Why were these deaths not investigated? "While all nursing home deaths are reported to the coroner, an autopsy is not scheduled except in specific circumstances, including those that are considered suspicious.

Women are more likely to work less than 30 hours per week with no benefits. Young workers, or those below 35 years of age, are less likely to have workplace pensions, or sick leave.

Racialized workers, non-citizens, those whose first language is other than English or French, are far more likely to be precariously employed. This is not the way to build a better Canada.

Our campaigns and political action work are an important part of this fight, but we must never lose sight of the most powerful tool we have. We must organize these workers, allowing them the single best way to fight precarity and inequality in the workplace – a union.

But the health consequences of PTSD can be calamitous - suicide rates are high - and the resources to deal with the problem are not keeping up with the surging demand. As it stands, the federal and provincial health systems are not equipped to get first responders the help they urgently need. As federal employees, Mounties can turn to the overburdened Veterans Affairs ministry, which is plagued by delays and inefficiency. Their local and provincial counterparts aren't even that lucky. They face a patchwork of support programs that vary widely according to region.

Some provinces include PTSD in their workplace injury compensation plans; others don't. In some places, certain classes of workers, such as nurses, aren't covered. Last month, the federal military ombudsman, Gary Walbourne, called for the creation of a national "concierge service" - a onestop shop for the Department of National Defence's PTSD sufferers. It's a good idea that should spawn imitators across Canada. Emergency workers perform dangerous, harrowing work on society's behalf, and they are hurting because of it. Governments at all levels have the urgent duty to help them recover.

Polls show Canadians overwhelmingly support these conditions. Medicare's key limitation, however, is that it applies only to services offered by doctors and hospitals. It does not apply to home care. Increasingly, provincial governments are trying to save money by encouraging acute-care hospitals to discharge patients as quickly as possible. In most provinces, these patients find themselves reliant on badly underfunded home-care services. Unlike hospital care, such services are usually neither comprehensive nor universal. As an Alberta oil worker with incurable cancer found when he tried unsuccessfully to come home to Ontario to die near his family, they are not even portable. Ontario pays $3 billion on home care each year. But Queen's Park saves more than that in foregone hospital and nursing home costs. In that sense, home care is a revenue tool. It allows provincial governments to evade the spirit, if not the letter, of the Canada Health Act. In Ontario, as my Star colleague Bob Hepburn has pointed out, the results are sometimes absurd. When the provincial Liberal government boosted wages for badly paid home-care workers earlier this year, some cost-conscious agencies responded by cutting services. In the weird world of Canadian health care, it was the logical thing to do. But there is a way to fix the home-care anomaly. Roy Romanow's royal commission on health care pointed to it 14 years ago.

Romanow argued it made no sense to exclude home care from medicare. He recommended home care services for the mentally ill, for patients just released from acute care hospitals and for those needing palliative care be written into the Canada Health Act immediately. By 2020, he said, all home care services should be covered by medicare. Interestingly, federal Health Minister Jane Philpott is also focusing on home care, mental health and palliative care. How would she get the provinces onside? Many assume a final deal over medicare spending can be hammered out only by the first ministers meeting in a marathon bargaining session - as happened in 2004. In that session, the premiers ran roughshod over then Prime Minister Paul Martin. Quebec demanded and received the principle of asymmetric federalism - that it could do whatever it wished with the massive health transfers Martin was offering. Alberta then demanded and received the principle of provincial equality - which meant any province could mimic Quebec. As a result, no real conditions applied to any of the money Ottawa agreed to hand over.

This is one way of doing things. The other is for Ottawa to ignore provincial objections. That's what Lester Pearson's Liberal government did in 1966 when, in concert with the New Democrats and over the strident objections of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and the federal Conservatives, it passed Canada's first national medicare act. The Canada Health Act is the successor to that 1966 law. It is a federal statute that can be amended unilaterally by Parliament. In 2016, it makes sense that it be amended to include home care as a core medicare service. Some provinces may disagree. If so, they won't have to take any extra money that Ottawa puts on offer. Thomas Walkom's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Mr. Duma fell through one of the biggest cracks in Canada's fractured home-care system - a crack that has still not been repaired, despite all the attention political leaders have showered on the issue recently. The problem is that home care is not covered in the first two to three months after a patient moves to a new province. The federal, provincial and territorial health ministers made home care a priority at their meeting in Toronto last week and the Liberal government has singled it out as the only area of health care in line to receive new money from Ottawa.

But that reciprocal billing deal covers only "medically necessary" services guaranteed by the Canada Health Act. Home-care services do not count, even for patients such as Mr. Duma, who had less than three months to live. Mr. Duma, a maintenance planner for Suncor, had active hepatitis B and liver cirrhosis before a liver cancer diagnosis led surgeons to remove 60 per cent of the organ in October of 2015. In May, he was back in hospital in Fort McMurray, Alta., when the wildfires swept through, forcing him to travel with hundreds of other patients to Edmonton. Terminally ill and unable to return with his wife, Ana, to their Fort McMurray home, Mr. Duma decided to move back to Windsor to be with Laura, 29, a nurse practitioner, and his younger daughter, Andreea, 27, a registered nurse. "He spent the majority of the last year of his life in a hospital," Laura said. "It was the last place he wanted to die." But Mr. Duma's family quickly discovered how hard it would be to fulfill his final wish. He did not qualify for any services provided by his local Community Care Access Centre (CCAC), the public agency that co-ordinates home care in Ontario. That meant no nursing care, no help from personal support workers and no access to publicly funded equipment, such as a hospital bed.

Darren Cargill, the palliativecare leader for the Erie St. Clair Regional Cancer Program, found out about Mr. Duma's dilemma from his daughters. He did his best to help, asking nurse educators from the Hospice of Windsor and Essex County to support the family by phone and rummaging through the hospice's basement to find used equipment to donate to Mr. Duma. In the end, Dr. Cargill bent the rules to secure a bed for Mr. Duma at a hospice in Leamington, about 45 minutes from Windsor. Hospice services are also excluded from the interprovincial billing agreement. "It's a little bit tragic," Dr. Cargill said. "In the eyes of the Ministry [of Health and Long-Term Care,] he wasn't even in that bed. We never admitted him. We kind of snuck him in on a weekend, took care of him, and gave him a peaceful death." Mr. Duma was not the first dying patient Dr. Cargill has treated who did not qualify for home care because of a recent move. The doctor had already raised the issue with Lisa Gretzky, the NDP MPP for Windsor West, who wrote a letter to Health Minister Eric Hoskins about the problem last January, six months before Mr. Duma died. On Tuesday, Ms. Gretzky intends to introduce a private member's bill called Dan's Law that would amend the Home Care and Community Services Act to waive the three-month waiting period for home care for patients who move to Ontario from another province where they qualified for public health insurance. Opposition private member's bills rarely become law. In an e-mailed statement, Dr. Hoskins said he and Premier Kathleen Wynne have "indicated that this is an issue of concern for our government," but that Ontario on its own cannot close the temporary gap in home-care coverage.

He said the provincial and territorial health ministers have formed a working group to "modernize and expand" their reciprocal billing agreements. But Ms. Gretzky said that "we can't wait for them [health ministers] to actually sit down, have this conversation, and really get this done."

TORONTO – Physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and murder — family violence is a pervasive but often hidden reality within Canadian society, says the country’s top doctor, who calls the scope of the problem “staggering.”

In 2014, the latest year for which statistics are available, almost 58,000 girls and women were victims of family violence, said Taylor, Canada’s chief public health officer.

Every four days, one woman in Canada was killed by a family member; every six days, a woman was killed by an intimate partner; while a man was murdered by a partner every 23 days.

Health Minister Jane Philpott says her government is prepared to make mental health a big priority, but she will not be writing a blank cheque to the provinces and territories until she knows how it will be spent. Philpott made the comments in Ottawa a day after meeting the provincial health ministers in Toronto to discuss the future of health-care funding in Canada.

After meeting with her provincial counterparts on Monday and Tuesday in Toronto, Philpott emerged without a long-term funding plan, or health accord, for health care in Canada.