While the federal government moved forward, Ontario governments continued to cling to denial and obfuscation. Elston, Caplan and Peterson ignored the responsibility to protect vulnerable persons in care, ignored warnings not to confuse debate about the recent claims of ‘environmental medicine’ with the reality faced by this long-existing group.
While Peterson’s staff ignored commissioned reports, there were several suicides.
These were people whose lives became impossible after their credibility was demolished by Ontario public servants and politicians, and by journalists who also confused the issues in the community, subjecting people to a reverse onus.
After the destruction of credibility and suicides, loss of income and homelessness were the main practical concerns, along with abuses in health care and social services.
The Peterson government ignored not only its own reports, but information distributed by the federal health department, as well as international sources.
The NDP government of Bob Rae, elected in 1990, was no better. They continued to focus on debate about the theories of doctors of environmental medicine and ignore the reality of sensitivities as known for generations.
Health Minister Evelyn Gigantes’s Chief of Staff lied outright about the findings of the Thomson Report, repeatedly declaring that the report had not identified an existing, publicly insured, method of diagnosis, when it had.
Several tens of thousands of people are dead because of those two mistakes. The people who have been killed have been killed without being identified, in fact because they were not identified. That makes it no less of a crime.
Gigantes’s successors, Francis Lankin and Ruth Grier, likewise refused to differentiate between the theories of doctors of environmental medicine and the fact of sensitivities as known to medicine for centuries. Ministerial officials continued to lie about the availability of a publicly insured method of diagnosis so, instead of being identified, people continued to be injured and killed.
Despite warnings from consumers, organized medicine, psych profs, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, Ontario coroners, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, provincial reports, federal reports, international reports, even from other members of the NDP—Bob Rae’s three health ministers and Bob Rae himself were evidently incapable of making this distinction, of focusing on protection of the larger, long-existing group instead of on debate about the stereotypical fringe.
No matter how often the down side was pointed out to them, or by whom, the NDP continued to act as if the debate about the theories of doctors of environmental medicine was what mattered.
Even today, centuries of history and clinical experience with a much broader group, including people who react to chemicals, does not matter to the NDP. Nor, yet, do the federal recommendations the Ontario NDP ignored three decades ago.
It’s how New Democrats in Ottawa Centre, across Ontario, in Nova Scotia, in Manitoba, BC, in other provinces and federally, turn a blind eye on their abuse of persons with environmental sensitivities.
Meanwhile, the NDP shows no honest concern for the people being excluded, caused financial damages, injured, and killed, even in situations where there is a duty of care. That’s one hell of a lot of ongoing sorrow.
It is a mistake to think of sensitivities as a disease.
Sensitivities are not a specific disease entity. They result from any of a compendium of diseases, injuries, deficiencies and naturally occurring anomalies. “Environmental sensitivities” is an umbrella term, as was the word “allergy” before the identification of IgE mediated reactions in 1966. People with sensitivities react to substances, EMF, temperature, light or other phenomena at levels of exposure that do not seem to affect the majority.
The terms “multiple chemical sensitivities” (MCS), “environmental illness” and “environmental hypersensitivity” describe, at best, undifferentiable, arbitrarily-defined subgroups of persons with sensitivities who are not homogeneous within themselves, and who react to natural as well as synthetic substances.
- creates confusion that can be used by unethical parties to obfuscate responsibilities, delay action on preventing harm.
- leads to inappropriate research expenditures such as attempts to find a consistent physiological marker when the patient population is not homogeneous.
- the stereotype of being sick because of the modern environment artificially divides persons with sensitivities, as happened when IgE mediated reactions were isolated in 1966.
- protection and duty of care issues that apply across the aggregate, including people who fit the stereotype, are hidden behind legitimate but separate debates about the nature of various etiologies.