Guardianship battle for intellectually challenged man settled

The bitter battle for guardianship of Gary Ford has been settled.
 

The intellectually challenged man who was once a resident of the now closed Huronia Regional Centre will continue living with his longtime caregiver while his sister is entitled to a number of visits and unlimited telephone access.
 

Under the agreement, reached on the eve of a full-fledged court fight, Ford will continue to live with Shelley Klintworth at her farm in Campbellcroft, Ont. Sister Ruby Williams can have him stay at her home near Dresden, Ont., 30 days a year.
 

“We weren’t fighting for Gary, we already had Gary,” Klintworth, 47, said Wednesday, claiming she had to spend $50,000 in legal fees to keep Ford where he’s lived for the past decade.

“We were fighting to prove that I wasn’t a thief. And that’s the part that’s making me so freaking mad.”
 

In the protracted battle between the two women, allegations flew from both sides. Sister Williams noted her concern that caregiver Klintworth was convicted in June 2006 of shoplifting from a Walmart store in Cobourg, while she was with Ford, netting her a criminal record and probation.
 

A Walmart security guard testified he saw Klintworth load up Ford’s shopping cart, then go outside and wait as he bypassed the cashiers without paying for $152.26 worth of merchandise. The judge accepted the security guard’s evidence, which he said was also consistent with a security videotape.

  

“I’m pretty sure if I was a kidnapper and a thief Gary wouldn’t be living with me,” Klintworth said. “I only wish the lies and deception and the expense our family suffered the last two years could have been avoided.”
 

Klintworth received a full pardon for the conviction.

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Guardianship battle for intellectually challenged man settled

Arguments in favour of assisted suicide rely on misinformation

The case of Ruth Goodman is a perfect example of how confused, illogical, uninformed and sometimes untruthful many proponents of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide are.

Goodman killed herself on Feb. 2, with no assistance, at the age of 91 in her Vancouver home, in a bid to change physician-assisted suicide laws. If you’re scratching your head right now and saying, “huh?” don’t be alarmed, you are thinking clearly and are not losing your mind.

In short, Goodman’s final act makes no sense. The reason this woman’s last act is so strange is because everyone already has the right to die. Suicide is not illegal.

“I am a 91-year-old woman who has decided to end my life in the very near future,” wrote Goodman, who had worked at an abortion clinic and was involved with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

“I do not have a terminal illness; I am simply old, tired and becoming dependent, after a wonderful life of independence,” she wrote.

“By the time people read this, I will have died. I am writing this letter to advocate for a change in the law so that all will be able to make this choice.”

To reiterate, everyone already can make “this choice.” It’s not illegal to kill yourself. No laws have to be changed. Anyone and everyone can commit suicide as long as they don’t endanger anyone else while doing so.

What so-called right-to-die activists are actually seeking is the right for people to help other people to die – they want the right to kill other people and to have other people kill them, making legal what has been illegal in most sane places, since time immemorial.

In countries where euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are legal – like the Netherlands – it is documented that thousands of people have been killed involuntarily by their physicians without their consent, even when a full recovery was possible.

Alas, this illogical and discordant story about Goodman has garnered much media attention, and that in itself is disturbing when you consider another story about euthanasia that has not received any mainstream media attention.

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Arguments in favour of assisted suicide rely on misinformation

Sunnybrook lifts ban, allows daughter to see aging veteran father

TORONTO – Canada’s largest veterans facility has lifted its ban on a woman who complained about bedbugs and a threat to a resident’s safety.

Following a weekend meeting, Sunnybrook said Jackie Storrison could see her aging dad at its veterans centre, from which police escorted her more than a week ago.

The facility did insist security was on hand when Storrison went to see her father on Saturday.

“To have security sitting outside the room was beyond humiliating,” Storrison, 61, said Sunday.

“I felt as though I was under house arrest. I felt like I had been convicted of a criminal offence and basically given probation with the condition that I attend mediation.”

Sunnybrook banned Storrison, who has spent most evenings over the past three years caring for her 91-year-old father at the veterans centre, after nurses apparently accused her of going on a “verbal rampage for hours on end”.

Storrison, who denies being abusive, said the allegation came after she alerted staff to an elderly resident wandering down the hallway alone and on another occasion to bedbugs in a patient’s room.

Sunnybrook spokesman Craig DuHamel said Sunday the no-trespass order had been lifted unconditionally, and there was no need for security to be present during Storrison’s future visits.

Storrison, a mother and grandmother who works in a lawyer’s office, has been among a group of relatives with loved ones in Sunnybrook who have spoken publicly about what they call neglect of the most frail vets.

They also said the facility had consistently shut down their attempts at raising concerns.

Those allegations — all strenuously denied by Sunnybrook — prompted Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney to order an audit of the 500-bed facility, something no level of government had done in more than seven years.

Results of the audit are pending.

Storrison said she was really bothered that neither executive vice-president Malcolm Moffat nor operations director Dorothy Ferguson asked at Saturday’s meeting for her side of the story.

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Sunnybrook lifts ban, allows daughter to see aging veteran father