A structural inquiry on ageing and death in Canadian cities: the case of the homeless elderly

Research on aging, death and homelessness as a whole is rife with difficulty, yet its joint study is integral to better comprehend the experience of the vulnerable elderly in society as they near the end of their life. To better situate our understanding of aging, death and homelessness together, a thematic review of the North-American literature was conducted around these joint phenomena and contextualized with regards to Canadian public services and provisions for the homeless. The analysis was guided by a foulcadian conceptual frame of thought. Through this process, we came to identify 3 tendencies of public discourse and practices concurrently marginalizing the aging homeless population: 1) the political and epidemiological narratives mostly endorse the “successful aging” approach which frames social needs under a moralistic conception of individual responsibility, 2) by focusing on autonomy and social reinsertion, Canadian public provisions fail to respond to the needs of the elderly homeless individual and serve more to hide their death than to support their end-of-life and 3) by identifying its services users through their socioeconomic status, institutionalized healthcare contributes to the experience of “social death” by the aging homeless as they approach their end-of-life and are denied the same quality of care.