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Greg Sorbara, MPP for Vaughan-King-Aurora and the former provincial Minister of Finance, told the mother of an aggressive autistic teen that his only suggestion for how to get him the treatment he so desperately needs is to have him charged in the hopes that a judge will issue a court order. The suggestion is outrageous and offensive. Please take time to contact his office and express your views.
For more information, including details on how to contact Mr. Sorbara, visit the Facebook group,
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=135031883208067&ref=mf
Today I attending a meeting Greg Sorbara, MPP for Vaughan-King-Aurora and the former provincial Minister of Finance. I was there to advocate for my good friend Susan Fentie-Pearce, who has two sons with autism. One of her two sons has become increasingly violent over the last few months and Susan is now in a place where she risks her own personal safety every time she is alone with him. He attacks her repeatedly, and has caused her numerous injuries. Susan is an incredibly intelligent, articulate and passionate advocate and helped us create the Ontario Autism Coalition back in 2005. She has tried everything she can to access appropriate supports in the home for her son and was turning to her MPP in desperation for help.
Susan told her story, through tears, and showed gut-wrenching photos of her bruises and the blood-spattered floor of her son’s “calm room.” Sorbara sat emotionless and waited for her to finish. As he prepared to speak, I thought surely he would start by saying something sympathetic. Instead, what he said was the most offensive, outrageous thing I’ve ever heard.
He started with, “Are there times when you call the police? What do they do?” Susan told him of course she’s called. Then he asked, “So why hasn’t he been charged?”
I think I managed to say something about how obviously he would be found NCR (not criminally responsible) because of his disability, but Sorbara brushed me off.
He said that having K. charged “might be a way to get him into treatment, because in juvenile court there is the capacity to order the kind of treatment that he needs.” I just about fell out of my chair. I asked him if he was seriously suggesting that K should be criminalized for his disability. I told him that it was bad enough that many parents were still being forced to give up custody of their disabled children in order to get services, but that if he was suggesting that the only other option was to send them into the criminal justice system, then the government had better get ready to build a whole lot of new jails. I asked whether that was really the best that parents of children with autism could expect in 2010 in Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario. I wondered aloud if he would like it if the media ran a story about how he suggested to a desperate mother of an autistic child that the best solution to her problem was to have her son arrested.
He said, “Well, let’s be realistic. I can’t just wave a wand and create additional capacity. I can’t make a new facility appear. I’m just a politician. All I can do is raise these issues in the legislature.” I pounced and asked, “So will you?” He looked irritated with me by this point. So I shot him a dirty look right back.
I then told him about how long the OAC has been advocating for better services for our kids, and I gave him a copy of the Recommendations report that we presented to staffers in the office of the Minister of Children and Youth back in June. (you can see it on the OAC website, www.ontarioautismcoalition.com) I also pointed out to him that other jurisdictions are doing much more and gave him info about the new changes to the funding formula in BC. I then gave him a copy of the report prepared for the federal government in 2006 comparing autism programs in all the different provincial jurisdictions. I talked a bit about services available in the US. I spoke about how our friend Malcolm is receiving incredible services for his daughter now that he’s moved to Pennsylvania and how despite how much we gloat about our health care system in Canada, many kids with autism are doing much better in the US than they are here. I also told him that the OAC is beyond frustrated with how long it’s taking for this government to make substantial progress on this issue and that we’re giving serious thought to having the main message at our next press conference be, “If your child just received a diagnosis of autism, get out of Ontario.” He didn’t look impressed. (I so don’t care.)
I pointed out to him that the Special Services at Home program hasn’t had a funding increase in several years and how there are thousands of people on their waitlist, let alone the IBI waitlist. I talked about how the special education funding formula is fundamentally flawed and how it’s not about spending massive amounts of new money, but about re-distributing the money that’s already in the system more intelligently. I mentioned the concept of individualized funding, and asked whatever happened to the Individualized Funding Agreements that used to be allowed for families. I talked about silos and agencies that jealously guard their budgets instead of helping our kids. His assistant took plenty of notes, but Sorbara offered no ideas. He even claimed at one point to know “nothing” about how autism funding works in Ontario. I bit my tongue, but somehow managed to offer to return to give him a briefing on that if he’d like.
He then launched into a lecture about how Penn. is on the verge of bankruptcy, the global economy is in rough shape, how governments have limited resources and people don’t like it when you try to raise their taxes. He asked how we thought the government should balance all the competing interests. I used Bruce’s line about how when times are tough, you look after the most vulnerable first, and that surely as a father, the last thing he would ever cut back was his children.
He said that from a government’s perspective, it’s all about balancing priorities and that government workers want higher salaries and soon will be threatening to strike if they don’t get it. (Made me wonder what would happen if parents of autistic children went on strike…but I digress.)
Susan and her husband Ken talked about the few services that they do have in place for their son and how hard they’ve looked to find what they need. Susan showed him photos of the clump of hair he son pulled out of her head, the six police cruisers that arrived at her home when she called 911 several weeks ago, and the gut-wrenching note she wrote last night as she tried to simply drive her son home from camp without completely losing control. She asked Sorbara point blank if he really thought that her best option was to send her son into the criminal justice system, where he would share space with deviant adolescents. She pointed out that her son was non-verbal and couldn’t speak up for himself, and challenged Sorbara to say whether that’s something he would have done to the autistic foster child he once had.
Sorbara said that a lot of the kids in the juvenile system are “just like” Susan’s son. (!) They have emotional, behavioural and psychological problems and they just happened to be born with something not quite wired up properly in their brain. I sat in stunned silence as I listed to the former Minister of Finance make a comparison between young offenders and a 14 boy with severe autism.
Sorbara’s point seemed to be that it would be very nice if a judge were to issue a court order forcing a facility to open up a space for K, and that only judges can make those orders. I said to him “You can’t be unaware that families of children with autism have turned to the courts several times for help. Deskin-Wynberg? Ceretti? Sagharian? The courts have consistently refused to tell governments how to spend their money. In fact, your government spent several million dollars fighting our families in court just to prove that jurisdictional point. And now you’re suggesting that we trust our children to that same system?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
He didn’t offer to call any agencies on Susan’s behalf. He didn’t say he would talk to the Minister of Children and Youth. He didn’t offer to write a letter for her. He just shrugged and said “my issue is that you are a person in danger and I have no idea how to safely decrease that risk.” He promised to look at the materials we left him. I know I won’t be holding my breath.
We went back and forth several times, but it felt more like we went around in circles. This is the man who sat at the Premier’s right-hand from 2004 to 2007. He managed the entire provincial budget. He was the second most powerful man in Ontario.
And his only idea for how to get services for an autistic teen is to have the child arrested. |
