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Dietrich Freed!
A Senior and the System
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Beryl Wajsman
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16 July 2008
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“You struck out against uncontrolled bureaucrats abusing citizens,” says Greenbaum
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| Erna Hagen Dietrich with Ura Greenbaum, Executive Director of The Association for the Protection of Persons Under Curatorship. |
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| This past April 9 our front page story focused on Erna Hagen Dietrich, citizen, trying to get out of the public curatorship that had been imposed on her. Hers was one story. But it was not just any story. For it contained within it all the elements of what can go wrong when a senior turns to the “system” and meets the tyranny of the mindless.
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$">I am proud to say that we didn’t just report the story, we advocated for Mrs. Dietrich. That too is the role of community journalism. To be the equalizer, le défenseur, the true fourth estate of government when the executive, legislative and judicial branches fail. I featured this story on my radio show several times. We followed up in these pages. Working in concert with Ura Greenbaum, executive director of The Association for the Protection of Persons Under Curatorship, in his unceasing struggle to bring together the medical and legal resources necessary to secure Mrs. Dietrich’s freedom, we called bureaucrats and political operatives. Last Thursday, July 10, the court discharged Erna Hagen Dietrich from curatorship.
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$">“All I want is justice!” Mrs. Dietrich pleaded in our first interview. Well, justice is something that has not yet been achieved since for justice to be served she would have to be compensated for her pain, suffering, the loss of her home and nearly every indignity that the “system” can heap on an individual. But at least she is finally free.
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$">In May of 2006 Erna Hagen Dietrich, a single 68-year-old woman, was living peacefully in her apartment on l’Acadie Blvd. and managing a residential fiveplex owned by her ex-husband who had returned to Germany in 1965 and allowed her, by giving her power of attorney, the use of the revenue from the fiveplex in lieu of alimony.
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$">A few years earlier she had given her power of attorney to two people to manage the property for her. She started to have trouble with them and felt they were not turning over all the revenues to her. She tried some lawyers to resolve the issue but to no avail. She looked around for more help and someone suggested 0that she try her local CLSC in Park Extension.
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$">Once there, a social worker told her that the most effective method of resolving her situation would be to put herself into curatorship and let the Public Curator deal with her property. That this was the best way the public service could help her, the social worker said. Though she wrote in her notes that Mrs. Dietrich did not seem to realize the seriousness of curatorship, this social worker sent her for a psychiatric evaluation.
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$">The psychiatric evaluation declared her mentally unfit. The reports were forwarded on to the Public Curator. In the fall of 2006 legal proceedings were begun by the Public Curator to take control of Mrs. Dietrich’s life. She was mentally fit enough though to retain the services of a lawyer and make sure that there was a written agreement signed with the Curator that this would only be a provisional and partial regime of curatorship and relate only to the administration of the fiveplex.
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$">However, by February of 2007 the official representative of the Curator in charge of her file decided to pursue final and full curatorship over Mrs. Dietrich. Mrs. Dietrich objected and did not attend the first court hearing. It was postponed to the spring. At the spring hearing in May, almost a year after the fateful day she had entered the CLSC looking for legal help, the Superior Court of Quebec awarded full curatorship though Mrs. Dietrich was not in attendance and the judge never saw her. Instead of postponing the proceedings and sending a bailiff to assure that Mrs. Dietrich be in attendance, the court simply went with the recommendations of the Curator’s office and legal counsel. Through all this Mrs. Dietrich had kept up an unending stream of correspondence vigorously objecting to these procedures. But justice was deaf, not just blind. And Erna Hagen Dietrich’s life was about to go from bad to worse.
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$">The landlord in the apartment she had lived in for 15 years was looking for ways to evict her because he wanted higher rent than what the rental board was awarding. He obtained a judgment from the rental board to do major repairs in her apartment. She would have to vacate for 60 days. He was ostensibly responsible for her housing costs during that period.
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$">Mrs. Dietrich returned often to see her apartment during that period. But no work was progressing. Unbeknownst to her, the Curator and her landlord were in contact. On Oct. 1, 2007, Mrs. Dietrich was informed by the new Curator’s representative on her file that in return for $2,000 paid by Mrs. Dietrich’s landlord, the Public Curator had decided to terminate her lease. The Curator’s office cut off her phone and electricity and put Mrs. Dietrich’s possessions in storage where they remain until today. She was left homeless. Literally. She has been relying on friends who have taken her in for various periods of time.
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$">Then the Curator went further. Since Mrs. Dietrich had been declared incompetent and an incompetent person cannot act as a power of attorney, the Public Curator located her ex-husband in Germany (still the registered owner of the fiveplex) and told him to appoint someone else to manage the property. After losing her home she was now deprived of her income.
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$">To complete her Kafkaesque nullification, the Public Curator’s office began receiving her mail so she could not even receive communications from the very government authorities to whom she was complaining. Her bank accounts were closed. The balances transferred to the Public Curator’s account and her pension cheques were also re-directed to it.
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$">Despite these trials and outrages, Mrs. Dietrich maintained the semblance of mind to seek out community resources to help her. Côte des Neiges’ Project Genesis suggested she see Ura Greenbaum. Earlier this year Greenbaum made a complaint to the Protecteur du citoyen against the CLSC that originally started this whole process.
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$">Greenbaum also had Dietrich re-evaluated by an independent social worker and also by a new psychiatrist. Both assessments agreed that the original social worker had been over-zealous at best and that Mrs. Dietrich was not incapable and should not have been put into public curatorship. Those reports were filed in Dietrich’s court record this past March triggering Mrs. Dietrich’s re-assessment and eventual liberation last week.
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$">Despite his leading role in this victory Greenbaum was very generous in his praise of our role in this story. In a letter to me he wrote, “Three out of three for you. (Referring to the Itzhayek and Marchildon cases.) You struck out against wayward and uncontrolled bureaucrats abusing citizens rights and freedoms.” But one’s mind moves to the thousands still left to help. And to the stubborn callousness of some bureaucrats.
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$">During last week’s court hearing, despite the favourable evaluations of Mrs. Dietrich by experts which had been presented to the court, Greenbaum reports that the very bureaucrat who had put Dietrich out of her home still presented herself in court to oppose Dietrich’s liberation. Greenbaum feels it was an effort to avoid certification of the abuse of Mrs. Dietrich by the Public Curator’s “unfounded proceedings” all along.
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$">I wrote at the start that Dietrich’s is just one story, but a story with elements that affect all. Among those are three questions that remain unanswered. Why would a social worker talk to a citizen about curatorship when that person had come in, with a friend, simply to ask for advice on legal remedies? How was the curator’s representative allowed to ignore a written agreement and extend the scope of the curatorship? And finally, why would the Curator’s office sanction the dislocation of a citizen from her home in violation of the Civil Code’s own provision?
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$">This has been a story of statocratic power run amok. The perversion of law. The nullification of individual consequence. Society’s ills. Greenbaum wrote to me that we “…did the right thing in the face of state power when too many simply retreat and surrender…” I can assure Ura, and all of you, that while these ills remain rampant, there will be no retreat and no surrender.
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