Ontario's Crisis of Disabled Adults, Abandoned By The System: Its An All-Society Issue
By ELIZABETH RENZETTI ELIZABETH RENZETTI Sylvia Quinn is 78 years old, and even though her four sons are grown, she worries about what will happen to them when she’s gone. Mainly, she worries about Sean, who is 44 and lives in a group home: He has Fragile X syndrome and autism, and cannot live on his own. Ms. Quinn, a widow, brings him home once a week, on a day he calls “happy Sunday.” Sean Quinn’s diagnosis places him in the middle of a tangle called “developmental services.” And developmental services, in the province of Ontario, is a chronically underfunded, busted system. An estimated 21,000 people needing help – young people and adults with challenges ranging from autism and fetal alcohol syndrome to intellectual disabilities – languish on waiting lists. You might not hear much about them, because they don’t have the facility to write petitions or demonstrate at Queen’s Park, and often their families don’t either. The families are struggling just to make it th