Ed Tubb

@edtubb.bsky.social

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Editor at the Toronto Star, with a focus on courts, justice and occasional greyhound content. Journalism is a discipline of verification. he/him | etubb at thestar dot ca

Why the U.S. has federal regulations against long-term seclusion Keeping someone locked in isolation for years in a psychiatric facility is basically unheard of in the present-day United States, said psychologist Dr. Pierluigi Mancini, interim president and CEO of Mental Health America, the country’s leading non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of mental health. “I can’t even fathom a case where someone can justify or make a request to keep someone in seclusion for years,” Mancini said in a recent interview. “I don’t know of a situation where someone would be restrained for years and in a facility that is licensed and accredited here in the United States.” A similar sentiment was expressed in a 2023 expert report from psychologist Janice LeBel and mental health nurse Kevin Ann Huckshorn, who jointly created the six core strategies, a widely used, evidence-based method for reducing the use of seclusion and restraint. The pair authored the report for a proposed class-action lawsuit against Waypoint launched by Toronto law firm Rochon Genova.
A screenshot of the Wikipedia page for former U.K. prime minister Andrew Bonar Law, highlighting the pronunciation guide to his name — /ˈbɒnər ˈlɔː/ — with the mouseover text on the ɒ symbol, explaining it stands for "o" as in body. As in, no: His name is not Boner Law.
Following a hearing each year, the ORB, made up of former judges, lawyers, doctors, and laypersons, has confirmed that Azevedo remains unfit to stand trial. The records show he’s struggled to understand his options for a plea, and can’t explain what it means to take an oath. In the case of Camelott Hamblett, the Star’s investigation found that the board rarely inquired about his living conditions in 20 years of seclusion, despite having a duty to look into the issue. In Azevedo’s case, the board did ask about his quality of life in 2024, but made no recommendation to try to end the seclusion. But there may be some hope on the horizon. Earlier this year, the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned the ORB’s latest decision in Hamblett’s case, with the senior judges expressing shock and ordering an independent assessment by an outside expert. Azevedo’s last ORB hearing came one month later, in February. It brought a surprise: Waypoint and the Crown supported Szigeti’s request for his own independent assessment, which the board then ordered. Szigeti believes the court’s decision in Hamblett’s case, the Star’s ongoing reporting, including for this investigation, and “the public’s reception of shock and horror and empathy” appear to be making an impact. “When the Toronto Star broke the story, it reached a lot of people,” Szigeti said, adding she has been flooded with sympathetic messages. The overwhelming reaction, she said: “How does something like this happen?”
In a letter on behalf of the family submitted at Azevedo’s most recent ORB hearing in February, Azevedo’s sister-in-law, Susan, wrote that they understand restrictive measures, including seclusion, are necessary for now, but the family is concerned about Waypoint’s “prolonged reliance” on restraint without a strategy to reduce it over time. After all, she wrote, it is clear that her brother-in-law is only getting worse. She also expressed concern that the hospital reports do not document how long Azevedo spends outside of his room on seclusion relief, the number of full days he’s gone without any seclusion relief, and how often relief was withheld due to staffing or other operational issues. She wrote that Azevedo’s lack of improvement must be understood in the context of several factors, including his prolonged seclusion. In an interview, Susan said she doesn’t feel unsafe around her brother-in-law and has had no problem bringing her children along for hospital visits. She said the family is focused on “baby steps” on Azevedo’s road to rehabilitation, the first one being: ensuring he’s out of his room on seclusion relief every day. “It breaks my heart that Andrew, who used to be up and down the soccer field, always outside till the lights came on, hasn’t been outside, hasn’t heard the birds, hasn’t had any fresh air,” Susan said.
Agnes Campbell Macphail (March 24, 1890 – February 13, 1954) was a Canadian politician and the first woman elected to Canada's House of Commons. She served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1921 to 1940; from 1943 to 1945 and again from 1948 to 1951, she served as a member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, representing the Toronto riding of York East. Active throughout her life in progressive politics, Macphail worked for multiple parties, most prominently the Progressive Party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the United Farmers of Ontario. She promoted her ideas through column-writing, activist organizing, and legislation.
Sokolovski's lawyer for his civil lawsuit is Sohaib Habib. Reached by the Star late last week, Habib said he had not yet learned his client had been arrested on U.S. money laundering charges. Nor did Habib know that his client had been interviewed by FBI special agent Hannah Monroe, the lead investigator in the Ryan Wedding case, in Chicago this April - the month before Habib filed the KuCoin lawsuit on Sokolovski's behalf. (Court documents do not detail what was discussed in that Chicago interview, which also involved the RCMP.) Habib and fellow Delex LLP partner Brendan Peters - who were profiled in the Star in an unrelated story published the same day as Sokolovski's arrest - are experts on cryptocurrency fraud. In an interview with the Star, they said Sokolovski had a legitimate case to be fought against KuCoin's parent companies; they questioned the legitimacy of freezing Sokolovski's accounts. The lawyers knew nothing of Sokolovski's alleged criminal allegations, Peters said. "We were dealing with the victim of the scam," he added. (Neither lawyer weighed in on the criminal case against Sokolovski. Speaking generally, Peters said: "I think one way to look at it is, criminals can get scammed.")
Chart showing the cost of electricity generation by type from 2009 to 2024, showing the sharp drop in solar panel and wind energy prices over this period to far below the cost of fossil fuels and especially nuclear.
A post with the text: "For people like Klein, a political 'win' is when you convince somebody that your position/policy is the right one. What a political 'win' should be is the implementation of policy that actually helps people. The political game the abundance bros are playing is fundamentally the wrong one." Replying to a post with the text: "The Ezra Klein style of caring about political “strategy” over consistent moral principles and values of your own reminds me of how a lot of pop culture consumers obsessively track box office and chart performance rather than just evaluating based on whether things are good or if they like them"
KLEIN One of the things I’ve thought about is the need to raise the status of old-fashioned politics. I’ve been surprised to find myself feeling that way. But one way the second Trump term has changed me is I think what got built, for all of its flaws in the back half of the 20th century, was much more fragile than I’d understood. Not just the legislation or any of that but the actual sense of what you could and could not do, what we would and would not accept. The sense that we could just tumble all the way back has become much more real to me. So the work that people did to begin to build those guardrails and how hard that actually was, and the disappointment we eventually felt — I feel like we began to take something actually quite beautiful for granted or only see what wasn’t there as opposed to what was. It has forced, for me, a sense of: How did they do it? How did they get out of the last one of these? COATES I think I’m speaking for a broader community here: We are not happy, but we are not surprised, man.
KLEIN One thing that I am seeing happen — and I think I really saw it in some ways more in Trump’s first term, but I see it now, too: The worse the other side gets, the more people want their reaction and their strategy to be emotionally constant with how they’re feeling about it. Because these people are so bad, there can be no quarter. Somebody we both know — I’ll say an eminent academic of one form or another — email me after these pieces and say to me: We are not on the same side anymore. That what I was doing — it was too far. Like, we are just not on the same side if I could say these things. I have a feeling right now that we are closer to genuine national rupture, certainly, than we’ve been in my lifetime. The idea that this experiment, that America could topple into something else, into something much worse, into some kind of new extended regime feels very real to me.
Linda, the greyhound with the big eyes, stamps her feet and chirps in anticipation.