Documentary: Disability Activist Fights for Right to Manage His Own Care

Sunday, April 14, 2013 | Categories: Documentaries | Read 1 comments1

Paul Caune is leading the charge for the right of people with disabilities to manage their own care.

You can’t miss Paul Caune in a meeting. What you see is a man in a wheelchair, all but immobile. His tracheotomy hose leads from his throat to the ventilator on the back of his chair.

What you hear is a take-no-prisoners fighter – a man using the force of his own experience to make a case.

He will tell anyone that most politicians and health care bureaucrats are from “planet clueless”, when it comes to the rights of people with disabilities, and that it’s time to do something about it.

Members of Civil Rights Now Caune and his cohorts call themselves, “Civil Rights Now”. They want self-determination – the right to manage their own care, make their own decisions.

In 2005, Paul Caune’s life changed dramatically, when he took on Lion’s Gate Hospital in North Vancouver.

He was 36, a patient there. His disability had escalated and the group home where he’d lived before wouldn’t – couldn’t – take him back. The Health Authority told him he couldn’t stay in the hospital either. He would have to live the rest of his life in BC’s long term care institution – the George Pearson Centre.

Paul Caune was having none of it.
Karin Wells’s documentary is called “The Golden Rule.”

Corrections

Please note there are two errors in “The Golden Rule”.

1. I was not sent to George Pearson Centre at night, but rather on a cold, late-morning in December 2005. My mother, who is now in her mid-80s, has misremembered this.

2. The reporter stated the workers I rely on for personal care live in my apartment building. In fact, the staff are on-site 24/7 and when they finish a shift they go home. My building has a office for the on-site staff.