Dementia patients need financial protection

As Canadians age and more of them experience cognitive decline, there are more cases of people making disastrous financial decisions and family members trying to undo them.  The Alzheimer Society of Canada wants financial institutions to be more compassionate in these situations, but at least one lawyer thinks they may need a push from government.

“I think that there’s an obligation (on the part of financial institutions)…that if there’s some strange financial changes on the account that are out of hand, for them to make some inquiries about whether or not capacity challenges may be playing a role,” says Laura Tamblyn Watts, a lawyer and senior fellow for the Canadian Centre for Elder Law.

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Little protection exists

However, employees in the financial field in Canada have very little training in handling elderly clients, unlike those in Australia or parts of the U.S., says Watts. Bad financial decisions can be very difficult to overturn.  And although families can appeal for help from the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments, the ombudsman does not have the power to oblige them to undo poor decisions made by someone with dementia or some other cognitive impairment.

There are consumer laws that allow people to back out of some obligations like gym memberships, says Watts, but those are not enough to deal with the issue.

Beyond that, unless a person has legally signed papers to mandate another to act on their behalf it is very difficult for someone like a family member to intervene.

Few Canadians provide for a loss of mental capacity

“Prevention is the key,” says Watts. “These are conversations that we need to be having more and more around our kitchen table in the way that we need to talk about wills and so on. We also need to be talking about loss of capacity.”

Only one third of Canadians have made legal provisions for someone to take over their financial matters in the event they become impaired. Watts thinks more people should take this kind of action, and that government should act as well: “I do think it’s one of the areas that we need to really talk to our government and regulators about putting some better protections in place.”