Marcel and Maurice display framed copies of the Ontario government's apology to survivors of institutions. Holding those frames, seeing the official words mounted and preserved behind glass, is a gesture that carries weight far beyond decoration. It is an insistence that this apology be remembered, witnessed, and displayed with the same permanence as anything else worth honouring.
What the apology represented
For much of the twentieth century, Ontario operated a network of large institutions where tens of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities were sent to live — often as children, often against their will, and almost always without meaningful recourse. Rideau Regional Centre, Huronia Regional Centre, Southwestern Regional Centre, and others became home to people who had done nothing wrong except exist in a society that did not know how to include them.
Life inside those institutions varied, but the common threads were segregation, limited freedom of movement, institutional routines imposed on every hour of every day, and a pervasive sense that the people living there did not have the same rights as those outside the walls. Many survivors have described the loss of basic choices: when to eat, when to sleep, whether to go outside, who to speak with. These were not small losses. They were the substance of a life.
In 2013, the Ontario government issued formal apologies to survivors of Huronia Regional Centre, Rideau Regional Centre, and Southwestern Regional Centre, acknowledging the abuse and neglect that took place within those facilities. The apologies were the result of years of advocacy by survivors and their allies, including class-action lawsuits that forced a public reckoning. Disability rights organisations across Canada had long called for this kind of formal recognition, and when it finally came, it mattered — not because words can undo harm, but because denial compounds it.
An act of reclaiming
When Marcel and Maurice frame their copies of the apology, they are doing something specific and deliberate. They are taking a document that was issued by a government institution and bringing it into their own homes, their own walls, their own terms. They are deciding what gets displayed and what gets remembered. For people whose early lives were defined by having those decisions made for them, this is not a small act.
There is also something about the physical object — a frame, glass, a matted document — that says: this is real, this is permanent, this will not be tucked into a drawer and forgotten. Documents can be dismissed. Framed images on a wall are harder to ignore. They become part of the visual landscape of a room, something that guests see and ask about, something that begins conversations.
The Memory Witness and Hope project has always understood that telling your own story requires more than words. It requires choosing how those words are presented, in what form, and on whose terms. Framing the apology is part of that same impulse. It says: we decide what is worth preserving. We decide what is placed with care.
Marcel and Maurice brought their framed copies to share with the group. Seeing them side by side, two survivors who had arrived at the same moment through different paths, was a reminder of how much this project draws on the strength of community. The act of bearing witness is not something done alone.