Media & Updates

Survivors and members of ‘Remember Every Name’ met with Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) Wednesday to discuss the future of the Huronia Regional Centre (HRC).

For many survivors, the former Huronia Regional Centre (HRC) is a place filled with haunting memories of institutional abuse, and now, decades later, the province’s decision to tear down parts of the site is bringing long-awaited closure to some who once lived there. “It’s about time,” said Betty Ann Rose Bond, who was placed in children’s aid care at age six and spent five years at the facility. “It’s an eyesore to the City of Orillia and also to us survivors.” Bond says her time at HRC was marked by trauma. The facility housed people with developmental disabilities until it closed in 2009. Bond says she remembers “too much” about her time at HRC, adding she recalls primarily “lots of abuse from staff.” A group of former residents launched a class action lawsuit against the Ontario government, alleging systematic abuse at the institution. The province settled the lawsuit in 2013 for $35 million. The allegations were never tested in court. The property is currently owned by the Ontario Provincial Police and has been used for the past two decades for training purposes. There are 49 buildings and 11 tunnels. The OPP says it is consulting with members of ‘Remember Every Name’ before deciding how the site should be used going forward. "To be respectful and to honour the people that survived that experience it’s important that they have input on the future use of the lands and buildings there because that was considered their home," said Debbie Vernon of ‘Remember Every Name,’ a group dedicated to preserving the memory of those who lived at HRC. The group is calling for a museum or permanent memorial to be built on the property to recognize the lives and stories of former residents. Orillia Mayor Don McIsaac supports the demolition and believes the site holds potential for new uses. “It’s a dark era and I think we just need to move forward. Taking the buildings down I think will help. I know the former residents are excited about seeing the buildings come down so that’s a good step.” Bond agrees. “It’s a bit of closure for us in a good way. You’re not going to erase our memories, they’re there, and it’s a permanent thing, but we need to move on too.” Police and survivors are expected to meet later this month to discuss next steps for the site’s future.  Source: CTVNews.ca Barrie, Rob Cooper, Journalist

A controversial building dating back to 1876 situated on acres of government‐owned and managed land at the north of Lake Simcoe may no longer be. Back in 2013, a $35 million lawsuit was filed by former residents of the Huronia Regional Centre against the province on allegations of mistreatment. The lawsuit claimed residents suffered abuse at the hands of their caregivers, which was home to people with developmental disabilities. The Ontario government paid millions to former residents and made an official apology. Since its closure in 2009, the property has been used for government services and initiatives, including a courtroom, a public health lab, and trainee homes and facilities for the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). While the province says these programs and services will continue, a portion of the Orillia campus is no longer needed. The Ministry of Infrastructure (MOI) is proposing the phased demolition of up to 49 buildings and 11 tunnels on the Huronia Regional Centre site. The ministry told CTV News on Monday that the assets and buildings have deteriorated and are no longer viable for long-term use. Orillia Mayor Don McIsaac saying, “Well this a dark area and I think we just need to move forward, you know, taking the buildings down I think will help. I know the former residents are excited about seeing the building come down. So, that’s a good step.” “Infrastructure Ontario (IO), on behalf of MOI, will lead planning for the demolition of buildings and site rehabilitation to ensure the site is ready for future use and redevelopment,” said the Ministry of Infrastructure to CTV News. IO is now actively pursuing a contract to carry out the planned demolition. Further decisions on site use will be made by the OPP in consultation with the Solicitor General’s office and Infrastructure Ontario. The OPP is in the preliminary planning stage of the new academy, including a comprehensive needs assessment. “The former HRC site offers important proximity to OPP General Headquarters, and based on its current use is considered a desirable site,” said Gosia Puzio, Corporate Communications Bureau, Ontario Provincial Police. “Those buildings coming down mean a couple of things, we’re obviously cleaning up the sight but we’re excited for the OPP. They are going to build an academy there which is going to be great for Orillia and we’re looking forward to seeing that too,” McIsaac continued. Officials say the timing of everything will be determined through the awarded contract. “It frees up the other land around it and Orillia has had a long standing interest in the land along the lakefront,” McIsaac said. This demolition is part of province’s plan to continue to generate revenues and reduce liability costs in Ontario. Written by: Julianna Balsamo, CTVNews.ca Barrie 

Survivors and allies in Remember Every Name are overjoyed about this long-hoped for announcement. The announcement includes an invitation for us to work with government and to meet with the OPP on the future of the HRC property. This is in response to our insistence that recommendations made by survivors to a 2017 Infrastructure Ontario consultation be followed, especially the construction of a collaboratively planned and respectfully curated museum on site. Download the letters below:

'Survivors and allies in Remember Every Name are overjoyed about this long-hoped-for announcement,' says advocate who is pushing for a museum on the property. Sixteen years after the controversial Huronia Regional Centre (HRC) was shut down, the province has finally decided on the fate of the 175-acre property. OrilliaMatters has learned Kinga Surma, the province’s minister of infrastructure, has given initial approval to demolish, in phases, up to 49 buildings and 11 tunnels on the sprawling former HRC property that lies between Memorial Avenue and Lake Simcoe. “The existing assets and buildings on the HRC site, constructed in the 1800s, have significantly deteriorated and are no longer viable for long-term use,” Surma says in a letter to the group, Remember Every Name. Parts of the property are currently used by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and other government tenants, Surma notes. “(The Ministry of Infrastructure), in partnership with the Ministry of the Solicitor General and the OPP, (is) working to advance demolition activities to support future redevelopment of the former HRC campus for continued government use,” notes the letter. In a separate letter to the group, OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique said this year’s provincial budget included a “commitment to modernize police training facilities to meet the public safety needs of our growing communities by training more police officers.” He notes the plan was “identified as a public safety priority and addressed the aging infrastructure of the OPP Academy” on the site. Carrique says “planning work is underway for construction of a new OPP Academy in Orillia, which is expected to include developments on the former HRC campus.” He says the “redevelopment of the site presents a significant opportunity for the OPP to equip new recruits, existing police personnel and Indigenous police partners with the skills needed to respond to the increasing complexity of policing and address urgent specialized training demands.”

Through her heroic efforts, Marie was one of the lead plaintiffs with the Huronia Regional Centre Class Action successfully suing the Ontario government for the neglect and abuse they suffered when they lived at HRC. Marie touched many people who lived at the institution and her legacy will live on. Marie Stark's Celebration of Life at The Church of Holy Trinity, Toronto held on Sunday, June 1st, 2025.

I would like to introduce you to my late sister Karen Jobbins who inspired us all to do better at supporting people who have disabilities. Her story may resonate with a few of you. Most of you have never met my sister Karen but she lived a courageous life as a teacher and an influencer to those who loved and respected her. Karen was the first born on January 31, 1955. Her arrival into this world was difficult and cruel. With the use of forceps during delivery she sustained a head injury causing cerebral palsy and a developmental delay and later the onset of epilepsy. The odds were against her because she could have died. The doctor predicted she would only live a few short years- maybe one or two, that someday my mother would find her dead in her crib. Instead, she survived for 66 years. Karen proved that doctor wrong. Then I came along. When we were little, my sister Karen and I were inseparable. So close in age, milestones were compared and measured. We were even dressed alike and had the same hair cuts. We loved camping with our parents out on Parry Island, Georgian Bay, getting there in the boat Dad built in the basement as a winter project. For as long as I can remember, Karen loved the water. If it wasn’t swimming and running around at the beach together, it would be kicking water in our wadding pool on hot summer days playing in the front yard and drinking Koolaid with the neighbouring kids who would come and join us. The odds were against Karen at a time when thousands of other children like her were shuttered away into institutions across this province. My parents resisted pressure from professionals who told them to put Karen "away" at the Ontario Hospital School that loomed nearby in Orillia, that the family would be better off forgetting her altogether. That's the kind of "help" that was available for families in those days in the late 50’s and early 60’s when Karen was a toddler. Karens influence on our parents gave them the resolve to resist that pressure from the professionals, that she was their responsibility and would remain with the family despite having little or no support in the community for her. When we lived in Parry Sound we went our separate ways to go to school. I was in Grade one- Karen went to a day care at the neighbours' house-even though she was older than me. The odds were against her because kids like Karen weren’t expected to learn or go to school.  In the 1960’s we moved from Parry Sound to Muskoka, in the country, on the lake near Port Carling near where our Grandparents lived, along with Aunts and Uncles and all our cousins. Our parents built the family home on Brackenrig Bay.

THE PHONE RANG late on November 15, 1977. Betty and Allan Bellchambers were getting ready for bed when a man’s voice broke the news: Robin Windross, Betty’s twenty-one-year-old son, was missing. Betty collapsed, and Allan angrily said a few words “I should not have said,” he later admitted in a legal declaration. For sixteen years, the Huronia Regional Centre had provided Windross’s care. How could they just lose him? HRC was a sprawling institution in Orillia, a ninety-minute drive north of Toronto, for children and adults with intellectual disabilities. Founded in 1876, it was one of Ontario’s oldest and largest facilities. There were multiple buildings overlooking Lake Simcoe and, on the other side of the road, a farm and a cemetery. Windross had grown up in the centre’s children’s wards and had been transferred to cottage C, an adult ward, close to the time of his disappearance. According to Allan, Windross was terrified of cottage C. Betty and Allan got the impression that bad things happened there. They say their son turned into a different boy after the transfer—they knew he wasn’t happy but didn’t know what they could do without evidence. Now Windross was gone—vanished into a damp Ontario fall. Shortly after midnight, according to the missing person’s report, an officer with Orillia Police Service took down the statement of the person who had last seen Windross, an HRC counsellor named T. A. Anderson. According to Anderson, Windross and other residents had boarded a bus to see a hockey game at a community centre. Windross had gone to the game and been returned to HRC, according to Anderson, at which point he’d gone missing. The police report notes that Anderson was conducting a search of the city and HRC grounds, presumably in the middle of the night. Who told him to do so, if anyone, is not clear, and the handwritten eighty-six-word police report contains errors. (Betty and Allan are referred to as “foster parents.”) Windross was nowhere to be found that night, and subsequent searches turned up nothing. Nearly forty years later, in 2013, the Ontario government settled a class action lawsuit out of court, and the claims of more than 1,700 former HRC residents who had alleged systemic abuse and neglect were eventually approved. The lawsuit was part of a wave of similar class action suits from former residents of other institutions across the province. Some former residents, or their families, didn’t meet the legal criteria to be claimants. Betty and Allan’s claim was among those denied. Shortly after the HRC class action was settled, Ontario Provincial Police began looking into numerous deaths connected to the facility—including at least one where there was no proof of death but foul play could not be ruled out. Cases like that of resident 16,628. ROBIN KENNETH WINDROSS was born in Penetanguishene, not far from Orillia, in 1955. Very little is known about his biological father, and Allan was more of a father figure to him. Betty was seventeen when she had Windross. Both pregnancy and delivery were normal. Soon there were other siblings, whom Windross protected. “He was always good to his sisters,” Betty, now in her mid-eighties, says. “When they were babies, he’d sit right in front of their crib and play there.” By age five, Windross had been referred to HRC. Though the exact circumstances of his admission are unclear, it appears that doctors in Penetanguishene and at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children noticed he was developing slowly and recommended he be placed in institutional care—a catch-all solution at the time. But, Allan says, Windross looked worse the longer he stayed at the facility. “If I had known [about the conditions at HRC],” Betty wrote in a legal declaration in 2014, “I never would have put him in there.” Windross was admitted in June 1961, at age five and a half. Though his parents and eventual teachers described him as a good kid, some clinical files alleged he was “bad tempered, hyperactive and [had] quite a behaviour problem.” Betty and Allan deny that Windross ever exhibited any violent behaviour and strongly disagree with HRC’s assessment of their son as aggressive. He was diagnosed as “severely retarded.” Betty was also labelled feeble minded and deemed unable to provide a suitable home. The appraisal of Betty seems more literary than scientific. “She appears delicate, quite thin, and of a nervous temperament,” one comment reads. Windross was placed in a children’s ward. A note in his HRC file described him as a “likeable youngster,” and a letter from a pediatrician mentioned he was “bright enough” to attend a school for children with developmental disabilities. Though he occasionally exhibited destructive behaviour, his HRC file also notes that he showed little to no aggression during sports and was quiet, cooperative, and artistically inclined. Windross eventually became friendly with other residents. “He was a good guy. He was just like me or any other kid in there,” Arthur John Timleck, a former HRC resident, told me. While Timleck would try to escape from the facility any chance he could get, Windross “would run anywhere, without any particular goal in mind given the slightest chance,” a pediatrician told Betty. At the time, she lived and worked in Midland. After Windross ran away during a home visit at age six, the same pediatrician said it would be “better for all” if he remained at HRC for at least another six months. Betty and Allan moved to Orillia around 1970 and lived a short drive from HRC. Records show they visited Windross often and were seen as “loving and concerned.” They repeatedly expressed a desire to bring him home, but HRC raised questions about his future. What would happen to him if they became ill? Who would take care of him? In 1974, the Bellchambers wanted to discuss options that would allow their son to “work toward some type of independent living,” such as learning a trade. HRC suggested they wait “until at least the end of the school term” before discussing “alternatives for future placement.” Then three more years passed. In the fall of 1977, Windross completed his education, which was focused on simple tasks such as telling time and preparing snacks, and was assigned to vocational training. He was put on laundry duty and tasked with delivering clean clothes to other residents. Around this time, Windross was transferred to the adult ward; Betty and Allan noticed that he seemed different after that. He would not allow them to touch him or even go near him. After home visits, Windross wouldn’t want to return to HRC. When they arrived at the facility, Robin would begin shaking and crying. “I almost had to force him out of the car,” Allan wrote in his legal declaration. “He was scared to go back,” Allan says. According to his parents, he was being abused by some of the staff. “He said they would touch him and then he pointed to his private parts,” Betty wrote. The couple was outraged but felt powerless to do anything. “We figured that, without hard proof of what was happening to Robin there was nothing we could do,” Allan wrote. Timleck also told me that sexual abuse was rampant at HRC and said that he was also sexually abused by some staff and residents. “There’s supposed to be night watch. He doesn’t do nothing. He just sits in the office and reads his comics.” By the time Windross went missing that November, HRC was already infamous. A visitor’s account by Pierre Berton for the Toronto Star in 1960—seventeen years earlier—had loosely compared the facility to a concentration camp. Berton described seventy-year-old overcrowded, understaffed, and unsanitary buildings that had fallen into disrepair. The piece led to a heated discussion in the legislative assembly of Ontario, and multiple reports over the following years raised even more awareness of the conditions at HRC. In the 1970s, still prior to Windross’s disappearance, the Globe and Mail reported on the stabbing of two HRC residents by a third resident. This incident, according to the article, led to outrage among the parents of patients who were still at the institution. In 1976, a deputy minister named Joseph Willard conducted more than 175 interviews, some confidential, with staff members, for a report to the Ontario government about the management and operation of HRC. The report recommended introducing an ombudsperson to ensure an independent review of all abuse allegations at the facility. The OPP eventually began an investigation into multiple allegations related to HRC, but that was a year too late for Windross. Despite HRC’s well-documented problems, the officer filing Windross’s missing person’s report in the early hours of November 16, 1977, seemed oblivious to the possibility of foul play. T. A. Anderson’s full name was not recorded. HRC’s files on the case are limited. They include only a handful of reports, letters, and memos authored by police. In June 1978, dozens of staff members conducted another search, finding nothing relevant to the disappearance. Later that year, a funeral for Windross was held at Betty and Allan’s request. In 1985, Windross was retroactively discharged from HRC. In a letter to Allan, HRC offered no apology or explanation for his disappearance, but they offered to plan a memorial service and said they could make a chaplain available. By the end of the twentieth century, some institutions for those with intellectual disabilities were beginning to close, and accountability for past injustices had begun. In 1992, Harold Rogers, a seventy-two-year-old former HRC attendant, was charged in connection with the death of a resident named Albert Morrison almost forty years earlier. According to Rogers, Morrison had run away from HRC and was punished by being made to wear pyjamas. Rogers stated that Morrison showed up to breakfast in plain clothes instead; other residents said they witnessed Rogers assault Morrison after that. Morrison died of a ruptured liver a short while later. At the time of the death, a coroner’s jury initially absolved all HRC staff, including Rogers, of any culpability. He died before the 1992 case went to court. IN JANUARY 2007, a former HRC social worker named Marilyn Dolmage and her husband, Jim, were having lunch with two HRC survivors, Marie Slark and Pat Seth, who had both been long-term residents in the 1960s and ’70s. Like many others, Slark and Seth had endured physical and emotional abuse. Both were sexually abused: Seth at HRC and Slark at another residence where she had been placed by the centre. The two women had been part of Marilyn’s caseload, and they developed a friendship with her after they were discharged. Marilyn herself left HRC in 1973. When the mealtime conversation turned toward HRC, Jim was struck by the vividness of Slark’s and Seth’s recollections. “They were in a unit with twenty-seven or twenty-eight kids,” he says. “They remembered the names of, like, twenty-four—first and last names.” At the time, Canadian institutions were beginning to face calls for reconciliation, including a class action lawsuit, over the history of systemic abuse at residential schools. Seeing parallels between the treatment of two vulnerable groups, the Dolmages began talking with lawyers, who suggested they conduct a videotaped interview of Slark and Seth. After seeing the footage, the lawyers agreed there were grounds for a class action suit but passed them on to another firm. By the spring of 2009, retainers had been signed with Koskie Minsky, a firm that was also involved with the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. At first, everything seemed to be going well. Koskie Minsky suggested they seek $2 billion in damages—same as the residential schools settlement. Though the Dolmages had no legal training and had never been involved in anything of that magnitude, Jim, a retired high school teacher, became Seth’s litigation guardian, and Marilyn became Slark’s. Though the Ontario government had compiled a report in 1971 about the overcrowding and understaffing at HRC and similar institutions in the province, the Crown still fought the class action, denying that abuse or neglect had occurred. With trial looming in 2013, Slark, Seth, and the Dolmages were elated. “We thought . . . the stories would finally be told publicly and would be reported by the media,” Marilyn says. “And that people would get some money—that they’d be able to live better.” Though Koskie Minsky had been promoting a trial publicly, the Dolmages say, the firm forwarded them a settlement offer for $35 million. In the end, more than $8 million of the settlement money went toward legal fees, according to the Dolmages; another $2 million or so went to a class proceedings fund. Though the then attorney general of Ontario stated in 2013 that notices were sent to around 4,500 individuals who may have been eligible as claimants, only 1,758 former residents eventually filed claims; Jim and Marilyn believe that some eligible individuals may not have received the notices due to a lack of accurate addresses on file. Specific amounts for each claimant from the remaining $23.45 million were determined as per a system that assigned points based on class members’ experiences of physical and sexual assault. The Dolmages say that survivors who could not verbalize who had harmed them, or who did not submit a claim for specific harm, were granted $2,000 for having lived at HRC during the defined period. “Here we have been bringing vulnerable people to access justice, and they get screwed again,” Marilyn says. By the time the class action was settled, HRC had already closed. Other decisions in similar class actions followed, including at Rideau and Southwestern regional centres in eastern and southern Ontario. According to the Dolmages, in the later suits, over a million unclaimed dollars were reverted to the provincial government. In 2014, the OPP began a review of a dozen prior criminal investigations with links to HRC. The team consisted of then detective inspector Martin Graham of the OPP’s criminal investigation branch, four detectives, and administrative support. The team also looked into the departure of around 650 residents who had left HRC under unclear circumstances between 1944 and 2009. Some had been “discharged to self,” while others had “eloped.” Investigators requested records from the ministry of community and social services, now part of the ministry of children, community, and social services, which had taken over HRC operations in the 1970s. In an email I obtained, one investigator described a “lack of cooperation” and “an amazing set of roadblocks” in getting the records, which, according to the email, took the MCCSS more than six months to produce. Once the OPP received the records, the team discovered they were vague and, at times, faulty. According to Graham, the OPP started searching for a 10 percent sample of the 650 departures. Eventually, they found all the former residents included in that sample. Windross was not part of this sample, but his case was one of the dozen criminal investigations that were reviewed by police. The central question was to determine what had happened to him: Did he leave HRC of his own volition, or was he a victim of foul play? Graham says foul play has never been established. “There is no evidence, to my knowledge, to indicate that his disappearance is a crime.” But the inconsistencies around Windross’s disappearance have haunted his parents. Anderson told Orillia Police Service that Windross had returned to HRC after the hockey game. But Allan said HRC had told him that Windross was last seen at suppertime, after which they thought he had gone to the game. The OPP confirmed a witness had seen Windross getting into someone’s car on Front Street in Orillia earlier that afternoon. In a subsequent email, Graham said that “no definitive conclusion as to where or when Windross was last seen can be determined.” Marilyn Dolmage, who left HRC four years before Windross’s disappearance, can’t remember anyone with T. A. Anderson’s name. For years after Windross’s disappearance, Betty and Allan would be downtown somewhere and Betty would start looking at men who resembled her son. “I thought we were going to lose her,” Allan wrote in a statutory declaration. As for Allan, he couldn’t drive by the institution without his blood pressure rising. “[Robin] was at HRC so they could take care of him, not lose him,” he wrote. “I am totally disgusted with the staff for their negligence.” The Bellchambers say no one has ever called to apologize or take ownership over the loss of their son. A 2019 article in Orillia Today discussed his disappearance, but apart from that, there has been no media coverage since 1977. No charges were laid in any of the cases the OPP examined. Though Graham said it would not be appropriate for the OPP to comment on HRC’s legacy, he described the Dolmages as “fierce and fantastic” and said Windross’s disappearance was “incredibly disturbing.” A DNA sample was collected from Betty in 2015 and submitted for comparison to unidentified human remains in Ontario and elsewhere, but none has ever matched. Though HRC and many institutions for those living with developmental disabilities have closed—some as recently as 2009—remnants of the system can still be found in today’s treatment of people with disabilities. Megan Linton, a PhD researcher at Carleton University who works with the Disability Justice Network of Ontario, pointed to the continued use of chemical restraints and seclusion—methods of control and punishment that were HRC mainstays, according to survivors. Linton was not familiar with Windross’s case but said she routinely works with vulnerable groups. “I am constantly afflicted and haunted and fear cases like Robin’s because I know . . . so many similar stories where families are just left wanting and waiting for a response, a change, an answer. And nothing ever comes.” ON MOTHER’S DAY in 2023, I joined a group of more than two dozen HRC survivors and supporters at a cemetery across the road from Lake Simcoe. The OPP headquarters, a 640,000-square-foot complex that opened in 1995, loomed over us in the distance. Some former HRC buildings now contained courthouses; still others appeared abandoned. At the cemetery, I planted flowers and listened to stories of survival and escape, including by Windross’s friend Arthur John Timleck, who has since passed away. Notably, Betty and Allan were not in attendance. Recently, they told me they were having health problems. When we spoke at our first meeting, I had asked Betty how she was doing. Her answer was reflexive: “Missing my son,” she had said. At the time, I was looking for people to go on camera for a CBC documentary. Betty and Allan seemed open to it, but the film ended up going in another direction. Still, I left their apartment with Windross’s nearly 500-page HRC file. As Allan walked me out of the building, the conversation returned to the class action. He made a zero with his fist, signalling the amount of settlement money he and Betty had received. It seemed a gesture that encompassed more than just a monetary amount. In the strange reverse alchemy of HRC, Windross’s file photos showed a progressive deterioration. The very first photo of him showed a young boy the institution had not yet touched. “I believe Robin is alive,” Betty wrote in her declaration. “I hope he is happy somewhere.”  BY ZANDER SHERMAN, thewalrus.ca

Former HRC resident shares story of neglect and abuse; 'You had no control over your life. Families had no idea what was going on inside'.  Although he can't read and write, Joe Lambert can share a deeply personal story. The Stratford resident has educated college and university students about his difficult life, which has included his continuing recovery from trauma after living in provincial institutions, including the Huronia Regional Centre (HRC) in Orillia. Sharing experiences about incidents of neglect and abuse have impacted students studying to work in social services fields, some brought to tears to hear first-hand accounts, said Mirjam Schut, who has travelled with Lambert and assists with his presentations at Fanshawe College and Brock University. "Joe always wanted to teach about institutions, about what he went through," said Schut, lead facilitator af Facile Perth. Lambert, who lives independently now with his wife of 19 years, Diana, and their dogs Lady, Misty and Scotia (and several cats) said it is difficult telling his story because it brings back memories and feelings that are "difficult" to deal with. But he says it's important that the younger generation of students are aware of what people with developmental challenges may have lived through. And it is important for their future careers to "know how to respect people and their choices." The HRC was shut down in 2009, and the provincial government later officially apologized for many years of abuse. A class action lawsuit resulted in payments to survivors. Lambert spent time in a group home after leaving the institution, but he doesn't agree with that way of living, preferring to have his own choice on where to live and who to live with, or what and when to eat, for example, he said. During the presentations with students, Schut runs through a slide show. One of the photos shows a beautiful image of the HRC from the outside, which is deceiving, he said. Lambert talks about choices and control. "You had no control over your life," he said of past experience at institutions. "Families had no idea what was going on inside," Schut added. At the end of the presentations, students always ask questions. Professors appreciate the first-person education provided, Schut said. Students are not the only people taking notice of Lambert's efforts. He is winning some prestigious awards for his efforts. Megan Watson, a professor in the developmental service worker program at Fanshawe College, said students leave his presentation with a completely different understanding of institutions and survivors. Watson mentioned his impact in her nomination letter for the Jason Rae award, which he subsequently won. The award is given to a person with an intellectual disability who has demonstrated leadership and given back to community and presented by Community Living Ontario. Lambert travelled to Ottawa by himself to accept the award as part of Community Living Ontario's Inspiring Possibilities conference. Watson said Lambert is a passionate advocate for himself and others. She said he is kind and considerate and his dedication to educating others so that history does not repeat itself is evident in each presentation. Students leave his presentation with a completely different understanding of institutions and survivors, she said. Jessica Jantzi, an adult protective service worker with Family Services Perth Huron, nominated Lambert for the David West/Blanche MacDonald award, presented by the Adult Protective Service Association of Ontario (APSAO). The award is given to a person or group of adults who have a developmental disability, for recognition of achievement in their community. He won that award, too, placing the plaque on the wall near his kitchen table. Schut and Lambert are also hopeful they can expand their presentations to include secondary schools. Lambert is carrying on talking about his past, though it remains hard to do so. He is one of 25 people providing survivor stories for an upcoming book project written by a professor at the University of Waterloo. He will also continue on with presentations at post-secondary schools. "I really believe this is a story the students will remember and take with them when they do their jobs," said Schut. By Paul Cluff, orilliamatters.com