Surrey council has endorsed an updated Age Friendly Strategy for Seniors in the city with its guiding principles being inclusion for all, community engagement and respect.
A corporate report by Laurie Cavan, Surrey’s general manager of parks, recreation and culture notes Surrey is seeing a “significant” increase in older adults living longer, healthier lives.
“This demographic shift aligns with a national and global phenomenon; population aging, and urbanization are the two major forces shaping the 21st century. As the senior population continues to grow, it is more important than ever to support the health and well-being of older adults,” Cavan stated.
The City of Surrey first launched its Age Friendly Strategy for Seniors in 2014 to support their safety, health and wellness needs, and also address transportation, mobility, housing and other concerns. Since then, Cavan noted in her report, things have become more complex with COVID-19, the health care crisis, climate change, housing affordability, increasing food insecurity, changing demographics, population growth, and “a deeper understanding of the need for actions in support of truth and reconciliation.
“These factors have created a dynamic community landscape that prompted staff to revisit and update the Age Friendly Strategy for Seniors,” she said, “ensuring it stays comprehensive, inclusive, and adaptive to the evolving trends and challenges faced by the aging population.”
Through community engagement city staff found top priorities to be access to medical care, health and wellness programs and services, housing, and transportation.
“As a result of this work, the City has successfully been awarded a BC Healthy Communities Grant of $25,000 to develop the associated action plan in 2024, which is currently being developed and will be made available on the City’s website as a support document of the Age Friendly Strategy,” Cavan told council on Jan. 29.
Coun. Harry Bains welcomed the update. “You know, we focus a lot on the youth of our city and we got more rec centres, but it’s a great acknowledgement that all residents of Surrey matter. Seniors deserve programs and activities and assistance in the city so I’m happy to see that the city is developing this action plan,” he said.
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Coun. Linda Annis remarked that today’s senior citizens tend to be a lot more spry than their grandparents were.
“Our demographics have changed quite substantially and when I think back to my grandparents and my parents, the activities that they got involved with versus 55-plus now are very different so I’m hoping that when we actually come through with the action plans that we spend an awful lot more focus on keeping seniors active.”
“I think this is a great start but I just hope that we’re really able to expand on it, focusing on the fact that seniors now are different than what they were a generation or two ago.”
The last census, done in 2021, found 28 per cent of Surrey’s population – 156,765 residents, specifically –to be 55 or older. Also, 10 per cent of immigrants who arrived in 2021 were 55 or older.
During a luncheon hosted by the Surrey Board of Trade last May, provincial Health Minister Adrian Dix noted that the number of Surrey residents over the age of 80 is expected to increase by 230 per cent in 20 years – to 44,000 from 12,000 – and the number of residents over the age of 60 is expected to double.
Mayor Brenda Locke said she’s “glad that the city does take such good care of all of the people in our city, and including the seniors and will continue to do so.”
Ramona Kaptyn, president of the Surrey and White Rock chapter of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP), says anybody who endorses safety for seniors “is perfect, in my books.”
“Whatever Surrey is doing, it’s great,” she said. “Should be more going on, it’s a bit upsetting what is really happening in our communities. I mean there all these services for seniors but you call and you’re on hold forever if you can get through. There’s a lack of doctors, I know seniors who have no family doctor.
“It’s really worrisome.”
For more that a year, representing a membership of more than 3,000 seniors in Surrey/White Rock and 20,000 province-wide, CARP has been lobbying the provincial government to provide free shingles vaccines and high-dose flu vaccines to seniors like other provinces do. In B.C. shingles vaccines cost anywhere from $160 to $210, Kaptyn told the Now-Leader in June 2023. “It varies from pharmacy to pharmacy, I don’t think it’s an absolute set rate. I paid $210 for mine.” The cost of a high-dose flu vaccine, she added, also varies. “You don’t know, because every pharmacy charges something different.”
Kaptyn said on Jan. 31 that the provincial government “is still looking at it.
“Shingles vaccines are not free here. Nothing’s really changed,” she said. “Don’t get me going, it’s just so upsetting. I don’t know any other word, it’s upsetting, it’s like banging your head against a wall. And high-dose flu vaccines, we know that vaccines keep seniors – and I don’t even like that word, older adults – out of the emergency rooms and out of hospitals.”
Deb Jack, a Surrey senior and also president of Surrey Environmental Partners, lamented that the “seniors area” of the Guildford and Cloverdale recreation centres are located “at the furthest possible part of the building that you can get from the front door.”
Moreover, she added, Surrey has only one indoor walking track, at the Guildford recreation centre. “There ought to one in each rec centre for seniors.” Simply walking around on concrete floors, she said “is terrible for knees.”
Jack said having indoor tracks for walking is especially important for when heat domes come back again, “because it’s going to be for always now.
“I believe based on what they have in the report that they indeed have done a great deal of consultation work, and obviously have involved a lot of seniors,” she added, “but there are some of the issues for seniors that a city doesn’t really have control over, not the least of which is the issue of housing – affordable housing – and the issue of health care.”