Jerry Godinho helps his mother Meena Godinho organize groceries at her home in Toronto on Saturday. Mr. Godinho lives in Hamilton but visits her frequently for caregiving.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
When Lisa Paul’s father was in and out of the hospital in early 2025 with kidney cancer and other health issues, she and her brother became the primary contacts for his medical staff.
Ms. Paul, a 48-year-old communications professional and single mother, had to navigate the public health care system and advocate for her father with his doctors. Driving three hours from her home in Toronto to the hospital in London, Ont., didn’t make it any easier to do so.
“I found the entire experience the most stressful thing I’ve ever gone through,” said Ms. Paul, whose father passed away in June, 2025. She was trying to be there for her two kids and had also recently started a contract job. Juggling those responsibilities with a six-hour round trip, twice a week, “was really draining,” she admitted.
Like many Canadians, Ms. Paul is part of the sandwich generation, juggling the responsibilities of not only raising her children, but also caregiving for her own parents. For those who are doing it from a distance – whether from another city, province or country – the logistical complexity adds significant strain to the existing emotional, mental and financial toll.
“If you’re far away, you’re not just worried about your parent, you’re worried about what you can’t see,” said Liv Mendelsohn, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence.
Distance can compound the feelings of anxiety, exhaustion and overwhelm that are common among caregivers, Ms. Mendelsohn said.
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Almost half of Canadian caregivers primarily look after parents or in-laws, according to 2018 Statistics Canada data – more common than any other form of unpaid caregiving.
In separate data from last November, Statscan reported that about one-quarter of adult children lived between 20 to 100 kilometres away from their parents, around 15 per cent lived 100 to 499 km away, and about 11 per cent lived 500 km or more away.
Long-distance caregiving is “increasingly the norm,” Ms. Mendelsohn said.
Adult children caring from afar typically become “care co-ordinators” rather than hands-on caregivers, managing finances and administrative tasks and navigating the health care system for their parent, she said.
When Jerry Godinho started caring for his 89-year-old parents about two years ago, he also became a joint account holder on both of their bank accounts. He kept track of their expenses and helped them pay bills after they had been hit with a penalty for forgetting home insurance payments. Mr. Godinho, 60, lives in Hamilton and his mom lives in Toronto; his dad passed away in January.
When he first saw their accounts, he realized that without his knowing, his parents had been paying for multiple services they didn’t understand or need, and had taken out an unnecessary reverse mortgage. He now has calendar reminders to pay his mom’s bills, but said he’s also started asking her to call him any time she gets mail or a door-to-door solicitation, so he can protect her from scams even when he’s not there.
“The most challenging thing for me is keeping the crooks away from her,” he said. “On her cellphone, I created a list of safe phone numbers and told her, ‘Everything else, don’t even answer.’”
Jerry Godinho helps his mother Meena Godinho look at car-leasing options at her home.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Giovana Pinheiro Chichito, a 41-year-old Toronto tech-sector worker, also worries about her 80-year-old mother, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, falling victim to increasingly sophisticated scams.
When he was alive, her father was the one who took care of errands that her mother struggled with because of her mobility issues. After he unexpectedly passed away last year, Ms. Pinheiro Chichito went back to Rio to teach her mom how to do things such as order grocery delivery to her door and call Ubers to get around. She quickly realized her mom needed help to build digital literacy skills.
“It’s really concerning to see a parent buy something on YouTube from an AI-generated channel that she thinks is coming from a professional,” Ms. Pinheiro Chichito said.
Long-distance caregivers also face their own financial challenges. Caregivers of all kinds spend on average $1,000 a month on out-of-pocket expenses, such as nutritional supplements and care supports, according to the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence. For long-distance caregivers, that amount is likely higher, including travel expenses and technology costs such as cameras and emergency devices, said Carolina Henao, financial planner at Sun Life and president of Lucem Financial Solutions Inc. in Richmond Hill, Ont.
Mr. Godinho estimates he’s spent more than $20,000 from his savings over the last two years on caregiving expenses, including weekly travel to Toronto, fixing the roof on his parents’ home, and snowplowing and lawn maintenance services. Part of that money also went toward junk removal to get rid of items that his father, who had dementia, had been quietly collecting.
He and his mom recently agreed that they would list her house and she’ll come to live with his family.
Mr. Godinho helps his mother down the stairs at her home.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Henao said she recommends that adult children pro-actively establish a plan with their parents for when their health deteriorates, including updating their powers of attorney and other legal documentation, as well as considering long-term care insurance. Adult children can also set aside funds for potential caregiving costs.
Christine Wolfl, a 35-year-old marketer in Kitchener, Ont., said she and her mother started talking more about the future after her mom broke her hip two years ago. Her mom, who’s 65 and lives in Toronto, has secondary progressive multiple sclerosis and mobility issues.
The best scenario for Ms. Wolfl’s mom would be aging in place in her condo, though it’s an imperfect option. The mortgage is paid off, making the condo cheaper than a retirement home, but provincially funded community caregiving supports are limited. Her mom currently has a personal support worker come in twice a day. Ms. Wolfl has also been looking into other public programs for older adults, but said the wait-list is long for what turns out to be inadequate support, such as a monthly cleaning service.
A lot of care will still fall to Ms. Wolfl. Since she moved to Kitchener last year, the support she can provide to her mom has changed. She goes to Toronto a couple of times every two weeks, schedules health appointments and handles paperwork.
“She does need a lot of hands-on support and unfortunately I’m just not able to be there as much as I’d like,” she said. She also recently started a full-time job with in-office days, posing another challenge to attend her mother’s appointments.
Sun Life’s Ms. Henao said the financial hit of taking time away from work, often unpaid, is an underestimated cost of long-distance caregiving.
That was the case for Ms. Paul before her dad passed away. When she was regularly driving to London, she used up her vacation and sick days. The intensity of her caregiving responsibilities also left her with no mental capacity to look for work ahead of her contract ending in October, she said.
“You’re making immense sacrifices in order to be present and do that work,” she said. “You don’t really feel like you have a choice at the end of the day. You lose money or you lose the last moments with your family member.”
