Daily Archives: January 31, 2007

Human Rights Hearing Second Day

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The second day of hearings in the Human Rights complaints against the Disability Support Program completed the testimony of the parents with Carolyn Bateman and Margaret Murphy.

Carolyn Bateman at Human Rights hearing

Both parents described in some detail their lives and challenges living with autistic children.

After two days, one can only ask – how could the government abuse these children and parents so grossly? What kind of public shame will it take to make Pat Binns realize this is wrong?

The thread that runs through both days of testimony is the love and devotion of these parents under trying circumstances. It is almost unbelievable how they have surrendered their lives to look after their children who have become disabled with autism.

There was a moment in the afternoon when Margaret Murphy was relating what happened when she and her husband got caught in a snow storm on the causeway. When then got home, her teenage daughter made her promise to pick out another set of parents because she could not look after her autistic brother on her own. Her daughter wanted to find the couple and ask them over to supper to talk about it. Margaret did as her daughter asked and found a couple. She added “Who ever asks their parents to find a replacement in case they die?”

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Disability funding complaint goes to human rights commission

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CBC TV
Three P.E.I. families are appearing before the Human Rights Commission Tuesday to complain about the province’s cap on support for adult children with disabilities.

Carolyn Bateman’s 24-year-old son Adam has severe autism. She and her husband spend more than $60,000 a year taking care of him. The province caps its support at $36,000 for a person 18 or over.

There is not enough money for disabled adults to have a life of their own, says Carolyn Bateman.

“We believe that it’s at such a low rate that it makes it impossible for families to ever have their adult child live outside the family home,” said Bateman.
(See link to CBC for rest of story)

Parents of autistic children allege discrimination under support program

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Human rights hearing told province’s disability support program needlessly punitive and falls short of delivering services it promised to families

Lawyers Karen Campbell, right, and Jacqueline O’Keefe talk prior to the start of a human rights hearing in Charlottetown Tuesday. Campbell represents four families alleging discrimination under the province’s disability support program. O’Keefe represents the P.E.I. Human Rights Commission. (Guardian photo by Heather Taweel)

RON RYDER
The Guardian

Families of children with autism ripped into the province’s disability support program at a provincial human rights hearing Tuesday, saying the plan discriminates against the disabled families it was set up to assist.

Parents Vic and Colleen Douse and Brad and Dale Wonnacott told a panel chaired by Lorraine Thompson that the DSP is needlessly punitive and falls short of delivering the services it promised to families.

Vic Douse said the screening tools and the income test system set up for claims seem to make it impossible to reach even the DSP theoretical ceiling of $3,000 per month in financial support.

“It’s the halving and the halving and the halving,” he said under questioning from the claimants’ lawyer, Karen Campbell.

Vic Douse said his 13-year-old daughter Jewel is autistic and has been prescribed 40 hours per week of applied behavioural analysis as a therapy. But he said he has been unable to get government to either approve or pay for the therapy prescribed by his daughter’s physician.

“It’s like telling someone that they need 40 chemotherapy treatments, but they’ll only get 20,” he said. “Then you say government will only pay for 10. If you don’t get better it’s not a surprise.”

Colleen Douse said they were faced with a dilemma that saw government willing to pay $10 per hour for a therapist to work with their daughter at home, while the provincial education system was paying $22 per hour for people with the same skills.

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PEI needs a serious school of Computer Science

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What we need on PEI is successful high tech development on the scale of Slemon Park

The best way to make that happen is through the establishment of a serious Computer Science program at UPEI including graduate studies.

I don’t mean to denigrate the current department but their own website says it: only 9 in the faculty. Update – in 2010 the number has shrunk to 6 professors.

‘Students from our department have an excellent record of placement at the country’s top graduate schools, including University of Toronto, Waterloo, British Columbia and McGill.’

If your goal is prepare students to go onto other schools, they will. When they graduate they get jobs somewhere else.

You can’t develop a serious IT sector without brain power: young people with graduate degrees in computer science. Microsoft couldn’t even think about a lab here. They need hundreds and hundreds of the latest graduates to come up with cool technology.

When I had Aquilium here in the 90′s we were doing leading edge stuff for back then. We could not find top programmers et al we needed simply because UPEI was not churning them out.

I gotta go practice guitar. This is depressing.