Why Is Doug Ford Spending $70 Million On A “Sikh-Punjabi” Long Term Care Home In Brampton?

Niwaas Long-Term Care, a not-for-profit organization, describes itself as “the first Sikh-Punjabi long-term care home in Ontario”. Its aim is to build a facility in Brampton that provides Sikh and Punjabi elders “with the medical care and support they need, in an environment that is familiar – with our food, our language, our culture and heritage”.

According to a report from the news outlet Baaz, many Sikh and Punjabi Canadians “find public long-term care (LTC) homes isolating due to language barriers, unfamiliar foods, and restrictions on practicing religious traditions”. The Niwaas Long-Term Care not-for-profit was initiated by the Sri Guru Nanak Sikh Centre and Brampton’s Deputy Mayor Harkirat Singh to address this issue, by building a senior’s home to “provide Sikh and Punjabi seniors with a home honouring their culture and specific needs”.

The report describes Ontario Minister of Transportation and MPP for Brampton South Prabmeet Singh Sarkaria as “another key figure in the initiative”. Sarkaria notes that the province of Ontario is infusing “approximately $70 million” into the Sikh-Punjabi long-term care home project, and explains that Premier Doug Ford is a “a huge champion of this project”.

What does a Sikh-Punjabi long-term care home look like? The descriptions provided in the Baaz report paint a picture of what sounds like a more or less closed ethnocultural community, almost hermetically sealed off from the influences of the broader Canadian society: “…familiar food options such as roti, sabji, and cha, Punjabi-speaking staff to eliminate language barriers, and programs based on religious and cultural practices, including Simran circles, arts and crafts, and gardening”.

There seems to be a particularly strong emphasis on the Punjabi language, to the point that fluency in Punjabi will apparently be a job requirement for working at the home: “Recruiting and retaining Punjabi-speaking staff has also been a priority. Gurvinder confirms that fluency in Punjabi is a requirement for employment, and many community members working in long-term care have already expressed interest in joining the team”.

According to the Baaz article, Niwaas LTC envisions its project as kicking off a larger trend of long-term care homes that cater to specific ethnocultural groups: “Over the next five to ten years, the goal is to expand services and inspire similar initiatives across Ontario and beyond”. Prabmeet Sarkaria, the MPP for Brampton South and an important figure in the Niwaas initiative, wants to see more of this type of long-term care home across the province: “This is just the beginning…We hope to see more culturally tailored long-term care facilities across Ontario to meet the diverse needs of our seniors”.

If some Canadians of Punjabi origin get together and fundraise to create an ethnic-specific long-term care home, that’s their right. But why should Ontario taxpayers be footing the bill to the tune of “approximately $70 million”? This astronomic expenditure of taxpayer funds is courtesy of the same premier who presents himself as a populist crusader against government waste.

Even worse, many Canadians will be troubled to learn that their taxes are funding an initiative to create a long-term care home catering to a specific ethnocultural group, an initiative which is described by one of its proponents as potentially “just the beginning” of a wave of homes with similar mandates. It is hard to see this trend ending with long-term care homes. All of the arguments about the need for cultural compatibility and language barriers could be leveraged just as easily to advocate for separate recreation centres, gyms, pools, or libraries. How could a trend like this lead to anything but the dissolution of the ties that bind us together as citizens, and the creation of a society in which immigrant groups are encouraged to silo themselves off into their own institutions?

This is an example of the “asymmetrical multiculturalism” described by Eric Kauffman, in which every minority group is encouraged to assert its identity while the majority is discouraged from doing so. As a thought experiment, if a long-term care home project was set up with a mandate to cater to “old stock Canadians”, would the Ontario government have given it $70 million? It goes without saying that a project like this would be accorded no funding. And yet, this same idea is considered perfectly worthy of taxpayer dollars when you swap the cultural mandate of the hypothetical long-term care home to “Sikh-Punjabi”.

Even in 2016, well before the major recent public opinion shift against mass immigration, 68% of Canadians said that immigrants “should do more to fit in better with mainstream Canadian society”. Only 32% felt that “we should encourage cultural diversity with different groups keeping their own customs and languages”. And yet, Premier Doug Ford’s Ontario government continues to promote the model of asymmetrical multiculturalism over the model of assimilation.