By Marvin Ross

I wasn’t going to post today as I spent most of the weekend in the ER with what turned out to be Covid. Kudos to our paramedics who came for me, heard my wife cough too and took us both in matching ambulances after arranging for a neighbour to care for the dog. She was released that day and I stayed till Sunday afternoon.

Anyway, what gets my BP up is that the media is recognizing that “Toronto seems like a scene out of Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian Clockwork Orange, these days.” That was written by Warren Kinsella writing in the right wing Toronto Sun but also quoting his Sun colleague Joe Warmington and the Star’s Rosie DiManno. The New York Times and the BBC have said similar things.

Kinsella’s Summary:

A woman murdered with a pickaxe at the High Park subway station. Another woman set on fire at the Kipling station, and she later dies. A mob of teenage girls — who apparently did not really know each other, and met online — allegedly murdered a homeless man for a bottle of booze near the Royal York Hotel and Union Station.

An 89-year-old woman murdered in broad daylight, at the corner of King and Yonge Sts., one of the busiest intersections in Canada, allegedly by a man who did not know her. A 23-year-old woman stabbed repeatedly in the head on a Spadina streetcar, mid-afternoon. A 16-year-old boy stabbed at Old Mill Station and rushed to hospital.

Transit employees swarmed by teens and beaten, and shot at. People shoved off platforms into the path of oncoming trains. Robberies, rapes, assaults.

And this is happening across the country

Kinsella mentions visiting an official at HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development) in the US a few years ago and being told that if we weren’t careful, “You Canadians are about to make the same mistake we Americans have made” and that is dumping over-medicated and under-medicated mentally ill people onto your streets all in the name of granting them rights and liberties. It is neither, he said but abandonment.

All of this is cruel as we have dumped vulnerable sick people into back alleys instead of psychiatric hospitals that can help them.

I was pointed to this article by my Linkedin friend Ted Ball who describes himself “on reflecting on lessons learned.”

OF COURSE WE ABANDONED THE MENTALLY ILL — BUT HAVE YOU SEEN ALL THE GOOD, WELL-PAYING INDOOR JOBS THAT ONTARIO’s CABINET HAS CREATED FOR THE PUBLIC SERVICE WITH THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS ONTARIO RECEIVED FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SINCE 2017 — $520 million so far, and another billion on the way.

Who thinks the healthcrats can spend it on themselves again — with the nod of approval from clinically brain-dead Cabinet Ministers in the Ford Cabinet? (Caps are his).

I hate to sound self serving but the blame for these attitudes goes back to the anti-psychiatry woke foke enabled by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Disabled. What rights? To live in misery when you could be helped. For a detailed discussion, see my book Anti-Psychiatry and the UN Assault on the Mentally Ill available in print or in kindle – or don’t.