N.S. discriminated against people with disabilities, hearing told

Lawyers for people with disabilities argued Tuesday that keeping people with intellectual disabilities in a Nova Scotia hospital ward for over a decade rather than a community home - breached basic human rights most citizens enjoy.

It was the final day of a marathon human rights hearing in Halifax, attended by 80 people in a packed hotel meeting room and being monitored by advocates for people with disabilities across the country.

Beth MacLean and Joseph Delaney have testified the Department of Community Services violated the province’s Human Rights Act by forcing them to remain at the Emerald Hall psychiatric ward in Halifax even though they had been medically discharged.

The human rights complaint they submitted in 2014 argued they should have been provided housing in a “small options” home after psychiatrists medically discharged them. Small-options homes are small housing units, with usually three or four residents, where day-today support is provided to people with intellectual disabilities.

In his closing statements, the complainants’ lawyer, Vince Calderhead, said there is enough evidence to find discrimination against people with disabilities occurred because the province deliberately didn’t provide this housing.

“It’s about holding governments accountable for their actions and their inactions. It’s about accountability,” he told the inquiry board chair, J. Walter Thompson.

At the core of Calderhead’s legal argument is a comparison with welfare services, where citizens in need can usually obtain housing in the community as a right. He contrasted the treatment of people without disabilities receiving welfare or public housing as a right against the testimony that MacLean and Delaney had languished in the psychiatric hospital for years as the Department of Community Services told staff and family they had no appropriate housing for them in the community.

Calderhead told the inquiry chairman this was an instance of government targeting a specific group in society for inferior treatment.

In the case of MacLean, that began when she was placed as a girl in an adult institution in the Annapolis Valley at the age of 14.

“Restricting her to a congregate care, institutionalized setting between 1986 and 2000 was discriminatory, and that would be appropriate for everyone, particularly a child, a female child,” argued the lawyer.

Once MacLean and Delaney were in the psychiatric hospital, in a special unit intended for people with combinations of mental illness and intellectual disabilities, it seemed they couldn’t get out, the human rights inquiry has heard.

“I can’t say that nobody who hears about this case isn’t stunned, isn’t gobsmacked at the prospect of someone sitting for 16 or 17 years in a hospital where she didn’t need to be,” Calderhead said of MacLean’s case.