Should you ever decide to ask your fellow Canadians why they support getting tough on crime even though crime has been falling for 10 years, you will have the following conversation over and over again (all replies guaranteed verbatim):

Nerdy Interlocutor: Why do you want the government to get tough on crime when the crime rate’s already down?

Tough-on-crime citizen:But the violent crimes are going up.

NI: Actually, they’re not.

TOCC: But the rapes, they’re all unreported!

NI: Actually, unreported sexual assaults – at least according to the General Social Survey on Victimization, which is how Statistics Canada measures crimes that aren’t reported to the police – haven’t risen in 10 years.

TOCC: But the really violent criminals, they get out after two or three years.

NI: That actually hardly ever happens. Canada has severe sentences, compared to much of the rest of the world. Has for a long time.

TOCC: Okay, but the judges let them out because they know there isn’t any room in the jails.

NI: Not the really violent guys, they don’t.

[Pause]

TOCC: Okay, maybe it’s not so much in Canada. But people see these violent scenes, people getting beheaded with machetes in other countries. Maybe they think the country should stay the way it is.

—————————————————–

Lots of people labour under these assumptions, with good reason – just not the reasons you may think. Now, a chance has come to sort things out: As of yesterday, crime is an election issue.

Unholstering his arsenal of campaign points on Friday in Toronto, Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised Canadians that, in return for the small favour of a majority government, he’ll gather up the last 11 crime bills the Conservatives tried to introduce, bundle them and put them through Parliament as an omnibus bill. He would take on organized crime, end house arrest, eliminate pardons and more, all in his majority’s first 100 days.

Before that happens, a brief look at some of the moves the Harper government has already made might be in order. It was a crime bill, after all – Bill S-10, one of roughly 60 pieces of crime legislation it has introduced in its time in office – that caused Mr. Harper’s government to be found in contempt of Parliament. Another law-and-order bill, the Truth in Sentencing Act, passed last year, is lengthening sentences and filling jails so fast that it alone will double the cost of the federal and provincial penal system in five years, to nearly $10-billion.

While we’re at it, we might want to ask ourselves why we seem to feel such a burning itch to be tougher on crime. The crime rate has been dropping for a decade, even though 44 per cent of Canadians think crime rates have risen. The volume of crime reported to police is down 17 per cent over the past 10 years. The crime-severity index, which measures the seriousness of reported crime, is 22 per cent lower than it was in 1999. Violent crime is off 12 per cent since 2000.

But the Conservatives want to put more people in jail, and 62 per cent of Canadians believe longer sentences are the best way to reduce crime. In fact, as we’ll see, lengthening sentences has no effect on crime rates. Yet many of us seem to want to be hard and unforgiving anyway. Why?

Fear and trembling

To hear Mr. Harper tell it, when he insists the Conservatives have made Canada safe by putting “real criminals behind bars,” you’d think we were all cowering in the corner. But in fact very few people are afraid they personally will be victims of crime.

Statistics Canada’s 2009 criminal-victimization survey (of nearly 2,000 Canadians aged 15 and over) found that 93 per cent of us feel “somewhat” or “very” safe from crime, a number that hasn’t changed in five years.

Ninety per cent of us feel fine walking alone in the dark. Eighty-three per cent aren’t afraid to be at home alone at night. A quarter of the people surveyed actually reported being the victim of a crime in the previous 12 months (theft, most commonly), yet most of them still weren’t afraid of criminals.

But that’s a dreary survey. To see what I mean in the flesh – and blood – let me take you to booming Abbotsford, B.C., an hour’s drive west of Vancouver in the spread-eagled Fraser Valley.

For two years running, in 2008 and 2009, this once-tiny farming town had the highest murder rate of any community in Canada over 100,000 people – 5.22 murders per 100,000 residents. A deeply religious town (more than 80 churches), Abbotsford is also in the riding of former Reform Party MP Randy White, one of the original sheriffs on the law-and-order landscape.

But Abbotsford straddles a long stretch of undefended border, and it’s a Tunnel of Love for drug smuggling and gang activity. Pot, meth and E go south; coke, guns and freshly laundered cash come back. Some of Canada’s most insouciant crime clans and gangs have operated here. Residents like to boast that back in the day, one in five houses in many parts of Abbotsford was a grow-op – a number the police don’t deny. Eight of the nine murders that occurred in 2009 were gang-related. Somebody should write a TV series about the place.

Yet if you imagine Abbotsford as a hideous bullet-pocked hole, you are very wrong: It’s a pleasant, friendly, utterly middle-class, suburban city. The parking lots are stuffed with brand new fully loaded $60,000 trucks. Herds of good-looking families roam the sidewalks. The city library is luxurious, bustling – only a brochure pinned to the message board advertising a “support group for people grieving the loss of those who died by homicide” hints at the city’s shadow.

No one I meet professes to be alarmed by the city’s criminals. In the food court of the local mall, an 89-year-old woman makes a few dubious remarks about seeing East Indians (heavily represented in this part of B.C.) in crime stories, but she says she’s never concerned for her own safety. “I just kept my head down and my nose clean.”

“I don’t think anyone worries about it until it happens to you,” her companion, a man in his 70s, adds. He has a Cockney accent like a small tray. “But nowadays with cellphones, you can get ahold of the cops pretty quick.”

Then I run into Bill and Pam, a couple who own and operate five long-haul semis. They earn upwards of half-a-million dollars a year for their trouble. Bill is in his 60s, and full of news: Three of his pals have just been sentenced to 60 years in the U.S. for smuggling cannabis. (So it’s not surprising that the couple asked me not to print their last name.)

He’s been offered the chance to do so many times, and has been tempted. But he likes his freedom too much. “It’s so easy to do, so easy to get away with. You can make $75,000 a trip. Seven hockey bags will bring you 50 grand.” He guesses the cops catch 10 per cent of what crosses.

Bill’s buddy Ted was nabbed with 1,300 kilos under the floor of a truck full of cattle, a messy spot the border guards normally don’t care to search. Some smugglers stuff it in PVC pipe, cover it with wood chips, haul it under the city garbage – common knowledge in Abbotsford. But even though meth labs have blown up across the street from where he and Pam were standing, Bill has never “particularly worried” he might be a crime victim.

“Most of the murders are targeted,” Pam explains. Her fingers are thick with nice gold rings.

But as personally unthreatened by crime as they say they are, everyone I meet wants the government to be tough on crime. Darshan Singh Dheliwal and his pals consider Stephen Harper “a child” and “not progressive” enough to vote for, but they still think Canada “has to be more like America. Not less than 10 years jail.”

Bill isn’t a Harper devotee – he’s voting Conservative this year for the first time – but he still says things like “if you get 15 years, you should serve 15 years.” It’s the easiness and showiness of the drug money and the way it beggars traditional notions of work and reward that upset him.

“I just hate seeing all these kids, rolling in and playing Joe Cool because that’s the only way you can make it. You can’t make it here” – he nods at the mall’s fast-food stands – “at $8 an hour. Abbotsford’s like New York City now – a city I love, but everybody’s trying to sell you something.”

What’s the antidote? Something disciplined and reliable, like a good hard spanking.

Punishment without crime

If you think this is just socially conservative Abbotsford speaking, go west, to Vancouver South, one of the closely fought middle-class, immigrant-stuffed, formerly Liberal ridings all the candidates have been trying to win over with tough talk. Conservative challenger Wai Young has talked about the “drip, drip, drip” of petty, often-unreported crime. Provincial MLA Kash Heed says crime issues get a lot of attention in the riding.

Yet there’s extraordinarily little crime to be found – mostly break-ins (down 7 per cent last year in Vancouver) and stolen cars (down 20 percent). In the pharmacy down the street from the Chong Lee Market, Dan Huzyk, 64, laughs and tells me he can remember only two crimes in the nearly 40 years he has lived here – a break-in, and a “child rapist” caught by his neighbours 20 years ago. He’s voting for the Tories anyway. Annie, the market’s 40-year-old Korean manager, can’t remember any crimes either. But she’s familiar with the local community-policing office, just in case.

Constable Wef Fung, a patrol officer in Chinatown here, has his own theories about immigrants’ appetites for law-and-order talk. “I think as a people, Asians are particularly prone to protecting our bottom line,” he says. “Back in China, the police can sometimes seem corrupt. But because they have different rules, they can do a lot more than we can. So immigrants come here and they’re used to cops and officials doing stuff for them.”

So Mr. Harper may be filling that bill. In any event, it’s becoming clear that what makes people susceptible to tough talk is more complicated than fear. It’s also more evasive than facts.

One of the things you see a lot these days when professional criminologists talk about the Harper government is the Twitch – a combination eye-widening/brow-rub that expresses Total Professional Exasperation. At the moment the Twitch is being performed by Rosemary Gartner, an American-born University of Toronto criminologist who happens to be one of the world’s leading experts on interpreting crime statistics, a notoriously swampy subject.

Dr. Gartner explains how, back in 1993, a parliamentary committee (dominated by Mulroney Conservatives, no less) counseled restraint in building jails and handing out sentences. “And that was when crime was goingup,” Dr. Gartner says. “Here we are today, with crime going down, and the Harper people are increasing incarceration.” Eye-widen, brow-rub, head-shake, twitch.

Mr. Harper and his parliamentary colleagues can throw as many people as they want into jail, and keep them there for as long as they like. None of it will affect crime rates.

Yes, this is true: Crime rates are not affected by how many people go to jail.

Until recently, the rate at which Canada incarcerated prisoners had been restrained and steady since the 1890s – for more than a century, in other words – at between 80 and 110 adults per 100,000 people. The United States started out where we did, but since the 1980s has almost quadrupled its incarceration rate, to 760 prisoners per 100,000 people, the highest in the world (China runs a distant second).

If it were true that jailing more criminals made society safer from crime, the U.S. should have seen greater rates of decline in its crime than we have. But the fluctuation in the U.S. homicide rate mirrors ours, exactly. Both homicide rates (the American one being consistently about four times ours) peaked in 1975 and both have declined ever since.

The effect is obvious – just not the cause

So incarceration doesn’t improve crime rates. Neither do the longer sentences Mr. Harper promises to push through, though there is some evidence they make inmates more likely to re-offend. Neither do mandatory-minimum sentences, also in the works, which can interfere with rehabilitation.

So why has crime dropped? Excellent question. Theories abound. Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University, credits the aging baby boom. “There were twice as many young men in the population in the 1970s as there are now.” Young men commit most crimes.

James Hackler of the University of Victoria thinks “the strongest answer to crime rates is equality of income”: Countries such as Scandinavia and Japan, where the ratio between CEO pay and worker pay is smaller than it is here, have lower crime rates.

Another theory points to the birth-control pill and even legalized abortion: Fewer unwanted children equals fewer social misfits.

The phrase you hear most from criminologists is “there are no quick answers.” Grisly, high-profile crimes and grossly lenient sentencing get attention, but statistically they’re rare: Sentences for major assault, drug trafficking and attempted murder have stayed the same or risen in the past 10 years.

“Everybody wants to be safe,” University of Toronto criminologist Anthony Doob observes. “And I think you can’t challenge that desire. And it’s very comforting to think that Parliament can sit there with a dial and turn it down and automatically lower the crime rate.”

But Parliament can’t, and has long known it. “Go back 50 years,” Dr. Doob says, “there’s report after report saying, ‘Let’s use prison with restraint.’” Again and again – at least 16 times between 1956 and 2003 – knowledgeable and brain-studded parliamentary committees have concluded that where sentences and jail time are concerned, “preference should be given to the least restrictive alternative” (1982) because (1993) “costly repressive measures … fail to deter crime.”

So the Harper government’s stance defies not just evidence but half a century of Canadian intellectual tradition. To many criminologists, that feels like heresy. “Nobody that I know who has any expertise about these things believes in what the Tories are doing,” Simon Fraser’s Prof. Boyd says.

Still, its iconoclasm helps explain why Mr. Harper and his colleagues find their anti-crime thrust exciting, new and serious – a genuine reformation of the criminal-justice system’s priorities. They have also sold it brilliantly. One of the ways they’ve done so is, as Harold Albrecht, the Conservative MP for Kitchener-Conestoga, says, “by standing up for victims.” That’s a lot more effective, politically, than standing up for a criminal’s future.

Just before the election call, egged on by the victims of Montreal fraudster Earl Jones, Mr. Harper’s government eliminated automatic parole review (APR). That will keep Mr. Jones in the slammer a little longer. But it will, much more seriously, affect many young, first-time, non-violent offenders (drug charges, break-ins) who will now serve longer sentences and run greater risks of reoffending when they get out (which APR was meant to prevent).

“Being in prison doesn’t make you a good citizen,” Graham Stewart, the retired director of the John Howard Society, a prisoner-rights organization, explains. “It just makes you a good prisoner.”

Ed McIsaac, the national director of policy at John Howard, estimates that axing APR alone will add 400 “bed years” to Canada’s prisoner load – which at the average daily cost of $322.51 per federal inmate, is $47-million a year. That’s about the same amount Mr. Jones stole from his victims over the course of 25 years.

The irony is that these experts’ elite outrage may help fuel the public’s embrace of the crime bills. The federal Ministry of Justice has dismissed statistics as “an excuse not to get tough on criminals.” Ian Brodie, Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff, said at a McGill University forum in 2009 that “every time we proposed amendments to the Criminal Code, sociologists, criminologists, defence lawyers and Liberals attacked us for proposing measures that the evidence apparently showed did not work. Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition of university types.”

That’s the thing: Tough-on-crime sentiment may be difficult to justify logically, but it is easy to feel. The question is, why has it become seductive to more and more of us?

Souls divided

One reason, of course, is that crime victimizes people, and happens more or less uncontrollably, and always has, and so it scares us – if not personally, then existentially. Crime never, ever disappears. It is our shadow as a society, a source of shame: What if we’re responsible for its existence? No one would argue that we shouldn’t try to control it, and reduce it whenever and wherever we can, if we can.

But as the evidence shows, crime is also a force unto itself, vast and multi-tentacled, often counter-intuitive. The things that actually reduce crime – sophisticated parole programs, rehabilitation systems, anti-poverty intiatives, education, mental-health centres, retraining (all of which the Tories have supported) – cost money and time, and are not quick or politically easy fixes.

Crime is so vast, worrying and intractable that when someone like Mr. Harper starts to crusade against it, it almost feels brave to join his cause – no matter how cynically or sincerely it’s touted.

Whatever the reason, though, our rejection of social civility as a cure is bound to have a profound effect on how we see ourselves as Canadians.

Tom Flanagan, the former Conservative campaign manager who is now a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, once said that the difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives believe people can’t change, that human nature isn’t malleable.

For many years, Canada’s approach to criminality was, in that sense, liberal – we relied less on prison and more on rehabilitation, on changing people. Now we seem to be headed the other way.

“If you think that people don’t change,” says Mr. Stewart, of the John Howard Society, “if you punish people for what they are, as opposed to what they do – then all this restraint in punishment [that we've practised before now] makes no sense.”

If people are unlikely to change, the bad ones can be locked up. That way the bad people will be in one place, and the good people will be in another place, and we’ll never have to be confused as to who is whom.

We think we want to be tough on crime because we’re afraid of criminals, but it turns out we’re not. We’re afraid of ourselves, and who we might turn out to be.

Thankfully, the election – now that Mr. Harper has made crime an issue – gives us a chance to choose.

With files from Rick Cash.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/what-are-canadians-really-afraid-of-when-it-comes-to-crime/article1978257/singlepage/#articlecontent >

On a warm day in June 1911, a delegation of City of Toronto officials piled into a car and drove 16 kilometres up Yonge Street to a 386-acre farm owned by James and William Russell, members of an old pioneer family. The group — which included Mayor Horatio Hocken and Alderman Tommy Church, who would succeed him — strolled across the pastures, pausing to admire a stream running across the land, located near Richmond Hill. A tumbledown colonial farmhouse stood nearby.

Their guide on this day was Toronto’s energetic properties commissioner, Roland Caldwell Harris, who had pressured the Russells into granting the city an option to buy the farm for $162 per acre. Harris’s plan was to establish an “Industrial Farm” where minor criminals could serve short sentences doing agricultural work, instead of rotting in the notoriously overcrowded Don Jail.

As Harris later told the Star, “We don’t want it called the jail farm or to have the name of the jail associated with it. The object of this place is to give the men who have fallen a chance to lift themselves up again — to show them that reclamation lies in their own hands. We seek to help — not to punish.”

A century later, such sentiments sound archaic and even naive. With Stephen Harper’s Conservatives bent on imposing a retributive criminal justice agenda featuring longer sentences, larger penitentiaries and fewer pardons, the government has been closing existing prison farms, ostensibly to save money.

But in the Toronto of the 1910s, the notion of diverting minor offenders from the Don had gained broad popular support. “We have a barbarous system of handling the fellow who gets drunk,” as one controller put it. “He hasn’t done anything or stole anything. He is a victim of his own weakness.”

It took Harris several more months to close the deal, and the city finally spent $60,000 to acquire the Russell farm and some adjacent land, as well as cows, horses and pigs. The sale closed shortly before council named then-37-year-old Harris as works commissioner, a post he held for 33 years, during which time he oversaw dramatic changes in the way the City of Toronto looks and functions.

Despite the promotion, Harris insisted on keeping a hand in the development of the industrial farm. Aiming to have capacity for 500 inmates, the city planned to erect cottage dormitories, a main building with a kitchen, a dining room and common areas, and barns. The property, according to a council report, could someday house facilities for very poor seniors and “the indigent.”

Conspicuously absent from the plans were bars, fences and other symbols of incarceration. The routine revolved a nine-hour shift working in the fields. As Alderman John O’Neill Jr., who chaired the committee overseeing the project, said in late 1912, “We have no locks or keys, cells or guards. We put the men on their honour.” Only a handful ever escaped.

The facility functioned without incident, easing congestion at the Don Jail. Initially taking 65 prisoners, it eventually held several hundred.

It was a time when social reform ideas were in circulation. During an election debate organized by women’s groups in December 1912, speakers called for improved housing for slum areas, campaigns to treat milk and water, psychiatric hospitals and female police officers. Also on the agenda: the establishment of an industrial farm for teenage girls found guilty of minor offences. As one participant said, “We ought to send them out into the fresh air to grow vegetables and flowers and raise chickens.” Two years later, the city agreed, acquiring a 200-acre farm in Concord to house female inmates.

The city touted its investment to taxpayers. As Hocken said in his 1914 mayoral address, “One has only to visit the institution to ascertain the great difference between the men who are confined at the farm and those incarcerated at the Toronto Jail . . . I feel satisfied that the reformation of those sentenced to the farm warrants the step taken by the municipality . . . ”

As time passed, Harris moved on to other projects, such as the water filtration plant in the east end that’s named after him. The industrial farms, for their part, began to generate controversy, revolving around chronic infighting between the city and provincial officials who shared administrative responsibility. A 1926 inquiry into the simmering conflicts led to layoffs, but Queen’s Park continued to question the city’s use of the farm as a place to also house infirm and poor seniors. By the early 1930s, the province had taken over the operation of the farms.

The men’s facility was converted for use as a hospital in 1938, but continued to serve inmates after World War II. Rob Leverty, executive director of the Ontario Historical Society, recalls driving past it on family outings in the late 1950s. “It intrigued me that there was a farm with prisoners,” he says, noting that the conditions seemed humane by contrast to movie depictions of chain gangs.

After the province closed the facility in 1958, tenant farmers rented the land, paying as little as $7,800 per year. But in 1982, the Langstaff Jail Farm — as it had come to be known — stormed back into the public consciousness when Toronto council decided to sell the property, which sat in the path of Greater Toronto’s sprawl. It encompassed a desirable chunk of real estate bounded by Yonge, Bayview, Highway 7 and 16th Sideroad.

For four years, Toronto officials bickered with the Town of Richmond Hill in a fight that involved ambitious development schemes from well-connected builders and auto-parts magnate Frank Stronach. In the end, the winning developer anted up $75 million but soon flipped some of the land for a hefty profit.

There’s a curious coda to this story. Shortly after the sale closed, Toronto council earmarked $23 million of the proceeds to establish the Toronto Atmospheric Fund, an agency mandated to finance energy efficiency retrofits for both public and privately-owned buildings. TAF proved to be one of the first such funds, and the model has been widely emulated elsewhere.

It’s fascinating to discover how these two progressive-minded ideas from very different eras turn out to be linked by the long arc of time.

In the Toronto of the 1910s, the notion of diverting minor offenders from the Don to Industrial Farms like this one had gained broad popular support.
Toronto Archives

< http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/839793–old-toronto-s-farm-for-minor-offenders >

• stratfordbeaconherald.com – Article
  26  Jun 2010.   BETTY JO BELTON, Stratford-Perth Archives

The Dec. 10, 1898 edition of the Stratford Evening Herald featured these pictures of “ Miss Macpherson’s Boys Home” at 51 Avon St. in Stratford.

The first group of 100 boys under Annie Macpherson’s care to be transported to Canada set sail on May 12, 1870. After she arrived a large house in Belleville was offered to her as a “distribution centre” for impoverished children with the rent to be paid by Hastings County. The next year, an Annie Macpherson Home was established in Galt ( now Cambridge) with her nephew William H. Merry as manager. In 1883, the Annie Macpherson Home moved to Stratford and the Galt location was closed. Merry continued as manager of the Stratford home.

At different periods in its history the home was referred to as “Miss Macpherson’s Boys’ Home — for the distribution and care of English children emigrated through Miss Macpherson,” “The Annie Macpherson Home of Industry” and was often called the “Merry Home” by local residents.

Who was Annie Macpherson and why were these children sent to Canada? Macpherson moved to London, England from Glasgow, Scotland in the mid-1860s to further her training as an educator. In his book, Kenneth Bagnell describes how her experiences with poor children in the city’s East End changed her plans:

“Annie Macpherson, according to the memories that pass among her descendants, was above all else a woman with a sense of destiny. Her eyes, peering out from beneath a high forehead, were large and strong, and her mouth, which was straight and correct, were set among features that spoke of a will of iron. Her parents … saw to it that after she finished her schooling in Glasgow she went to London, there to study the methods of … the founder of the kindergarten movement … When she was twenty-three years old, in 1865, Annie Macpherson — like many in her time a convert to evangelical Christianity — decided that her life work would be among the poor in London, in the East End, where, for an entire population, life was a burden of unending desperation, disease, and crime … During her first summer of work in 1866, an epidemic of cholera swept the entire East End … She visited the sick and distributed food, and in the evenings, in her room … she held meetings for mothers, talking with them of ways in which they might stave off the tragedies that stood at their doors.

Then one day in the late autumn of 1867 … Annie Macpherson entered a dark, smelly house and heard voices on an upper floor. She climbed the gloomy stairway and opened a hatch upon a sweltering attic. Inside was a sight that would move her to direct the rest of her life, not to the miseries of poverty in general, but to the suffering of children. Everywhere in the attic … crouched more than thirty small girls, their arms thin as broomsticks, at work making matchboxes … Each child received three farthings, less than one penny, for making a gross of boxes … On a table was a loaf of bread. When the children were so hungry they could not go on, they were given a slice. They paid for it out of their earnings. Annie Macpherson came back down the stairs … convinced that she must begin that day to try ending the misery of the matchbox-makers.”

With her sisters Louisa Birt and Rachel Merry she operated a child emigration organization from 1870– 1925 with homes in Belleville, Galt and then Stratford and Knowlton, Que. From 1869 until the late 1930s, around 100,000 children — boys and girls — were brought to Canada from the United Kingdom by religious and philanthropic organizations like Macpherson’s, and sent to live with families here. Some of the very youngest were adopted and treated as family. More often these children were used as low-cost farm labourers or domestic servants. They were called Home Children. Millions of Canadians are directly descended from these “ little immigrants.”

The First World War made it dangerous for children sailing overseas and the last Home Children to live at 51 Avon St. arrived around 1916. In 1919, the Annie Macpherson Home in Stratford closed and Merry and his wife moved to Belleville to operate the home there. The Stratford property was sold the next year. Historians estimate that 8,100 of the approximately 100,000 children who were sent to Canada spent time in the Stratford home.

In 1987 the well-preserved remaining portion of the Italianate house was designated under the Ontario Heritage Act as a significant heritage property and described as “a station in the British Child Emigration Movement.” In 2001, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada commemorated the nationally significant contributions of Home Children and their descendants to Canada’s success by placing a federal plaque in front of 51 Avon St. A reunion of Home Children and their families was held following the plaque unveiling and attended by over a thousand people.

The government of Canada has designated 2010 the Year of the British Home Child. Canadian Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney announced that the government recognizes the hardships suffered by British Home Children and their perseverance and courage in overcoming those hardships. Over the next year, the government will honour the great strength and determination of this group of child immigrants, and reflect on the tremendous contributions made by former Home Children and their descendants to the building of Canada.

The Stratford-Perth Museum has created a new display about Home Children and the Annie Macpherson Home. Beginning tomorrow to July 10, the display will feature one of two British Home Children Memory Quilts made of blocks submitted by descendants of Home Children from across Canada. The one being displayed here is BHC Memory Quilt ( AB) which was finished by Hazel Perrier who lives in Alberta. The other quilt soon to be finished is BHC Memory Quilt ( ON) which is being finished by Gail Collins who lives in Ontario. Information on researching the lives of Home Children will be available at the exhibit and the archives.

A colourful and exuberant celebration of triumph over adversity, the quilt is also extremely moving. Blocks include photographs, text and small artifacts chosen by descendants to symbolize the life of “ their” Home Child. Many thanks to archives volunteer Lynn Matthison who worked very hard to arrange for the loan of the quilt and the creation of the exhibit. It includes a block for her grandmother Gladys Gwendoline Cookson (nee Parsons).

The Stratford-Perth Archives is located at 24 St. Andrew St. We are open from 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday. You can reach the archives at 519- 271-0531, ext. 259, or by e-mail at sparchives@perthcounty.ca. For more information including hours at the Mitchell and Listowel branches, call the Stratford office or visit us on the Perth County website at www.perthcounty.ca.

< http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2643504 >

Thursday afternoons at the Ontario Legislature, when private members’ business is dealt with, and most MPPs are already on the road back to their ridings, are not your high-profile time of week. And Jim Brownell is no one’s idea of the flashiest MPP.

Still, the Liberal from Stormont-Dundas-South Glengarry out in eastern Ontario might just be one of the more interesting.

The retired teacher has quietly carved out a niche for himself as a history buff among legislators. And last week, he added another instalment to his passion for the past.

Brownell moved second reading of his bill to proclaim Sept. 28 each year as British Home Child Day. And if you wonder, at first blush, what the Dickens that’s all about, you’re not alone.

As Liberal Wayne Arthurs put it, British home children were something he’d known nothing of and, but for Brownell’s efforts, probably never would have.

As Brownell told the Legislature, about 100,000 children were sent to Canada from Britain between 1869 and 1939, many to work as soon as they were old enough, and in those days it wasn’t very old, as farm labourers and domestics in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.

This province was growing. The impoverished orphanages and other institutions of Victorian Britain were overflowing. Supply met demand.

“Officials believed these children would be better off in a new land with fresh air and wide open spaces,” Brownell said.

Most of the children were transported, he said, by British religious and charitable organizations who believed they were doing “a good and noble thing” for the children.

Brownell’s grandmother, Mary Scott Pearson, was just shy of her 14th birthday when she arrived as an orphan in Halifax in 1891, before travelling to the Fairknowe Home in Brockville, Ont., a receiving house for orphans sent to Canada from Scotland.

Her story, like most who shared her journey, was one of challenge and adversity, he said. There was little monitoring of living circumstances or fate after arrival.

“Arriving in Ontario with their worldly possessions tucked into little wooden trunks, siblings were often separated upon their arrival and many never saw each other again.”

New Democrat Cheri DiNovo was aghast.

“Can you even begin to imagine a 4-year-old getting on a boat and arriving in a stranger’s house? One of them described being put with the dogs in a shed and having to eat with the dogs … The fact that there was abuse goes without saying … Think `slavery.’ That happened here, and it happened with British children.”

Yet, many endured and went on to live productive lives, Brownell said, and more than 10,000 fought for Canada in World War I and II.

Brownell said it’s estimated more than 10 per cent of Canada’s population is made up of descendants of British home children, yet many Canadians don’t know their story.

“They are not aware of the hardships that they suffered and the sacrifices that were made. They are not aware of the tremendous contributions that British home children made to the social and economic fibre of our great province.”

This year, Canada Post is to issue a stamp commemorating home children. And Brownell’s initiative gives Ontarians “an opportunity to learn about their past.”

Almost all MPPs who spoke to the bill before it passed second reading said they’d known nothing about this part of the province’s history.

As for the date?

Well, Sept. 28 was the day more than 100 years ago that Jim Brownell’s grandmother stepped off the SS Hibernian and set foot in Canada.

< http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/article/769317–coyle-story-of-home-children-part-of-our-history >

On Tuesday night, on the grounds of the Ontario legislature, a group of community-living activists and former residents of institutions gathered for a candlelight vigil.

They were celebrating a historic moment in the evolution of health and social-welfare systems that occurred when, on March 31, Ontario closed the last three large institutions for people with developmental disabilities.

The Rideau Regional Centre in Smith Falls (once the largest facility of its kind in the Commonwealth with close to 3,000 beds), the Huronia Regional Centre in Orillia and the Southwestern Regional Centre in Blenheim harked back to an era when people with physical, developmental and psychiatric disabilities were warehoused and hidden away.

It was a time not so long ago when there was no place in society for “cripples,” “retards” and “crazies,” to use once-common pejoratives.

Psychiatric patients and those with physical disabilities have been largely de-institutionalized over the past few decades, but those with developmental (or, if you prefer, intellectual) disabilities such as Down syndrome and Fragile X syndrome have, to a certain extent, been forgotten in the push for social justice and equality.

While the vast majority of people with disabilities now live in the community – they are our family members, friends, co-workers, neighbours, fellow congregants, hockey buddies and so on – a disturbingly large number remain trapped in institutions.

While Ontario has closed its institutions (and British Columbia did so years ago), there are several thousand people with development disabilities across Canada still residing in large, sterile facilities such as the Michener Centre in Red Deer, Alta., the Manitoba Developmental Centre in Portage La Prairie, Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies in Montreal and Sunset Adult Residential Centre in Pugwash, N.S.

Historically, these facilities were dank, oppressive places – isolated, grossly overcrowded and rampant with abuse.

In 1971, the Ontario government, embarrassed by the freezing deaths of two residents of the Rideau Regional Centre, asked lawyer Walter Williston to examine the situation. In a devastating report, he called for all such institutions to be closed, concluding that “a century of failure and inhumanity in the large multipurpose residential hospitals should, in itself, be enough to warn of the inherent weakness in the system and inspire us to look for some better solutions.”

Decades later, his recommendation has finally been implemented with the adoption of the Services and Supports to Promote the Social Inclusion of Persons with Developmental Disabilities Act, a law that effectively strips government of the right to operate such institutions.

While it is true that these residential hospitals were, in recent years, well-maintained and had dedicated staff members, one fundamental issue remained: It was and is unjustifiable to “jail” someone for want of a few IQ points.

There is not a single person housed in these facilities – in Ontario or elsewhere – who could not be cared for as well, if not better, in the community.

The mistake that was made with the de-institutionalization of people with psychiatric disabilities was to release them into nothing, leaving them to struggle with severe mental illnesses without necessary supports such as housing and income.

The result is thousands – no, tens of thousands – of people with psychiatric illnesses and addictions living on the streets and in the rooming houses of Canada’s big cities, a social disaster and a national disgrace.

To its credit, the community-living movement has, through its advocacy and hard work, ensured a smoother transition for people with intellectual disabilities.

Throughout history, people living with developmental disabilities have been vilified, patronized and marginalized.

But, when afforded a voice, they express a desire for the same thing as everyone else in society – a good life: friends and family, a roof over their heads, basic wealth, choice in daily activities and the ability to make a contribution to society.

In short, while it may not always be articulated in this fashion, they want citizenship. And if our commitment to rights and equality is real, if the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is to have meaning, people with disabilities (developmental, physical and psychiatric) need to be full citizens, to have an equal opportunity to participate fully in all aspects of community life.

But equality does not mean sameness. Flexibility, accommodation and commitment are required to ensure that people with developmental disabilities, no matter how severe, can live on their own, attend school, work (in real jobs, not in sheltered workshops), shop and play like everyone else.

There is no one-size-fits-all alternative to institutional life but, rather, many programs and approaches, all with one overarching goal: community living.

There is also a need, given the shocking number of people with developmental disabilities who are still warehoused and denied full citizenship in most provinces, to honour what Ontario has done, no matter how overdue.

At the sombre candlelight vigil, they remembered the dark period of institutionalization but, in each candle, there was also a flicker of hope, a recognition that we have finally extended to our fellow citizens the ability – and the right – to belong.

apicard@globeandmail.com

Deserted by her husband, she begged for shelter then lay down on the street. Surrounded by a crowd of boys, it was where she gave birth to her third child.

Three days later, Mrs. Wellesley Knowles, clutching her newborn baby, climbed 24 steps to the front door of an imposing limestone building. Etched above the entrance were the words “County Poor House.”

Knowles’ two older children, about two and five, had already been taken to the house by horse-drawn wagon. Each time, members of the family were accompanied by the township reeve.

“You couldn’t just come and knock on the door of the poorhouse. You had to be accepted as the `deserving poor.’ It was the reeve and township council that decided who the deserving poor were,” said Susan Dunlop.

Dunlop is curator of the Wellington County Museum and Archives, which is housed in the 19th century building in the rolling countryside between Elora and Fergus, where Knowles, who’d immigrated just six months earlier, was taken on Sept. 23, 1884.

“In the poorhouse” wasn’t just an expression in Canada.

Though more commonly associated with Victorian England and novels by Charles Dickens, such as Oliver Twist, the poorhouse was part of Canada’s social fabric for more than 60 years and one of its earliest legislated responses to poverty.

“Poorhouses have been forgotten,” said Dunlop. “They are part of our local history.”

These “houses of industry and refuge,” as they came to be known, were shelters of last resort for the destitute, homeless, “feeble-minded” and elderly. In exchange for their labour, they were provided with spartan accommodation, clothes and simple food, much of it grown themselves. At Christmas, there might be small gifts, perhaps a handkerchief, a pipe or an orange.

The oldest surviving example of a poorhouse in Canada is in Wellington County. The building, a national historic site, opened in 1877, a time when “pauperism” was considered a moral failing that could be erased through order and hard work.

The poorhouse system was the foundation for today’s government-funded social assistance programs.

It was also something Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe had very much wanted to avoid when he arrived in Upper Canada in 1791.

In his native England, more than 100,000 people were swallowed up in work houses, funded by a “poor tax” on landowners and criticized for being costly and creating cycles of dependency.

“When he came over to take up his position here, he was absolutely convinced he wasn’t going to allow anything like that to develop,” said David Wood, a professor emeritus of geography and urban studies at York University’s Atkinson College.

Yet poverty was inescapable. Crops failed. People starved. On farms and in cities, as the province slowly started to become industrialized, many couldn’t work because they were sick or injured or old.

The only option for indigent people in the province’s earliest days was to seek shelter for a night or two at the local jail, said Wood, who has written on the legislative history of Ontario’s poorhouse system and admissions in Wellington County.

Dunlop ran across a newspaper account from the early 1870s of one elderly man who was living in a hollowed-out log on a farmer’s field in a township outside Fergus, partly paralyzed and in danger of freezing to death. The council was debating what to do.

Across Canada, elected officials were struggling with similar problems. Handouts of food or clothing known as “outdoor relief” became common and, in New Brunswick, one solution was to auction off care of the poor to the lowest bidder at “pauper auctions” that were compared to slavery in the American south.

In Ontario, the province passed the Houses of Refuge Act in 1890, which provided county governments with grants of up to $4,000 to purchase at least 45 acres of land and construct a suitable building.

By 1903, new legislation required every county in Ontario to have a house of refuge.

Much earlier, in 1876, Wellington County officials had purchased 50 acres of land between Fergus and Elora for a poorhouse, intended to function as a self-sufficient industrial farm. Residents, who were called “inmates,” a term used at the time to describe anyone living in an institution, tended livestock, looked after 30 acres of crops, an orchard, a garden and a strawberry patch.

Their labour provided most of the food for the 70 inmates and staff.

As new inmates arrived, it was entirely possible they might see the body of another inmate, such as 70-year-old George Kerr, who died in the fall of 1892, making its final journey to the poorhouse cemetery for burial in an unmarked grave.

Dunlop, along with archivist Karen Wagner and conservator Patty Whan, have documented these stories after poring through admission and discharge records, medical files, council minutes, old newspaper stories and tracking down relatives to find out more about the people who lived there.

Since they died more than 30 years ago, their names can be used, which Dunlop and her colleagues felt was important for appreciating the history.

“Poverty doesn’t often have a face or a name or the (documented) family connections you see here,” Dunlop said, standing near photographs of the Everson family of Harriston, near Mount Forest, whose story helps illustrate poverty’s generational cycles.

At eight months pregnant, Mary Jane Everson entered the home in 1889 with her children, Julia, 7, Leonard, 5, and George, 3. Her husband, Alfred, had become sick, couldn’t work and spent more than a year in Guelph General Hospital. The family had no source of income.

Everson’s baby, John, was one of three children born in the house. The family had returned to Harriston to live, possibly when Alfred had recovered, but Mary Ann and her older children were eventually readmitted to the house.

Leonard and George were apprenticed out as farm labourers at ages 12 and 13, as was Julia. But in her case, it didn’t work out and she remained at the poorhouse for the reset of her life, dying at age 67 in 1948. Her mother and brother, William, born in 1894, both discharged, continued to write and send Julia family photographs. (George later enlisted with a county battalion and was killed in action three months before the end of World War I).

Meanwhile, Mary Ann’s parents, George Hollingshead, 82, and his wife Ann, 80, were admitted to the house in 1907 because of “old age and destitution” and died there.

Much like today, misfortune seemed to hit society’s most vulnerable people the hardest – the unskilled, the elderly, the disabled and children.

Leonard Howson of Eramosa Township entered the house in 1877 at age 9 and drowned on the property in May, 1903, at age 35, while searching for a lost fish hook.

During his 26 years there, Howson would have only walked through the front doors once. After arriving, inmates were required to enter and leave through the back doors.

Photographs show male residents wearing patched trousers and women in dresses made from the same bolts of cloth. Uniforms were sewn by inmates and staff.

Men and women, even elderly married couples, were housed in separate sections of the building, in dormitories at times so crowded the only way to get into bed was by climbing in from the end.

A stone washhouse was erected in 1877 and served as a laundry, a woodshed and “dead house,” or morgue. Three jail cells were sometimes used for temporarily housing inmates suffering from mental illness or what today would be known as dementia. The staff weren’t trained to deal with these challenges.

A hospital wing was added in 1892, with the help of a $4,000 provincial grant and the physical labour of inmates such as Jimmy “the giraffe” Allen, so nicknamed because of his height and bright red hair, who operated a lime kiln during construction.

A hospital wing was needed because the composition of the inmate population was changing, partly as a result of society’s attitudes toward poverty itself.

With the advent of the poorhouse system had come recognition, for the first time in Ontario, that governments had a responsibility to provide for the less fortunate. Other social programs aimed at reducing poverty and dependence on the poorhouse followed, including a children’s aid system and early forms of worker’s compensation, as well as legislation to improve workplace safety.

While women and children continued to seek sanctuary in these institutions, they were increasingly becoming senior citizens homes and, by 1947, Wellington County’s House of Refuge had officially been renamed the Wellington County Home for the Aged. It remained such until 1972, reopening three years later as a museum.

While Canadian society has evolved and a sophisticated social safety net has developed to ease the burdens of those who’ve fallen on hard times, Dunlop is struck by how some attitudes toward poverty remain the same.

“Sometimes when people go through the exhibit, they say `Things haven’t changed very much’ and I can understand their thinking,” Dunlop says.

“They see, I think, the harshness and sometimes the judgments (society made about the poor.) I think we still carry that ideological base…that if you are not successful in work you are morally a failure. Those are strong roots in our western society.”

For directions to the museum and more information go to www.wcm.on.ca
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Rules for the ‘inmates’

Social chaos (poverty and rootlessness) could only be eradicated through order and hard work. The daily routine of the inmates, regulated by the ringing of the bell, was designed to teach middle class values regarding moral and social conduct.

At the ringing of the morning bell, every inmate in the House (the sick and those in confinement excepted), must rise, dress, wash and be in readiness to proceed to work.

The bell will ring 10 minutes before each meal, when all will leave their work, and be in readiness with clean hands and faces for the ringing of the second bell, when they will repair to the dining rooms, and take such seats at the table as are assigned to them by those in charge, where they must observe silence, decency and good order.

At the ringing of the slow bell after meals every inmate shall repair to work. At nine in the evening, at the ringing of the returning bell, the inmates must secure the fires, put out the lights, and retire to bed in their respective apartments.

Any inmate guilty of drunkenness, disobedience, immorality, obscenity, disorderly conduct, profane language, theft, waste, or who shall absent himself or herself; or who shall be guilty of defacing any part of the House or furniture…shall be punished as the case may seem to demand.

In solitary confinement, the prisoner shall be debarred from seeing or conversing with any person except the Inspector, the Keeper…and the food shall consist solely of bread and water.

Any inmate who shall have communication with any one thus confined without permission shall be subject to punishment by a like confinement. No inmate shall go beyond the limits of the Industrial Farm, unless by the permission of the Keeper, nor remain out beyond the time specified by the Keeper.

The Sabbath Day shall be strictly observed, and no irreligious diversion or unnecessary labor shall be indulged in.

Every person previous to admission as an inmate of the House shall be examined and searched by the Keeper or one of his assistants.

All persons aggrieved may prefer their complaints to the Inspector when he is visiting the House or to a member of County Council.

Wellington County By-Law 410, passed 8th June, 1888