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'The kids' are all right -- for now So why must these toddlers-in-adult-bodies be
moved from the only homes they've known?
By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
Saturday, May 7, 2005 Page A19
E-mail Christie Blatchford Read Bio Latest Columns
A week or so after I visited the Huronia Regional Centre last month, Ontario Community and Social
Services Minister Sandra Pupatello toured the place.
Now, I wasn't there for her tour, and unlike my unofficial visit, hers was a proper tour, but I figure that we
must have gone to two different places, because we sure came away with different impressions. Judging
by what she told the local newspaper, the Orillia Packet & Times, afterwards, Ms. Pupatello was veritably
bubbling over with optimism.
"I am feeling extremely positive about how well it's going to go," she told the newspaper of the
government's plan to shut down the joint in about four years and move the residents into what is always
euphemistically called "the community."
Ms. Pupatello added, "Especially after meeting the residents, one on one. I feel good about that."
Blow me down, I thought when I read that.
How I was, when I left -- with a high-school-era friend and former fellow journalist, David Kingsmill, whose
sister Lynne has lived there 53 of her 59 years and who was my host this day -- was absolutely stricken.
How I felt was worried for the residents I'd met and dubious that they could ever get better or more
competent care than they get already.
Lynnie, as David calls her, lives in a pod of what are called the McGhie Apartments, a three-storey
red-brick building on the sprawling green grounds on the shores of Lake Simcoe. She has a room, which
she shares, and spends her days in a pleasant common area with couches and a TV and a kitchen, among
faces she has known for years or even decades. She even has her own rocking chair, where, after
hugging her brother and me both, she promptly fled and where she remained, rocking back and forth,
back and forth.
Her fellow residents in the pod are all women, many about her age, a couple in wheelchairs, and all with
pretty much the same degree of disability, which is hard to measure because most of them don't speak,
though some yell. Some clutched toys, and one woman, who is 43, proudly dragged out all her dolls from
the pillowcase she carries them in, and then sat on the floor to play with them. I held hands with another
woman in a wheelchair for a while, both of us grinning, and then, suddenly, she began to cry, with big fat
tears rolling down her cheeks.
I thought she was sad, or that I'd done something to upset her. But one of the staff knew her well enough
to recognize, immediately, that she wanted a hit of apple juice, and sure enough, she was right.
No wonder the residents are affectionately called, by pretty much everyone, The Kids.
They are essentially middle-aged toddlers, with all that suggests. Lynnie, for instance, can't eat anything
but baby food. Yet the advancing years have brought a host of age-related complications for The Kids,
so Lynnie is also on hormone-replacement therapy. Many residents have a host of such medical
complications, and the administration of their meds alone is a hugely complex business. "Who's going to
do that in the community?" Jennifer Sutton asked. Her charming brother Dave, who is now 51, has
diabetes, cerebral palsy, vision and hearing disabilities, and seizures.
At Huronia, the residents get 24-hour care, from well-trained, experienced staff, including doctors and
nurses, who outnumber them about three-to-one. The government's answer to families' questions is, Mr.
Kingsmill and Ms. Sutton say, always the same: A home will be found for each, with all the supports built
in. The families are less than reassured.
One particular group of residents, The Kids who have the eating disorder called pica, will eat anything
from drywall to dirt. They're the ones you see wearing hockey helmets, and sometimes oven mitts, so
they won't scratch themselves raw.
But see them you do, walking about the grounds: The days of this institution, with its dismal history,
shutting the mentally ill away -- the better, in many cases, to mistreat them -- are long past.
It is in that awful history, Mr. Kingsmill said, that was born the impetus to close down Huronia, and its
sister regional institutions, the Rideau in Smiths Falls and the Southwestern near Chatham. He has no
doubt that for most of the developmentally disabled -- those who are moderately or mildly delayed --
moving them into group homes or the like is absolutely the right thing to do. "They can function
independently," he said. Not so the most profoundly or severely retarded.
Yet the history, Mr. Kingsmill said, informs the current policies of government, and the Ontario
Association for Community Living, which argue that institutions are bad, period, for everyone.
Mr. Kingsmill was 2 when his mom took his sister, then 6, up to what was then called the Orillia Hospital
School. Their folks couldn't handle her any more, and in those days, doctors told parents that an
institution was the only solution.
"The place was a horror show," Mr. Kingsmill said. But over the years, it changed, and it became the
caring place it is now -- with terrific facilities (a special pool, tunnels linking the key buildings so
residents can get about easily in the winter months, a canteen, a drop-in centre, an infirmary, a summer
camp). "It's the only home Lynnie has ever known," he said. "These are her only friends."
Whenever the families ask about the plans for their loved ones, he said, the government people reply
that there will be plans, when the time comes. "They have no plans," he said bluntly. "They have no idea
where they're going. . .They always say, 'Oh, we've asked them if they want to move.' You wouldn't ask a
two-year-old to decide her fate, would you? Especially when most of them, like Lynnie, can't even speak?"
Some of the residents' families -- who are supported by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union,
whose members make up most of those working at the three Ontario institutions -- are rallying at
Queen's Park on May 11, to protest against the closings.
After our visit last month, Mr. Kingsmill was still hoping that Ms. Pupatello would come to Huronia, as the
families have wanted for so long. I was so sure that if she did, and saw what we did -- the woman on the
floor with her dolls, sweet Dave Sutton who tooted cheerfully as he showed us his room, the woman who
holds hands -- she'd change her mind. Well, Ms. Pupatello made her tour, and nothing has changed.
The Kids aren't expected to join their relatives on the lawns of the Legislature this Wednesday -- the trip
is too arduous for most -- which is a pity, because if your eyes work like mine, and you saw them there,
then your heart would seize with fear for them, as mine did.
cblatchford@globeandmail.ca