Today Wilkinson held a press conference on a tax credit that will mostly benefit higher-income seniors. Only seniors that have an extra $20,000 to spend can receive the full amount:

• The median individual income for seniors is just $32,600.
• Nearly a quarter of households with one or more seniors have a total annual household income of less than $30,000.

Wilkinson didn’t get any questions from the media. Given the BC Liberals' record of privatization, cuts and understaffing, I’m sure he was relieved.

Here are just a few of the things that Wilkinson didn’t answer for:

• Understaffing: 9 in 10 care homes not meeting minimum government standards
• Contracting out: Bills 29 and 94 allowing widespread contracting out and contract-flipping
  • - Forced care aides to work at multiple facilities - leaving care homes vulnerable to COVID-19
  • - The largest mass firing of women workers in Canadian history (8,000 workers)
• Increased privatization: the number of privately operated beds soared 42% from 2001 to 2016, while public and non-profit beds dropped 11%.
• Less care, more profits: For-profit care homes failed to deliver 207,000 care hours they were funded to provide in 2016/17 and 2017/18, helping them generate 12 times more profit than non-profit facilities.
• Enabling foreign takeovers: Dismissed families’ concerns around Retirement Concepts sale as “fearmongering” and rubber-stamped new licenses in just one week. Four facilities later had to be put under public administration.
• Less public home support: access to public home support fell 30% from 2001 to 2016.