Simons: A final indignity?
Michener only home many remember
The Michener Centre symbolizes one of the darkest chapters of Alberta’s history. First opened in 1923 as the Provincial Training School, the residential institution was meant to house “mentally defective” Albertans.
Initially, there were just 108 residents, all of them children. By the early 1970s, there were more than 2,300, many of them adults, locked up as inmates for life. Between 1928 and 1972, 2,822 residents were sexually sterilized, in the name of eugenics. The vile experiment in “social engineering” only ended with the election of Peter Lougheed.
Gradually, as prejudice against the intellectually handicapped became less socially acceptable, as community living and integrated classrooms became the norm, the population of the facility declined. There are now only 125 adults in the main Michener institution.
On Monday, they and their families learned that they will have to move out, either into long-term-care homes or contract group homes. The first residents are supposed move out this September.
Frank Oberle, the associate minister of services for persons with disabilities, says there was no consultation with residents or guardians, because the news was embargoed until after Thursday’s budget.
His department will now start looking for placements for residents, across the province.
So should we celebrate the end of a terrible era, and our more enlightened social attitudes? Or are things not quite so simple?
Locking people away in asylums because of their handicaps is outmoded and cruel. But these days, no one is kept at the Michener Centre against his or her will. For many remaining residents, the centre is the only home they remember. Many are elderly. A significant number are medically fragile.
To compel vulnerable, cognitively disabled Albertans to leave familiar surroundings and faces, to throw their lives into confusing upheaval, is cruelty of a different sort.
“Community care” makes a cosy mantra. In practice, it’s not always so cuddly — especially in Alberta, where the operation of group homes is generally contracted out to small, not-for-profit agencies and private-sector firms that sometimes lack the resources to deal with the most complex or violent cases.
Over the last few years, for example, we’ve seen the death of Marilyn Lane, a 43-yearold woman with Down syndrome, trapped in a house fire in an unlicensed group home that hadn’t had a fire-code inspection, the murder of Valerie Wolski, a caregiver with a not-for-profit agency who was strangled by her severely developmentally disabled patient, and the wrongful death of Betty Ann Gagnon, a mentally handicapped woman who was abused and neglected by her sister and brotherin-law.
Staff at not-for-profit agencies earn significantly less, and have fewer workplace protections, than public-sector employees. There are currently 410 unionized workers at the Michener Centre. It will almost certainly be cheaper to close the aging, sprawling, hard-to-maintain facility and download services to the notfor-profit sector.
Yet Thursday’s budget pummelled the not-for-profit sector, with cuts of about $17.4 million to a wide range of grant programs. Worse, the province has stepped back from a promise made in February 2012 to provide additional funding, especially earmarked for staff salaries, to social agencies that run facilities such as group homes, agencies whose chronically low wages make it a struggle to recruit and retain staff in Alberta’s hot labour market.
“Now, we’re A.B. — After Bubble,” Oberle says. “And clearly, we couldn’t keep that commitment.”
Instead, $25 million of that promised additional funding will now be “deferred.”
In other words, the government is insisting the not-forprofit sector take over care of more than 100 extremely vulnerable Albertans — while simultaneously reneging on the funding commitment that would have helped them do so. It hardly bodes well.
“I take no glee in this,” Oberle says. “I’m fraught with worry, going forward. We’re caring for some extremely vulnerable people, and that’s a tremendous responsibility. But I wouldn’t do this without the advice of some really good staff and experts in the field.”
Non-institutional care is probably the best model for many — even most — people with developmental disabilities. But unless the necessary resources and supports are in place, evicting these particular 125 patients won’t be a liberation. It will just be the final indignity, the pathetic denouement to one of Alberta’s saddest stories.