The Un-Making of Difference: The Winding Road of Deinstitutionalization in Ontario, 1960-2018

The institutionalization of people with an intellectual impairment lives in the shadows of
\nCanadian history. In Ontario, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, social and medical ideas about
\nhuman difference emerging from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in the
\nmassive push toward segregation and institutionalization of all kinds of “undesirable” types of
\npeople, including those with a physical and mental impairment. Although institutionalization
\nitself, as a “solution” for people without an intellectual impairment came under early fire by
\nmedical experts and policy makers, these arguments were not applied to children or adults with
\nan intellectual impairment. I will argue that the appeal of institutionalization, which persists
\ndespite decades of irrefutable evidence about its extraordinary harm, continues to exist because
\nthe beliefs and attitudes of those who made the decisions to institutionalize in the first place
\ncontinue to circulate, and to dominate our thinking about what is “best” for people with an
\nintellectual impairment. These attitudes fundamentally deny that people who have an
\nimpairment are “persons” in the same sense as those who do not have an impairment are. My
\nthesis outlines the various elements which have shaped attitudes toward people with an
\nintellectual impairment since the late nineteenth century, and the ways these attitudes (medical,
\nsocial, and political) were built into the physical landscape of the province, in the shape of
\ncongregate institutions. Using oral history interviews with many of the survivors of these
\ninstitutions, I argue that these attitudes about personhood are fundamentally wrong, and detail
\nhow the agency and activism of the intellectually impaired, themselves, was a crucial element in
\ninstitutional closures and the crucial (yet unfinished) shift toward community living.

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