There is nothing funny about the abuses being reported in nursing homes but it illustrates the attitude of the McGinty liberals.....It is just about time for the McGinty liberals to have their annual media event where they trot out their "We are going to correct the problems in nursing homes" but the abuses continue to happen......this is just a f&%king shame.
National Affairs Columnist
Ontario's Human Rights Commission says it's too busy now to look into complaints that elderly nursing home patients are being left to fester in urine-soaked diapers.
In a letter to Ontario Federation of Labour head Wayne Samuelson, who requested an investigation last November, commission policy and education director François Larsen said the rights body is not only swamped with work but is busy reorganizing itself to meet requirements of new provincial legislation.
"As a result of these factors, our resources will be stretched simply to cover existing work, and we need to be very selective about committing to new projects," the letter, dated Feb. 8, reads.
In an interview yesterday, Larsen said the commission might revisit the diaper issue later – if it gets enough money from Premier Dalton McGuinty's provincial government. "This is a very compelling issue," he said. "(But) we don't know how many resources we will have."
"Unbelievable," an audibly frustrated Samuelson said yesterday, "It's absolutely unbelievable."
Oddly enough, the diaper inquiry rejection letter was sent four days after the provincial health ministry asked the rights body's chief commissioner, Barbara Hall, to back off.
In that earlier Feb 4. letter, ministry lawyer Evelyn Brown said it would be "premature for the commission to consider the matter" and that, anyway, the ministry's own "anecdotal evidence" suggests that everything in nursing homes is fine.
The ministry lawyer said that the umbrella labour body was raising the diaper issue simply to create more jobs for union members.
She said there was no evidence to back claims that, as a cost-saving measure, nursing homes are making incontinent residents wear dirty diapers until they are 75 per cent full of urine.
(In fact, evidence of that particular practice was presented to a legislative committee last year and detailed in a July 30, 2007 Toronto Star story by reporter Moira Welsh. As well, the ministry itself lists 86 incidents over the past four years where inspectors found nursing homes that weren't meeting so-called continence care standards).
The nursing home diaper issue has brought two large, somewhat dysfunctional bureaucracies face to face.
On the one hand is the health ministry, which is charged with regulating nursing homes and which comes under constant attack for its failure to ensure that elderly residents of these institutions live in a modicum of comfort and dignity.
On the other is the human rights commission, a body set up to make sure Ontarians of all kinds were treated equally in areas such as jobs and housing which now is routinely criticized either for taking too long to resolve serious complaints or for focusing on those that are trivial.
A recent controversial case involves a Brampton Sikh who claims he is being religiously discriminated against by provincial law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets.
In November, the commission began an inquiry into allegations that Asian-Canadian sports fishermen who fish at night face discrimination – an inquiry that labour federation lawyer Mary Cornish says she took as a model for the proposed diaper investigation.
Larsen said the Asian fishermen case is still not resolved, and one reason the commission is hard-pressed to take on another complex inquiry. Since January, he said it has received 10 to 12 requests for major investigations but will not decide which, if any, to pursue until new statutory amendments come into effect June 30
Two years ago, the provincial Liberal government, over opposition objections, rammed through these controversial amendments to the human rights act, claiming they would make the process to get Ontarians relief swifter and fairer. At the time, opposition parties as well as many rights groups argued that the changes would hobble the efforts of aggrieved Ontarians to get relief.
Ironically perhaps, the new legislation is supposed to make it easier for the commission to look into cases of systemic discrimination, where people – such as immobile residents of nursing homes left stewing in dirty diapers – are abused, not because they are disliked, but because that's just the way things are.
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