Huronia school survivor becomes a voice for others
Patricia Seth, who lived at the notorious institution, is part of new speakers’ bureau
It’s 1964. A confused little girl is dropped off by her parents at the Ontario Hospital School in Orillia, a now-notorious institution that housed people with developmental disabilities.
The girl walks hand in hand with her mother. “Mum,” she says. “Aren’t you staying with me? Aren’t you and dad and my sister and brother going to live with me too?” Her mother says no. “Then she turned around and she walked away. I sat in the corner of the playroom and I cried my eyes out.”
That’s how Patricia Seth remembers arriving at the institution later known as the Huronia Regional Centre, founded in Victorian times as an “Asylum for Idiots” and now known for the historic abuse and mistreatment of thousands of residents. Some were physically and sexually assaulted and buried on the facility grounds in unmarked graves.
Seth was admitted at the age of 6 and lived there for almost 15 years.
“My parents were told to put me away and forget about me and have other children,” Seth said, relating how doctors determined she had a developmental disability and should be institutionalized.
“That’s the way it was back then. So that’s what (my parents) did.”
Along with her friend, Marie Slark, Seth was one of the representative plaintiffs in a huge class-action law- suit against the province, after Ontario’s network of developmental disabilities centres shut down in 2009. Huronia was the oldest and biggest of the bunch: Founded in 1876, it housed about 2,600 people at its peak in 1968.
The government reached a settlement of $35 million with the claimants’ lawyers in September 2013, and Premier Kathleen Wynne apologized to residents of Huronia and other institutions from the floor of the legislature that December.
Now, concerned that their stories and those of hundreds of others were never aired in court, Seth and Slark have joined the Huronia Speakers Bureau, a series of travelling seminars put on by university researchers and advocates that will feature survivors of Ontario’s institution system. Beginning Thursday at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Seth plans to tell her story again and again.
“If you don’t keep talking about it, people are going to forget,” said Seth, now 57. “We don’t want any more institutions. Those are like prisons.”
Seth remembers overcrowded dormitories and “military” discipline.
“They would pull you out by the hair of your head, and you’d have to stand in the corner,” she said. Sometimes residents would be forced to scrub the floors with a toothbrush or be struck with a fly-swatter.
Seth received a payout from the Huronia settlement, which she didn’t want to disclose, but said she’s concerned too many people received far less.
Last summer, for instance, the Star learned that about one-quarter of the roughly 1,700 complainants in the class-action suit would receive the minimum payout — $2,000.
“It just makes me so angry,” Seth said. “We didn’t know it would turn out like this.”
Through speaking about Huronia, she hopes to prevent something similar from happening again.