Ontario being judged on care of vulnerable

Caring for a loved one can be a burden. And a joy. Whether it’s a child or an aging parent, there are trials and tribulations, triumphs and sacrifices.

Of a unique and particular challenge, though, is caring for those with developmental disabilities, particularly as caregivers age or the children become adults, and government and community support systems change and some drop off. Then the bureaucratic labyrinth becomes especially burdensome to navigate, and wait lists seem interminable.

In a scathing indictment of Ontario’s Ministry of Community and Social Services’ response to crises with adults who have developmental disabilities, titled Nowhere to Turn, the ombudsman’s office last week said Ontario has been complicit in a “systemic failure to help desperate families who are unable to care for loved ones with developmental disabilities,” and that “has left vulnerable people in dire and often dangerous circumstances.”

The stories are heartbreaking. As the report notes: “Some were on the brink of crisis, others firmly in its midst.” It details sexual abuse in nursing homes, finds some people housed in hospitals and others in homeless shelters, others still in prison.

Not every one of the 62,000 adults with developmental disabilities are in crisis, but the system is challenging even for those who aren’t in need of urgent care. A huge issue is that when people with developmental disabilities become adults and leave school, family is left to care for them, and, to some extent, finance care and find them programming or funding, which is delivered around the province in a fragmented fashion.

The province must find a way to help families navigate the system pre-emptively, while figuring out how to help those in crisis. The ombudsman’s 60 recommendations provide something of a framework.

The government also needs to look at what is leading to crisis. Only one recommendation, it appears, deals with the transition to adulthood, referring to “medically complex” cases. But, the importance of this transition is noted in the report.

Governments have a habit of responding insufficiently to ombudsman reports. Rightly, the government has stepped up funding to $2 billion annually in its April 2014 budget, and Minister of Community and Social Services Helena Jaczek has agreed to all the recommendations. We must hold her to it. It’s cliché by now to say that societies are judged by how they treat their most vulnerable. That doesn’t make it any less true. Ontario is being judged.