If you knew a woman who lived alone and had a lingering illness, and if you had known about her illness for a long time but done nothing, and if it finally dawned on you that the woman needed help, would you break her arm in order to get her an ambulance?That is, in effect, what the Toronto Community Housing Corporation is doing to my friend Anne. She lives at 40 Asquith. No, TCHC did not break her arm; they did, however, send her a letter telling her that her tenancy will end on Dec. 25.
Get the hell out.
And have a Merry Christmas.
I talked with Anne the other day; and when I say we talked, I mean I wrote questions and she wrote answers. Anne is deaf.
She is also 86 years old, and she has been deaf since she was in her teens. She is tiny and sweet and fierce, and she retains the posture of a ballet student, but — brace yourself for some jargon — she has clutter issues.
Her apartment is hip-deep in stuff: odds and ends of books, magazines, toys, games, dolls piled here and scattered there. She apparently has bedbugs, although I could see no sign that she herself is being bitten.
Clutter? You know what happens to some of us as we age. We get a little fuzzy. Anne has always been active in support of charity; she collects things to donate, and the urge is strong, but her collection overwhelms her.
She needs help.
You’d think help would be easy. TCHC, for example, provides cleaners to tenants in need, and in the case of 200 Wellesley — you remember the fire there — the corporation is making sure that some tenants get what is called clutter coaching.
Wit is required, but Anne is getting bullied.
Because she is deaf, she needs a device in her apartment to let her know when someone is at her door; last year, TCHC staff entered her apartment without obtaining permission, and surprised her when she was nude.
Also last year, TCHC took away her key. She couldn’t get into her place for a week. She had to sleep at a friend’s.
Now TCHC is moving to evict her as the first step in steering her towards help. Destroy the village to save it? We had to kick her out to keep her housed.
The key points of the letter of termination: “You, your guest or another occupant . . . has substantially interfered with: the reasonable enjoyment of the residential complex by the landlord or another tenant.”
The letter continues sternly, and ungrammatically: “On November 2, 2011, Staff visited your apartment and found it to be shockingly substandard state of cleanliness . . . Moreover, we suspect that your unit is the source of the bedbug infestation in the building. We scheduled a bedbug treatment to be do on November 16, 2011.”
What is to be do?
“On that day we were unable to do the treatment in your unit, as you had blocked off the entrance to your unit with a 2x4.”
I don’t think she’s capable of barring a door with a 2x4, and while you may forgive the errors in grammar, I cannot possibly forgive the bullying of an elderly deaf woman who is alone and in need of help, especially when help is so easily available.
Here is another thing I do not forgive.
TCHC kicked Al Gosling to the curb a couple of years ago. Al died as a result, and Justice Patrick LeSage wrote a damning report warning TCHC not to bully seniors, nor to use the threat of eviction as a tool of social work.
I guess, in addition to being unable to write a grammatical sentence, staff of TCHC have not read the LeSage report. Perhaps they don’t know how to read, but they surely do — this is the season for it in our city — know how to act like bullies.
Merry damn Christmas.
Origin
Source: Star
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