Through social media, satire has the potential to reach more voters than ever before; left-wing activists are slowly figuring out how to take advantage of this shift.

But how do you gauge the effectiveness of these kinds of campaigns? The government may be considering amendments to Bill C-30 but the proposed legislation hasn’t disappeared. Meanwhile, conservative groups continue to prod the national conversation to the right, attempting to reopen issues that were long considered, such as contraception and the environment. What is the place of satire in Canada’s political landscape?

Like the court jester in ancient times, Sean Devlin, creative director of TruthFool Communications, sees political satirists as one of the last avenues for combating abuses of power. That’s why Christopher Geoghegan throwing a pie at then Alberta premier Ralph Klein in 2003 was funny, while Klein throwing money at the occupants of an Edmonton homeless shelter in 2001 wasn’t. “When it is coming from the bottom, pointed upwards, it tends to be empowering,” says Devlin. “When it’s the opposite it’s just kind of mean.”

Since founding the Shit Harper Did campaign during the 2011 federal election, TruthFool has been using satire to reach larger audiences on issues ranging from asbestos mining in Quebec to the exploitation of the Alberta oil sands, and more. Because of their connections to Vancouver’s comedy and independent film communities, the company is able to create professional-looking multi-media campaigns that engage younger voters who feel bored or disempowered by traditional news sources.

Aside from providing entertainment, TruthFool’s work is unbound from the news media’s tradition of objectivity. Devlin believes that young people are more likely to trust news sources that aren’t required to give credence to every mainstream political idea, no matter how insane.

“A lot of these issues that are really crucial for young people to do with the climate and the economy and that sort of thing, there’s so clearly a right or a wrong,” he says. “When the media feels forced to pay mutual respect to both sides of that story, it undermines their credibility in the eyes of younger people.”

On the other side of the country, in a campaign dubbed “McGuinty and Me,” a group of antipoverty activists under the banner Put Food in the Budget has been touring Ontario soup kitchens and food banks with a cardboard mannequin of Premier Dalton McGuinty. One of the results is a three-minute video produced by the Toronto Star of activists and welfare recipients pouring their hearts out while across the table Dalton McGuinty’s eerie white-toothed smile remains unchanged.

It’s a familiar image to activist Melissa Addison-Webster, a member of Put Food in the Budget’s leadership committee, who knows that her work often fails to capture politicians’ interest. “God knows you need humour as an antipoverty activist,” she says. “I’ve been advocating for increases to social assistance rates for close to ten years. You just don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere lots of days.”

Although she understands the place for other forms of resistance, Addison-Webster sees the Put Food in the Budget satirical campaign as a relief from the often-dour tone of activism. “More militant responses to antipoverty issues polarize classes and I don’t think that leads to social change. Social change will come when there is solidarity amongst all people.”

Devlin agrees. “Comedically speaking, funny is funny,” he says. “If someone has laughed at a joke you’re making, even if it’s political and they don’t agree with your politics, on some level you’ve convinced them because they’re laughing.”

There was a lot of disappointment when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives took a majority government in 2011, but that setback in no way condemns the rise of this new era of Canadian political satire to an early death—quite the opposite. The more willing the right becomes to bend credulity in its policies, the more material it hands to the new generation of satirists. Just as the Bush years marked a zenith in American political satire, perhaps the Harper era will be Canada’s.

Erika Thorkelson is a writer and culture critic living in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in the Vancouver Sun, Herizons Magazine, and Joyland.ca, and she is the host of the Canadian Fiction Podcast.

After a thousand-plus kilometre invasion and destruction of U.S. ecosystems, Asian carp are now poised to enter Canada’s Great Lakes—where they could unleash incalculable and irreversible damage. Inside the desperate fight to stop the swarm.

Four fish lay motionless on the metal slab in the laboratory, lying good side up. Their wide, recessed eyes are blank and unseeing. Traces of blood pool underneath each recently dissected Asian carp, though surprisingly there is only a faint smell of fish in the air. Beside the tray of fish are two industrial-sized boxes of purple rubber gloves. “They’re essential when you work with dead fish,” says Becky Cudmore.

The 39-year-old scientist is the manager of the Centre of Expertise for Aquatic Risk Assessment (CEARA) at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ Canada (DFO) at the Centre for Inland Waters in Burlington, Ontario. She has spent the past eight years studying Asian carp, an aquatic invasive species that has the potential to wipe out most native fish species in the Great Lakes. These particular carp are donated evidence from a January 2011 Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) seizure at the Windsor/Detroit border. Seeing them under the bright fluorescents of the lab, it’s easy to wonder what all the fuss is about.

Each carp is seven-pounds and little more than 23 inches long, “market size,” according to Cudmore. They seem nothing like the monstrous invaders I have spent the past three months researching. Report after report has described a voracious creature, one capable of growing to massive weights, decimating native fish species, and destroying local fisheries and recreational areas. Some carp jump so high and with such force that recreational boaters have shied away from the carp-filled Illinois and Missouri rivers after a woman was struck in the face by a 30-pound Asian carp in 2005 while water-skiing, knocking her unconscious. She lived. “I’ve been struck before,” says Cudmore. “And believe me—it hurts. Boats are now being rigged with protective shields for the drivers.”

To get to her office, we walk through the halls of the monolithic concrete building, past other research labs and government offices with views of the polluted Hamilton Harbour and the Burlington Skyway. Inside, the space is strewn with binders, awards, and a life-size fiberglass bighead carp. Here, from a desk covered with family photos, Cudmore manages DFO’s Centre of Expertise for Aquatic Risk Assessment. Founded in 2006, the centre operates with a long-term, national perspective of invasive species. It both mitigates and manages current threats and those that could spell future disaster for the Great Lakes and its tributaries. Asian carp are at the top of CEARA’s priority list. “I’ve been working on invasive species for a very long time,” says Cudmore, and “[Asian carp] are the first species that are breathing down my neck.”

Thanks to their seemingly unstoppable spread, Asian carp are on their way to becoming the latest household name in aquatic threats—joining such past invasive species as zebra mussels, sea lamprey, and alewives. Already, their presence in midwestern waterways has proven a history of ecological destruction on a tremendous scale. Over the past 40 years, the carp have spread hundreds of miles north from the American south, outcompeting native fish species, destroying ecosystems and spawning with alarming fecundity. They’re now poised to invade the Great Lakes. There they would unleash incalculable damage on freshwater ecosystems already plagued by a litany of environmental problems—unless Canadian and U.S. governments can figure out a way to stop them.

Asian carp is an umbrella term, the collective expression for several carp species (bighead, silver, black and grass) that belong to the Cyprinidae family. Of them all, bighead and silver pose the largest threat, and therefore receive the most attention. What makes these carp so devastating, ironically, is exactly what attracted early aqua-culturalists: bighead and silver are filter feeders with gluttonous appetites, capable of thriving in a broad range of habitats. This makes them ideal pond cleaners. It also makes them ideal invaders. Bighead and silver outcompete native species through sheer volume. Researchers cannot begin to estimate how many Asian carp now exist in America, but have determined carp have cultivated the entirety of the Mississippi River and much of the Illinois and Missouri rivers and their hundreds of tributaries. More than that, they are huge: Over a 20-year lifespan, carp can grow to 100 pounds. Both feats are achieved largely through destruction.

Some carp filter feed plankton by straining water through their gills and eating whatever they catch, allowing them to consume upwards of 20 per cent of their body weight in a single day. They are also opportunistic feeders, devouring whatever is available at multiples levels of the aquatic food web. The hazards of their filter feeding on native species are two-fold. Asian carp out-feed secondary consumers that rely on phytoplankton and zooplankton as their primary food source and also reduce available food supplies for tertiary consumers across the food web. Both bighead and silver are highly tolerant species, capable of building sustainable populations in diverse habitats. Rapid spawning during multiple annual peaks means Asian carp also typically outbreed their native competition. This destruction of natural ecosystems can rarely be fixed—no matter how hard humans try to mitigate the damage. Ultimately, the intricacies of healthy, working ecosystems are “little understood and too sophisticated for [humans] to reproduce even with the most advanced technology,” reports the Australian-based Ecosystem Services Project, which studies the services humans obtain from their environments and their economic and social worth.

All of this would only become apparent after bigheads were introduced into the U.S. in 1972 from China, followed by the introduction of silver carp in 1973 from eastern Siberia. Both species were placed in aquaculture facilities in the southern United States to help keep retention ponds and wastewater facilities clean Each made it into the wild through severe flooding, release as baitfish, or a combination of both. Once there, they broadened their range significantly. By 2007, Asian carp had slipped the sewage lagoons in Arkansas and spread to 23 surrounding states, moving north to Minnesota and South Dakota through the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers and their tributaries—conquering dozens of new habitats and destroying even more native fisheries along the way.

Between 1995 and 2003, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service caught five bighead carp in Lake Erie, triggering fears the fish had already reached the Great Lakes. When subsequent monitoring efforts in Ohio failed to locate further samples, researchers concluded no sustainable population of the species existed in the Great Lakes. But they were getting closer. In 2002, Asian carp were detected in the upper Illinois River about 95 kilometres from Lake Michigan—by 2010, a bighead carp was caught in Lake Calumet in Chicago, just under 10 kilometres from the Great Lakes, a vast new habitat to cultivate.

The current threat to the Great Lakes, however, might never have been—save for Chicago’s sewage conundrum 115 years ago. In the late 19th century Chicago was growing quickly and solutions for sewage treatment were ineffective. The favoured method of dumping sewage into the Chicago River meant residents suffered from typhoid and other diseases at alarming rates. An alternative was needed. In reversing the flow of the Chicago River by connecting it with the Illinois River, Chicago diverted their sewage from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. Construction of the 28-mile Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal began in January 1900, making stable urban growth for Chicago possible.

The move also opened trade routes from Chicago to New Orleans and beyond through barge shipping on the Mississippi River, adding to the city’s reputation as the largest transit hub in the American Midwest. The Sanitary and Ship Canal now forms the nucleus of the larger Chicago Area Waterway System.[11] Today, CAWS has been expanded to include roughly 210 kilometres of constructed rivers, canals, locks and other structures in Chicago and northwestern Indiana. More importantly, there are now five connections between Chicago’s water system and Lake Michigan[12]—meaning, five direct entry points for Asian carp, and other invasive species, to enter the Great Lakes.“By addressing the problem in the Chicago area,” says Robert Lambe, chair of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC), “we address the problem continent-wide.”

Only small steps have been taken in Chicago to stop the spread of Asian carp. Signage along Chicago waterways now warns boaters of underwater electric fences to deter overzealous carp. Experiments are underway with aquatic sound cannons designed to frighten bigheads and silvers. But problems persist with current deterrence efforts, making them vulnerable to failure: electric barriers, which cost $8 million U.S. annually to operate, will not stop all invasive species, and may not even be able to stop juvenile bighead and silver carps. “[Current barriers] are important and necessary interim solutions, but they were never designed to be permanent solutions,” says Tim Eder, executive director of the bi-national Great Lakes Commission, established in 1955 to promote cross-border co-operation in protecting the Great Lakes. “We are focused on the long-term, and support ecological separation as the long-term solution.”

Eder is referring to the proposal to permanently separate the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds—a move that is massive in scope and extremely controversial. While permanent, partial, and semi-permanent options each significantly reduce the likelihood of Asian carp migrating into the Great Lakes, they come with a price tag in the millions, have their own flaws—and can be a tough sell in the face of less expensive Band-Aid solutions. As a result, the various plans to physically separate these watersheds—complete, single-barrier, four-barrier, and five-barrier, all meticulously outlined in the GLC and GLSLCI report Restoring the Natural Divide—is caught up in a time-consuming permitting, funding, design and approval processes. Ideally, at least one of the four options will be chosen and shovels will be in the ground by 2017 or 2018. That is, if it moves forward at all. The abundance of competing regional interest groups and lobbies foreshadows a protracted debate and years of study before any comprehensive plan to physically separate these adjacent watersheds is possible.

Neither Chicago nor the state of Illinois has officially supported the erection of physical barriers in the Chicago Area Waterways System (CAWS) system. Predictably, the majority of opposition is coming from container shippers on the Mississippi and the industries that rely on them. Many opponents of the plan believe physical separation would close the CAWS for good. They are mistaken, says GLSLCI executive director David Ullrich. His organization’s reports show it would add five percent in time and 10 percent in cost to materials shipped by barge. Compared with huge financial and ecological damages wrought by an Asian carp invasion, though, a 10 percent increase in barge shipping isn’t much.

If this isn’t scary enough, Cudmore also warns: “Chicago is just the front door to the Great Lakes. Our job is to make sure that all our windows and side doors are closed to invasion as well.” Many of those windows are in Canada. As a result, the Ontario government phased-in a ban on possession of live Asian carp between 2005-2006 based on U.S. federal legislation: it is now illegal to possess live specimens of the fish in Ontario, the only province to follow Washington’s example. Cudmore says the number of arrests made for live possession, most at the high-risk Windsor/Detroit border crossing, were up since November 2011. This could signal an increase in the volume of Asian carp smuggled into Ontario for sale at urban fish markets, or it could reflect a greater frequency and thoroughness of searches conducted by border security and Ministry of Natural Resources staff. Despite the ban, Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller notes an “illegal market persists and poses ongoing risks,” suggesting MNR should raise the penalties or ban possession of the species outright

In the past sixty years, efforts to control invasive species in the Great Lakes is as replete with exemplary international co-operation as it is with insufficient funding and soaring mitigation costs. The failure to success ratio is 90 to 1. Former GLFC chair Dr. Michael J. Hansen delivered some sobering news to the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure in February 2010. “Currently, control mechanisms do not exist for Asian carp, if they become established,” he told the committee. “Scientists do not know of a pesticide that would target the carp, nor weaknesses in their spawning behavior that could be exploited.” Prevention, in other words, is key—eradication, said Hansen, is not possible. Once established, invasive species become a permanent, destructive force in the ecosystem they have colonized, forever altering the region’s ecological and economic health. Unfortunately, he added, the effort to find solutions has not exactly been robust: “The short answer to the question ‘What can be done if Asian carp enter the Great Lakes?’ is ‘Not much.’”

Hansen testified that coordinated control efforts to halt sea lamprey—another Great Lakes invasive species—had been extremely successful since the 1950s because U.S. and Canadian governments committed the necessary resources to tackle a problem of such magnitude. As of 2010, Hansen noted, “no such effort exists for other invasive species, including Asian carp.” In the two years since this dismal statement, progress has been incremental.

DFO announced in October 2010 that the federal government would allocate $415,000 over 18 months, in addition to Ottawa’s one-time allocation of $4 million in support of DFO’s national invasive species program. With it comes an in-kind contribution from the GLFC to fund research into the economic, social and financial tolls of Asian carp’s presence in the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, other organizations are already warning about its potential to cause damage past Chicago’s waterways. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reported in August 2011 that, “We need not wait to see [Asian carp] being pulled from the mouth of the Chicago River every day before concluding that the threat of a nuisance exists. It is enough that the threat is substantial and that it may be increasing with each day that passes.

Consider the carp’s current presence in the Mississippi River. While it is difficult to determine the exact percentage of Asian carp biomass (the amount of living matter in a given habitat), in some areas the figure is reportedly pegged at 90-95 percent. Think about that: 90-95 percent of all organic material in some areas of the Mississippi River is now Asian carp. As of 2007, Commercial fishers on the Illinois River routinely catch upwards of 25,000 pounds of bighead and silver carp daily. Over 9.1 million pounds of Asian carp is caught annually from the Illinois River alone, but such huge catch numbers do little to deplete the population. Incredibly, a new facet of the commercial fishing industry has been born in the Midwest by catching and freezing Asian carp for human consumption in China. Since 2009, fishers have been plying the waters of the Illinois River and have sold hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of silver and bighead carp to the country they came from, a potentially problematic act that promotes the propagation of a species governments are attempting to eradicate.

Indeed, it’s worth examining the financial risks associated with the spread of Asian carp into the Great Lakes. Currently, the total cost to Canadian governments for dealing with 18 minor invasive species is pegged at $34 billion annually—not one-time costs, but annual financial burdens. Asian carp could increase that number greatly. Much else must be considered: lump sum and annual costs spent on prevention and damage control once a species is established; revenue lost to commercial, recreational, and tribal fisheries due to native species destruction; jobs and wages dependent upon healthy ecosystems; and damages to the immeasurable services offered by a healthy ecosystem that is no longer functional. Plus, if Asian carp break through the barriers in Chicago and enter Lake Michigan, they could become the most expensive invasive species to manage in North American history.

Currently, the United States spends $50 million annually on controlling Asian carp, and the Obama administration has slated an additional $51 million in 2012-13 for researching alternative control methods, a move both Cudmore and Ullrich welcome. That number rises when you factor in money spent by the Canadian, Ontario and Quebec governments, both cash and in-kind offerings, including roughly $5 million to complete the CEARA-led risk assessment study. Cudmore says the federal government shares the same level of concern as Washington towards Asian carp but financially, “they are not on the same playing field.” Too bad considering prevention—as opposed to maintenance—can generate up to $9.5 billion in long-term savings. “We have learned the critical nature of prevention. This is now the number one strategy for dealing with invasive species,” says Eder. “Once [an invasive species] is in the system they are virtually impossible to eradicate or control or manage.”

Yet the cost of controlling an invasive species is only the tip—there is also the mountain of associated costs and lost revenue. Take the Great Lakes fishery: the GLC estimates that $16 billion is spent annually on boating trips and equipment, with some of this money trickling down to Aboriginal groups specializing in fishing expeditions on tribal lands. Commercial and sport fisheries generate an additional $7 billion in economic activity annually as part of 1.5 million jobs the Great Lakes directly sustain, generating an estimated $62 billion in annual wages. If Asian carp enter the waterways, the recreational fishing industry could likely not survive such a monumental blow.

When asked how well North American governments have done preventing the spread of invasive species into the Great Lakes, Ullrich sighs and admits, “We have had very limited success managing or controlling any individual species.” Of the 182 non-native species in the Great Lakes, the overwhelming majority exist without any effective checks and balances. (Alien invasive species implies some level of harm is caused by the species presence, whereas non-native species are not necessarily destructive.) Canada has, quite simply, failed to prevent or control the presence of invasive species in our shared waterways. In more than 70 years only two species have been controlled, and with limited success: alewives (a species of herring that thrived in lakes Michigan and Huron due to lack of predators between the 1950s and 1980s) and sea lampreys (a primitive, eel-like fish that, once attached to a host fish, simply drains their bodily fluids until the host dies).

Sea lampreys utilized the Welland Canal in southern Ontario—built to bypass nearby Niagara Falls—as their vector point into the Great Lakes around the turn of the 20th century. Signs of their damage to native fisheries became apparent in the 1930s, but it was not until the 1940s that dramatic declines in native fish species were conclusively pinned on the eel-like invader. By the late 1940s, the harvested catch of lake trout, a keystone species in the Great Lakes, fell by 99 percent from a decade earlier—a total collapse. In 1955, the American and Canadian governments had no efficient way to monitor damages, let alone research effective control measures. The bi-national GLFC was established largely in response to this invasion.

The specific nature of lamprey’s life cycle allowed researchers to target breeding grounds, a control measure that has had significant success in reducing population numbers. It comes at a cost of $20 million annually. The GLFC estimates they have spent roughly $300 million since 1956 on sea lamprey control. But while the population of sea lampreys has been reduced to 10 percent of its 1940s peak, it has not been eradicated—control means an acceptable level of minimized, though ongoing, damage.

If $20 million annual expenditure defines success in the struggle against invasive species, failure must be staggeringly expensive. Zebra mussels serve as an example of our inability to prevent or control invasive species; their impact, true to form, has been devastating. Originally brought to North America in the ballast water of Russian freighters, zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) were released into Lake St. Clair between Lakes Huron and Erie in 1988. Less than a decade later, zebra mussels had spread to all five Great Lakes and into the Mississippi, Tennessee, Hudson, and Ohio River basins, attaching themselves to anything solid—from slow moving marine life such as turtles and crayfish, to boats, boat trailers, harbours and water intake pipes. Once established, zebra mussels can even grow on top of other zebra mussels, forming layers over 12-inches thick. According to the USFWS, the zebra mussel infestation in the Great Lakes and adjacent waters cost the American and Canadian governments $5 billion between 2000-2010, a figure not expected to decline unless food supplies diminish and the colonies collapse independent of human involvement.

Annually, the mussels cost Canada and the United States $300-$500 million, all for “managing” a single invasive species. Dr. Hansen lamented in his U.S. House Committee testimony that “sea lampreys changed the human way of life in the Great Lakes basin.” He needn’t be so species-specific: The ecosystem stresses and changes that began with sea lampreys in the 1950s have continued through the decades with dozens of injurious invasive species—Asian carp are merely the latest, and perhaps most dangerous—though the public conscience and the government policy makers are only beginning to fully appreciate the extent of the danger. Seventy years on we have controlled the lamprey, but what would we give to have prevented their occurrence in the first place? Have we learned our lessons well enough to find a better definition of success with Asian carp? As Cudmore says, “I don’t think anyone in the world has been successful at controlling invasive species.” Back in her office, the fiberglass bighead gaping, open-mouthed behind her, she offers one final warning: “Don’t wait until they get here.

As this article went to press, the Canadian government announced $17.5 million worth of new funding over five years to DFO to be allocated towards four key activities: Asian carp prevention, early warning, rapid response and management and control. For more updates, see www.this.org

Illustration by Ben Clarkson

Behind closed doors in nursing homes across the country, thousands of seniors are denied sex—and some are even chastised for holding hands. Lesbian, gay, and transgender seniors face ridicule and hostility. Why advocates, residents, and staff are mad as hell and fighting for change  

“How can somebody be like that?” The words wafted down the hall of the nursing home, accompanied by furtive glances. “How can anything like that exist?”

These were the sorts of questions that Christine Sherman would sometimes overhear.

They were questions about her.

Born in Ireland and raised in Winnipeg, Sherman discovered that she was intersex at the age of 10 and publicly came out as a lesbian at 16. In 1969, at the age of 20, she moved to Toronto to work as a nurse. More than 30 years later, in 2001, Sherman entered a private long-term care (LTC) facility in Toronto for her own health reasons. There, her unique anatomy and sexual orientation made her the subject of antipathy and gossip that she had rarely encountered during her nursing career. “It was just like they were living back in the 1950s,” says Sherman. While some members of the nursing staff were accepting and supportive, others were “way off the wall.” In such homes, says Sherman, anyone who was perceived as being different, especially sexually or in sexual orientation, is a target: “[They’re] not to be accepted—not even to be tolerated.”

Sherman transferred from that facility when it closed in 2006. At the next facility, the discrimination was present, she says, but more subtle—“you just got the impression that they knew.” Finally, in 2009, Sherman arrived at Wellesley Central Place, a 150-bed nursing home in eastern Toronto, which has a fully developed lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) policy, and where Sherman feels welcome. It is one of only five nursing homes out of 83 in the Toronto area with LGBTQ-friendly policies.

In fact, many nursing homes in Canada don’t have any concrete policies when it comes to seniors’ sex and sexuality. In 2011, I conducted a survey with a master’s student at the University of Regina that examined resident sexuality and intimacy policies in select Canadian nursing homes. Its chief aim was to determine whether facilities had any policies on resident intimacy or sexuality. The study had a number of shortcomings: it only covered homes in the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and provincial capital districts, and excluded Quebec. Of the 248 facilities contacted, only 64 responded to repeated requests for information.

Despite these limitations, the results of the survey are revealing, especially because so few have addressed intimacy in Canada’s LTC homes. Of the 64 respondents, 13 facilities had sex-positive policies, 47 had no policies, and 5 actively declined to participate. Homes in cities with large gay and lesbian communities, it seems, are no more friendly than those in less diverse towns. Toronto’s city-run Long-Term Care Homes and Services had no clear-cut policy for LGBTQ residents until 2008. Other interview-driven studies have repeatedly revealed that nurses and staff who believe intimacy is incompatible with old age regularly bar residents from pursuing healthy relationships. In some homes, staff sniff out intimate situations with the fervour of an old-fashioned witch hunt.

Lois Horath is a senior registered nurse at St. Joseph’s Integrated Care Centre, a 10-bed LTC facility in Lestock, Saskatchewan. When asked about suppression, she tells the story of a woman who had separated from her husband. The widowed fellow across the hall from the woman wanted to pursue a relationship. He went to her room a few times. There, they held hands—until staff hustled him out one evening, saying he wasn’t allowed in her room. Horath pleaded the would-be couples’ case with staff members, but many were adamant: the two couldn’t have a relationship. Administration later released a memo affirming the rights of residents to engage in relationships. Yet, out of fear, both residents said they were just good friends. “Because [the man] thought that he was going to get in trouble,” Horath says, “he actually denied that there was anything going on.”

As research (or an uncomfortable conversation with your grandmother) shows, though, people do not become asexual when they enter a nursing home—resigned to a life of “just good friends” after age 60. This is news to many nursing homes. Some staff feel that they need to protect residents from themselves; others think those who express sexual urges after a certain age are misguided or deviant. Even staff who want to support healthy sexual relationships often find themselves stumbling without any official policies or guidance. While awareness is slowly growing, thanks to the work of sex-positive policy advocates throughout the country, many more homes simply leave the issue unspoken. As a result, seniors are separated for flirting, scolded for holding hands, and threatened with disciplinary action for pursuing healthy relationships. When it comes to LGBTQ individuals, treatment only often gets worse—turning a supposed home into something that feels more like an institution.

In 2002, Dalhousie University professor Robin Stadnyk quipped: “Nursing home care across this country has developed as if the provinces were 10 separate countries.” Homes are administered and funded by each individual province’s government. They are not insured by the Canada Health Act, which principally covers care delivered in hospitals or by physicians. The result is widely different policies and levels of coverage across the country, making it difficult to discuss Canada’s nursing home system as a whole.

As of 2010, there were 2,136 residences for the aged—including nursing homes, homes for the aged, and other facilities that provide services and care—in Canada. Together, they serve 204,008 residents, accounting for 0.6 percent of the population, or roughly four percent of seniors, based on Statistics Canada estimates from 2009. As baby boomers age over the next 25 years, the number of Canadians over 65 is expected to double to roughly 10.4 million. While the vast majority of nursing home residents are above the age of 65, there is also a significant population of younger people with disabilities who live in LTC facilities alongside older residents.

The roots of the modern nursing home lie in nineteenth-century Great Britain, when women’s and church groups established special homes to shelter the impoverished elderly. The marginalized elders of previous centuries were often relegated to almshouses and poorhouses, where they would be mixed with the poor, the insane, and the disabled. By the end of the 19th century, poorhouses had evolved into dumping grounds for the sick and elderly—“a place for the destitute pauper to die,” as gerontological historian Thomas R. Cole wrote in 1987. Staff generally assumed the “inmates” were unworthy. “That is,” Cole adds, “chronically and illegitimately dependent on the state.”

The appearance of modern-day nursing homes in the 1930s  in Western society parallels the emergence and development of the mental hospital. Indeed, as many elders suffer from dementia, the clientele of the mental institution and the nursing home often overlapped until the 1960s, when the role of the nursing home as a long-term residence for the elderly became clearer. Hospitals became increasingly concerned with acute, short-term care, while asylums were principally reserved for younger patients with the potential to be treated and returned to society.

Insane asylums—institutional cousins of the nursing homes—experienced a seismic shift in the late 1950s and 1960s, when a movement towards deinstitutionalization was mobilized by damning accounts of overcrowding, abysmal living conditions, and widespread abuse. Nursing homes became swept up in the same anti-institutional zeal and underwent a number of reforms, especially after a cascade of scandals in the 1960s and 1970s. These revealed widespread negligence, physical and emotional abuse, and financial mistreatment, including embezzlement and extortion. While stricter government scrutiny has largely banished these practices to the scrapheap of history, the nursing home culture is still struggling to emerge from a century of silence and stigma.

Judith Wahl is the executive director of the Toronto-based Advocacy Centre for the Elderly. Founded in 1984, this community legal clinic is funded by Legal Aid Ontario, and offers a range of legal services to seniors. It also engages in public legal education and law reform activities. Wahl, who has directed the centre since it was founded, is a frequent speaker at various conferences on elder law issues. There, she often discusses the murky legal issues surrounding LTC resident intimacy. Passionate, experienced, and full of energy, Wahl is not someone you’d want to contend with in front of the judge.

While she is now one of Canada’s foremost advocates for elder rights, Wahl first became aware of resident intimacy issues by following cases of sexual assault in LTC facilities in the 90s. From there, she began looking more   broadly at senior sexuality in homes, completing anecdotal interviews with residents and talking to staff and managers. She discovered Canadian nursing homes have a range of approaches to the issue of sexuality, and that most have no written policies on the subject. Since then, Wahl has given numerous presentations on elder sexuality at various universities. Wahl, and others like her, believe that nursing homes should have policies that explicitly affirm the rights of residents to engage in intimacy, while also untangling difficult questions about consent and capacity.

Without such policies, Wahl says many nursing homes are “no sex” zones that forbid all types of sexual expression. Several years ago, she even had one personal support worker (a person who performs routine caretaking tasks) in an Ontario facility tell her that sex was holding hands. That worker, she says, continued to rationalize that holding hands leads to cuddling, which leads to petting, which leads to more intimate behavior, which leads to sexual intercourse. Wahl now deploys this anecdote in conferences and training seminars, grasping the hand of the person next to her.

Such restrictive policies and interventions have caused some advocates and academics to liken nursing homes to total institutions. One of the seminal works of the deinstitutionalization movement over the past 50 years is Canadian-born sociologist Erving Goffman’s Asylums. In his collection of essays, Goffman outlines four key components of the total institution: daily life occurs in the same place and under a single authority; a large group of inmates or residents are similarly situated; daily schedules have rules established by an official group; and all of the scheduled activities are part of a plan to further the goals of the institution.

Examples of total institutions, Goffman argues, include insane asylums, prisons, and military bootcamps. Such organizations, he says, thrive on the social distance between supervisory staff and inmates. In Goffman’s final analysis, people in total institutions undergo a process of self-mortification, in which the roles that they held in civil society—husband, wife, lover, even flirt and womanizer—are stripped away.

American author Renee Rose Shield echoes Goffman’s arguments in her 1988 book Uneasy Endings: Daily Life in an American Nursing Home. People, Shield says, draw their sense of self-worth from reciprocal relationships with others. This often takes the form of gift-giving, but can also include physical affection—a gift in itself. Residents in LTC facilities who are unable to give gifts, she adds, can only perceive themselves as helpless children, or even useless. They are denied all means of meaningful expression and become interchangeable.

While many, if not most, contemporary homes for the aged have managed to divest themselves of many of the elements of the total institution—such as isolation from the outside world, impersonal rituals of admission and daily routine, and a lack of intellectual stimulation—repressive sex policies remain the last bastion of institutional culture in many facilities. Part of the reason for this, says Wahl, is that saying no is easy. Restrictive policies, in other words, are simply easier to manage; no one needs to think. “I’ve had staff say to me, ‘Everyone in a long-term-care home is incapable,’” says Wahl. “That’s not true.”

Facilities that fail to incorporate a sex-positive approach into their policies face a number of pitfalls, she adds. Sexuality policies are vital in preventing sexual abuse and assault, in controlling the spread of sexually transmitted infections, and in allowing the expression of a fundamental aspect of residents’ humanity. In the absence of such policies, the potential for abuse from staff, spouses, and other residents often goes unchecked. Repressed residents can lash out in destructive or unexpected ways.

Nursing homes that deny capable adults of making their own sexual decisions could also reasonably be accused of violating Charter rights. Specifically, Wahl says, the ability to engage in consensual sexual activity, which can be interpreted as a right under Charter section 12: “Everyone has the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.” Consensual sexual activity is generally legal throughout Canada; the only exception is public places, which nursing homes are not.

Unfortunately, there is little legal literature or case law in Canada on these issues. Common misconceptions among staff include the notion that residents with dementia can pre-consent to sexual activity, or that the family of a capable resident can determine that resident’s sexual practices. To have sex without breaking the law, each party must provide consent and have the capacity to provide that consent. Nursing home staff often invoke both these factors as reasons for suppressing sexual activity, especially with residents living with various forms of dementia. While issues of consent may be difficult to determine in these cases, Canadian law involves making judgements on a case-by-case basis.

Wahl admits consent and capacity can be murky territory for seniors, especially those living with dementia. Questions to consider, she says, include: Does the person understand that they’re engaging in a relationship and what that means? Do they appreciate the risk of being involved in that relationship? Do they understand what’s going on? Do they understand who that person is? If the answer to all these questions is yes, then any type of intervention is ethically and legally unjustifiable, Wahl says. “Capable adults, wherever they live, can decide to do what they do,” she adds. “That’s their right. If a couple wants to get together in a long-term-care home and they’re in their nineties, that’s their business in their home. When you’re capable of consent, you can make decisions yourself.”

While heterosexual activity is often suppressed in Canadian nursing homes, same-sex partnerships and transgendered individuals are frequently met with outright hostility. Many nurses and staff oppose LGBTQ individuals and relationships on religious or moral grounds. In fact, plenty of nursing homes in Canada are religiously or ethnically centred. As a result, these homes can create an environment where gay and lesbian issues are not respected, says Dick Moore, a prominent Toronto activist who advocates for LGBTQ rights. Even homes and staff that are open-minded and well-intentioned may be unaware of the issues surrounding these residents.

Moore has worked with retired people and their families for more than 30 years, and served as the coordinator of the Older LGBT Program at the 519 Church Street Community Centre for nine years. During that time, he started the Seniors Pride Network, which works to expand programs and services for older LGBTQ individuals. He also worked with Toronto Homes for the Aged to establish LGBTQ-friendly nursing homes. There is a common attitude among staff, Moore says, that LGBTQ “people are sinners and [they] don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

The reasons for those feelings can be complex. According to Moore, many nursing home workers come from conservative backgrounds or are recent immigrants, and some can be less accepting of sexual expression. He recognizes that LGBTQ-positive sex policies can clash against such staff members’ values and religious beliefs, and that training must be done sensitively. Even so, he says, the point is not to change religious values or beliefs, but to assert residents’ human rights.

In part, Moore and his fellow advocates are also letting residents know what their human rights are. While the sixties generation was also involved in the gay liberation movement, says Moore, not everybody coming into care—or who is already in care—was on the front lines of social change. “Some people are going to be coming in waving the pride flag, saying ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,’” says Moore. “Many other people are going to be closeted, because that’s the way they were able to survive.” The challenge for nursing homes, he says, is to make homes comfortable for those who are out and proud and also those who are closeted. “This is where they live,” he adds, “and they’re entitled to privacy and intimacy.”

Alan Raeburn, a 76-year-old nursing home resident, agrees. A former actor/dancer who lived through the Stonewall Riot of 1969, Raeburn spent much of his professional career performing in New York City in roles such as Mr. Sowerberry in the musical Oliver! and as a homosexual Piers Gaveston in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. He says that the latter role may have been “the first time that two males had smooched in a play in New York.” Now retired and living with Parkinson’s, Raeburn has never experienced animosity at his home, Fudger House, which lies within Toronto’s east end—most likely because the facility has had LGBTQ-friendly policies since 2004. Raeburn participates without discrimination in Fudger House’s various programs, which include weekly movie nights. He’s been lobbying for weekly showings of LGBTQ-themed movies such as Trick and Normal. Yet while Fudger House is a welcoming environment, Raeburn suspects some residents may still be keeping their sexuality secret. Old survival mechanisms die hard.

Unfortunately, transgendered and transsexual residents are almost inevitably subject to the judgment of staff and other residents, says Anna Travers, director of Rainbow Health Ontario, a province-wide program that aims to improve access to services and promote the health of Ontario’s LGBT communities. This is one area where training for staff is invaluable. Many trans people, says Travers, choose to present in a certain way, but not to have surgical procedures. Some may use hormones instead. Others choose to have top surgery, but not bottom surgery.

“Unlike lesbian and gay people, who are in a vulnerable situation because of relationships and history,” says Travers, “Trans people are actually at risk because of their bodies.” The same can also be said for intersex individuals, like Christine Sherman. Intersex and trans residents often face shame and humiliation during bathing, dressing, and using the bathroom. It isn’t long before gossip carries down the hall, and daily life becomes a series of dirty looks and sour whispers.

Despite these challenges, there are grounds for optimism. “People are talking about it more,” says Wahl. “Even before people like me are getting into the home.” In the past five years, elder rights advocates across Canada—including lawyers, activists, nurses, and bureaucrats—have managed to make piecemeal progress. In 2008, Travers and Moore, along with many others, contributed to the creation of  the Toronto Long-Term Care Homes and Services LGBT toolkit. In 2009, the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority developed a comprehensive set of guidelines for supporting sexuality and intimacy in LTC facilities. Other changes are coming: Baby boomers will soon enter the nation’s nursing homes in force and are less likely to tolerate the older culture of repression. The “free love” generation will hit these homes like a tanker truck. Through struggle and work, more change will come. Until then, however, most of Canada’s nursing homes have a long way to go.