For
Immediate Release
April 6, 2005
Lanark-Carleton MPP Norm Sterling this week called upon the Minister of Community and Social Services to listen to the more than 6,500 Ontarians who have petitioned the Ontario Legislature to keep the Rideau Regional Centre in Smiths Falls open.
Sterling told the Legislature about severely disabled adults who know no other home the Rideau Regional Centre. He spoke of one veteran who wrote about his son who has lived at the Centre for 50 years.
“The parents and families of these individuals are frightened,” said Sterling. “I have received dozens of letters, often from elderly parents, describing the situation of individual residents. They don’t believe that their severely challenged children can survive in outside group homes and they can’t care for their children themselves.”
Later, Sterling read and introduced the hundreds of pages of petitions that he has received from the families and friends of RRC residents.
The Rideau Regional Centre in Smiths Falls is home to 400 severely disabled individuals. It was opened in the 1950s and right now is scheduled to close by 2009.
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For more information, please
call Lanark-Carleton MPP Norm Sterling at: (416) 314-7900
Please click here to view a Hansard excerpt