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Press Release Bill 68 - Forget Caring Communities No Force Coalition
Press Release, June 21, 2000 No matter how many consultations
are held, or how most submissions to the Standing Committee
on General Government fault Bill 68 (citing research, expense,
careless legal writing, or rights abuses) the Harris regime
has voted against all psychiatric patients with primitive
bias, not just against those few people who are violent.
We who are called the
"mentally ill" are to be ruled not as citizens
but as suspects, a threat to public safety, potential killers
in the wake of a disproportionately few victims like the
namesake of this law. Bill 68 paints millions of citizens
who've been hospitalized in the last few years as ticking
time bombs who must be dragged into a system with little
real accountability. The few changes that have been made
to Bill 68 since second reading in Provincial Parliament
are insubstantial and unresponsive. Ontario is at the crossroads
yet again. How many people should be force drugged or electroshocked?
It's no matter that the treatments don't work for the majority
of us. No matter that people who've experienced emotional
crisis need concrete solutions like affordable housing,
accommodation in the workplace, or loving relationships
that help them find independence again. The Tories are more
concerned about public relations. No matter that most of
us are victims of crime rather than dangerous ourselves,
or that we are no more violent than "normal" people
who fear us like children do gremlins. No matter that many
of us walk away from hospitals and rebuild our lives against
the odds. Public castigation will prevail. All that it will take
now is one doctor who believes heavy tranquilizers are a
proper solution for human suffering to lock us up, keep
us quiet and make us dependent on archaic treatments, toxins
that have pushed many of us to suicide or into a zombie-like
state. We will no longer need expensive institutions; drugs
will be made mandatory in the community. Home institutionalization,
or "community treatment orders", are leash laws,
cynically painted as a right, an increased freedom, by a
government that respects no boundaries when pandering to
the misinformed, to those who discriminate or lie, and to
those who promote their own suffering while ignoring ours.
The dragnet of a system that dehumanizes and degrades has
been widened and psychiatric survivors will resist it as
we always have. The No Force Coalition takes pride in having brought CTOs to the attention of other lobbyists and commends groups like the Canadian Mental Health Association, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Psychiatric Patients Advocacy Office of Ontario, and the Ontario Federation of Community Mental Health and Addictions Programs, for lobbying against this Bill. We are proud to have generated public discussion about the unbridled use of force in a system that doesn't work, proud to denounce this law, with many families and professionals, as uncaring, narrow-minded and unconstitutional. We are proud to refer Bill 68 to the courts for legal challenge with the support and sanction of so many others. home / QSPC
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