The Real Crisis Isn’t Aging

It’s Abandonment

From the Table Series: Replacing Senior Housing with Human Infrastructure

Let’s start with a number.

47% of personal support workers in Canada say they’re barely making ends meet.
Half are thinking of leaving. A quarter already have.

And when they leave, it’s not the system that suffers.
It’s your mother. Your grandfather. Your neighbour’s aunt.

But this isn’t about wage tables or union strikes.
This is about the lie we’ve been sold... and the cost we’ve swallowed.

THE LIE

We were told that long-term care would be there when we needed it.
That someone—trained, kind, professional—would step in when families couldn’t.

What they didn’t say?

That “long-term care” was code for institutional abandonment.

A 94-year-old woman waits 67 days for an assessment.
Then 76 more to get support.
She is continent. Cognizant. Alone.

She can’t afford to wait 143 days.
But the system says she’s not urgent. Not ill enough. Not helpless enough.

In Canada, “not dying yet” is now the threshold for support.

THE TRUTH

This is not an eldercare problem.
This is a systems severance problem.

Here’s what we know:

• 1 in 5 Canadians will need long-term care.
• Most will enter facilities designed fifty years ago.
• Those facilities were built to isolate, not integrate.
• Over 200,000 Ontarians have up to $3.6B in unclaimed pensions—because they don’t live long enough, or alert enough, to claim them.

We have normalised vanishment.

We have accepted that aging means withdrawal, warehousing, and waiting.
Waiting for a bed. Waiting for a nurse. Waiting to be remembered.

THE SYSTEM IS THE SYMPTOM

Look at the data from TREC.

Translating Research in Elder Care (TREC) (@trecresearch.bsky.social)

An applied and partnered health services research program that develops innovations and practical solutions that contribute to sustainable improvements in quality of care and quality of life in long-term care (LTC) homes.

Bluesky Social

Personal support workers are exhausted.
Care aides are burned out.
Researchers track missed care like war casualties... measuring what was forgotten, what was rushed, what was ignored.

Because in today’s system, care is a checkbox.
A flowchart.
An industrial outcome.

No one asks: Is this a life you would choose for your own family?

Because the answer is always no.

THE REAL CRISIS IS SPIRITUAL

This is not just about operations.
It’s about ontology.

What do we believe a human life deserves when it can no longer produce?
When it becomes inconvenient?
When it reminds us that one day, it will be us?

We didn’t design this system to fail.
We failed to design it at all.

So it metastasized—into bureaucratic corridors and antiseptic meals, with music therapy on Thursdays if there’s staff.

We didn’t ask the one question that matters:

What if care wasn’t a facility... but a family-supported system?

INTRODUCING: THE TABLE

We are building that system now.

It’s called The Table Community Format.
It’s not a home. It’s not a hospital. It’s not a hub.

It’s a living doctrine—where families remain together, care is layered not outsourced, and every element of daily life is built to support connection, dignity, and longevity.

We are replacing abandonment with architecture.

• Intergenerational living units.
• Embedded clinical and palliative care.
• Research and educational partnerships.
• Climate-secure utilities.
• Faith-aligned grief spaces.
• Real food. Real gardens. Real community.

No one is locked in.
No one is locked out.
And no one dies alone.

Because the family table is not just a symbol.
It's the first infrastructure that ever worked.

We are putting it back.

THIS IS THE FIRST STAKE

The public must know:
This isn’t just a crisis of funding.
It’s a crisis of imagination.

And we are done waiting.

Done waiting for policy.
Done waiting for reports.
Done waiting for capital that demands ROI without moral yield.

The Table is being built.

It begins in Canada.
It begins with families.
It begins now.

NEXT IN SERIES: “The Lie of Long-Term Care”
How the institutions that promised to care became the ones we fear most... and what we build instead.

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Thanks!

B

Proconsul 🇨🇦 (@proconsul.bsky.social)

Visionary Strategic Growth A guide for ambition, bridging strategy with implementation for modern business: clarity, structure, and sustainable impact. I listen. If it’s possible, I’ll show you how. proconsul.ghost.io 🇨🇦 🏳️‍🌈 🍉

Bluesky Social

The real crisis isn’t aging. It’s abandonment.
Long-term care failed.
This is the replacement.
Not housing. Human infrastructure.
Families stay. Elders lead. No one is locked away to die.

PS -