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Less Promises. More Action.

That’s CARP’s priority for this year, after the pandemic shed light on the devastating impact on vulnerable older Canadians.

The Zoomer advocacy group held its annual general meeting to outline its priorities for this year, with the keynote address from Premier Doug Ford.

“I welcome everyone who is now tuning into the annual general meeting of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons,” said Anthony Quinn, Chief Community and Benefits Officer.

With that, more than 700 CARP members from around Canada joined virtually to hear not only the priorities for the year, but to listen to Premier Doug Ford. In his introduction of the Premier, CARP President, and CEO of Zoomer Media, Moses Znaimer, admitted some members weren’t too pleased with the Premier’s appearance.

“He knows who actually does the voting, we do, Zoomers do, and at twice the level of millennials and Gen Z,” said Moses. “His appearance here will not be a cake walk, that he wears the burden of all those tragic long term care deaths and that many hard questions await him.”

The Premier took questions from CARP members including this from Kathy Wright.

“Ontario’s long term care homes urgently needs a revolution in how they provide care and CARP is calling for a transformation of all long term care homes to an emotion-based model of care, so when will you mandate this change?”

“Even though we made historic investments in long term care, and hospital centred care, we know that there’s still increased demand and it continues to grow, and also to make sure we have home care, that’s one of our priorities,” responded Premier Ford.

CARP’S Chief Policy Officer Bill VanGorder outlined the five priorities to the year; improved home/community care and long term care, access to innovative care, fitness and financial security.

“So CARP is asking government to given pensioners super priority status by creating a pension insurance program that insures 100 percent of pension liabilities.”

After spending half hour with the group, Premier Ford left this final message.

“I won’t spare one single penny when it come to making sure we keep our seniors and our province safe.”

CARP expects its membership to reach 350,000 members by the end of the year.