‘We paid our dues’: Senior calls for government help to keep aging residents at home

It’s a problem we see or hear about every day. Tents in the park, people living in cars, being evicted or worried they won’t make rent. This week, we’re looking at the scope of the problem, how we got here, who can fix it and how. 

Amid the barrage of daily government announcements trumpeting additional long-term care rooms for Nova Scotians, one senior says some of that provincial funding ought to be channelled into keeping aging residents in their homes.

“That bothers me to no end,” Ross Preeper, 78, and living alone in his three-storey A-frame house in South Bar, about 10 kilometres north of downtown Sydney, said of the long-term care news.

“You could probably support two households on what they pay,” Preeper said of the cost to build, operate and occupy one long-term care home room. The Seniors and Long-term Care Department estimates the cost to government for the operation of one new bed when it is ready for occupation at about $160,000 annually.

Preeper said he appreciates that long-term care is the only option for some seniors.

“The people who have no problem with it, go for it, but how many people are being put in a situation where that is their only choice, and I could be there, but I wouldn’t be alive two more years if I was put in one of those places. I’m a hunter, a fisherman, I live in the woods.”

Preeper grew up in the rural community of South Bar, briefly took a military officer training course as a teenager and then married his wife Judy and went to work at the steel plant in Sydney at age 18. 

Education diploma

With the plant’s pending closure on the long-distance radar, the provincial government made an arrangement with St. Francis Xavier University that plant workers facing layoff could study for one year at the Sydney campus of St. F.X. and then pursue further education at the university campus in Antigonish, he said.

Without graduating from high school, Preeper earned a senior education diploma from St. F.X. and started teaching in South Bar in 1971.

The Preepers built a small house on a 4.5-acre property that his father had acquired and later designed and built the larger chalet-type home over a 15-year period, living in the basement and investing modest earnings and an abundance of sweat equity into the unique wooden structure.

In 2000, long after the couple had raised their only daughter, Preeper was diagnosed with PTSD and walked away from the teaching profession a year later, having taught and served as principal at the South Bar school and as teacher and vice-principal at St. Agnes School in New Waterford. 

After 30 years in the teaching profession, Preeper and his wife applied for their first mortgage to keep their home. 

Judy Preeper, daughter of a Cape Breton coal-mining family, died more than six years ago after suffering from pulmonary fibrosis. 

Preeper said through married life and into retirement, the couple had enough to get by but were never well off.

‘Proud people’

“We were proud people, we got along with what we could get along with,” Preeper said. “What I’m seeing now is that we’re the lost generation. We’re a proud people, we don’t go looking for money.”

He said his first ask of government came in the wake of this past July’s flood that took out portions of his 200-metre driveway. Preeper applied for disaster financial assistance from the province to repair the driveway. The application was very time-consuming, especially for a senior without internet service, and included a requisite three quotes to get the work done.

“I live in South Bar, I ended up getting one quote,” he said, because there are no construction companies in the area.

“I don’t know how many are out there that are in the same situation I’m in,” said Preeper, explaining he is handicapped, has some medical issues and intermittently relies on home care.

“I have a mortgage, my last year’s income was $53,000 and when you subtract all of the taxes from that …,” he said. “I’ve been running these woods that I live in since I was two years old. The squirrels still know me. What leaves here, as far as I’m concerned, should be my stardust.

“I’m a rural person, that’s in my DNA. I can understand people who live in urban centres, that’s in their DNA but how many of us lived on farms, lived out in the country, I honestly think the votes aren’t there, the votes are in urban centres.”

Urban centres are also the sites of homeless tent encampments and long-term care homes.

“I don’t want to live in a tent and I don’t want to live in a room somewhere where somebody is serving me gruel and I’m sitting in a corner and I can’t go walk outside. I have a wood stove, I go out and cut wood off my property. Right now I’m sitting in front of a nice, warm cozy fire. Why can’t I keep that? What are they doing to us? We paid our dues. I’m frustrated.”

Separate category

Instead of governments scratching away at his modest teacher’s pension and old age security benefit through increased taxes, Preeper said people like him who want to stay in their own homes should be considered a separate, special category.

“Put us in some form of a group,” he said. 

“There’s no planning, no looking forward. Everybody knew that there was going to be a housing crisis, anybody with any common sense knew that people who owned all these apartments were going to raise the prices because we live in a market system. How much do you gain from that if you are in the ownership class?”

Preeper said he and his wife were very private people and he is not interested in renting out a portion of his house to help pay the bills and he has no desire to sell his property, even though he believes it would fetch a tidy sum in today’s market. 

What he wants is for the province to provide him more money or for the province and municipality to demand less tax money from him so he can afford to stay in his own home.

The province has partnered with the Johns Hopkins nursing school to launch one of the Baltimore school’s CAPABLE (Community Aging in Place – Advancing Better Living for Elders) programs as a pilot project in Nova Scotia. 

The pilot program, to be run in conjunction with the Victorian Order of Nurses, would have a registered nurse, occupational therapist and handyperson go into a senior’s home to identify goals and create a plan for that resident.

The pilot program is expected to include 300 Nova Scotia households and a Seniors and Long-term Care spokeswoman said Wednesday that more details about the pilot will be released before the new year.

The department announced on Nov. 20 that 2,200 more long-term care rooms would be added or replaced in Nova Scotia by 2032, in addition to about 3,500 new and replacement rooms that are expected to open by 2027.

Eleven specific long-term care site announcements have followed.