse – write your elected representatives, voice your concerns online, let others know what’s happening, or… take whatever steps you think will help make a difference to protect seniors’ legal and human rights from abuse by Canadian healthcare institutions and public agencies.

The Coalition to Support SENIORS AT RISK 



However, there is some hope as the courts are starting to help some seniors who have been victim of this change in attitude by our Hospitals

A reader sent us another, more detailed, story about the court award for false arrest at Lions Gate Hospital (excerpts below). Mr. Park’s elderly mother died of cancer “soon after the ordeal.”

This story describes the attitude and rough treatment of patients and visitors by staff, doctors and police, something that is apparently becoming more common in B.C.'s health care facilities.

By Todd Coyne – North Shore Outlook  Published: May 10, 2012

"A former District of North Vancouver council candidate was awarded $15,000 in damages Thursday after winning his lawsuit against the RCMP for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment. …

 “Cpl. Norman took Mr. Park to the ground with the assistance of another officer and two or three security guards where he was restrained, held down and handcuffed,” the judge ruled.

 “I characterize her actions as inattentiveness to rights, lack of care about her grounds for arrest and the authority for which she attended the hospital and the manner in which she treated Mr. Park after the arrest — keeping him for more than four hours completely unnecessarily.”

On June 5, 2006, Park had accompanied his elderly, cancer-stricken mother to the chemotherapy department at Lions Gate Hospital. While they did not have an appointment on this particular day, Park and his mother were in the habit of dropping in and speaking with her doctor — a habit that caused “something of a nuisance to the oncologist,” according to court documents.

This time the doctor flatly refused to speak with Park and his mother and threatened to call security if they did not leave the department.

Park and his mother decided to complain to hospital administration but were stopped on their way by two Paladin Security guards who told them to leave the hospital and that police were on their way.

During case proceedings in November, the court heard as evidence an audio recording…

When Cpl. Norman refused to let Park leave on the grounds she was investigating a disturbance and now the obstruction of a police officer for Park’s refusal to provide identification, the verbal altercation escalated and Park was forced to the ground and handcuffed in front of his mother and a crowd of hospital staff and attendees.

 “I place emphasis on the following: Mr. Park was arrested in the presence of his ailing mother who was dying of cancer,” Judge Baird Ellan explained before announcing the damages.

“If Cpl. Norman had just asked Mr. Park to go outside with her and discuss the problem it likely would have been diffused. She acted insensitively not only to Mr. Park but to his mother whom she knew was both present and a patient at the hospital. I can conclude that it would have been traumatizing to the mother… to see her son taken down and carted away.” …

Soon after the ordeal, Park’s mother succumbed to her illness …”

Read more here