TheRoom.

The room was eight feet by eight feet. Concrete walls. No windows. A desk. A chair.

That was where the school board put Samira—diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, placed in a “specialized program” she and her parents trusted—for roughly 80 percent of the 2024/25 school day. She was eight years old.

Her parents did not know. The school did not tell them. They learned about the room from a visit by their local social services agency.

The school called it a “calm room.”

This is not new. We have done this before, in this province, to people we said we were going to take care of.

In December 2013, Premier Kathleen Wynne stood in the Ontario legislature and apologized—formally, on behalf of the Crown—to thousands of survivors of Huronia Regional Centre and the province’s other institutions for people with developmental disabilities.¹ Huronia, in Orillia, operated for 133 years before its doors closed in 2009.² Rideau Regional Centre in Smiths Falls. Southwestern Regional Centre at Cedar Springs, near Chatham.³ The apology followed a $35-million class-action settlement⁴ and decades of documented testimony from people who had been warehoused, isolated, restrained, secluded, and educationally abandoned—many of them as children, many of them autistic or otherwise neurodivergent.

The province apologized for what it called a “painful chapter” of its history.¹ It pledged that this would not happen again.

Samira was placed in the concrete room eleven years after that apology.

I · VocabularyThe architecture of institutional cruelty

The architecture of institutional cruelty is remarkably consistent across centuries. The Victorian asylum had its quiet rooms and padded cells. The mid-twentieth-century state hospital had its seclusion rooms. The developmental-disability institution had its locked dormitories and isolation wards. Erving Goffman, writing about what he called “total institutions” in 1961,⁵ catalogued the pattern: a controlled space, a controlled body, a controlled day, and a vocabulary designed to make the control sound therapeutic.

“Calm room” belongs in that vocabulary.

So does “calming period”—the phrase used in October 2024 when Samira’s parents were asked to keep her home for a few days after an incident. Those few days became a year. The school directed her not to return; no return date was set; follow-up was ignored. She was not formally expelled, because formal expulsion would have triggered procedural rights. She was, in the bureaucratic euphemism, “excluded.”

Throughout the exclusion, the board provided one hour of virtual learning per day, on material below her abilities.

Huronia survivors testified that the institution’s “school” consisted of busywork, sorting tasks, and instruction far below their capabilities. Many of them learned for the first time, as adults during the class action, that they had been denied an actual education because the institution had decided they did not need one. The Ontario government, in 2013, agreed that this was a harm worth $35 million to acknowledge.⁴

One hour a day. Below her abilities. For a year. She is eight.

II · PatternThe audit, and the parallel architecture it describes

The audit findings now circulating—§ 4.6.1 on the unmonitored use of seclusion spaces, § 4.3.1 on exclusion practices, § 4.4.1on the systemic failure to notify parents—describe Samira’s case not as an outlier but as an instance. The province has constructed, inside its publicly funded school system, a parallel architecture of confinement for children whose disabilities make them inconvenient. The architecture is small, distributed, and locally deniable. Every individual room is “just” a quiet space. Every individual exclusion is “just” a calming period. Every individual case has a specific behavioural justification.

This is precisely how the institutional era worked. Huronia did not begin as a horror. It began as a “training school.” Each restraint was justified. Each seclusion was therapeutic. Each child sent there was a special case. The horror was not the existence of any single decision; it was the accumulation, the normalisation, the absence of anyone outside the institution who was allowed to see what was happening inside.

Samira’s parents were not allowed to see what was happening inside.

That is the line. That is the historical signature. When a publicly funded institution puts a child in a concrete cell, deprives her of education, and conceals the practice from her family, it is not a school making a clinical decision. It is the asylum returning under softer language.

III · DefenceWhat defenders always say

The defenders of these rooms will say what defenders have always said. That the children are dangerous to themselves or others. That the staff are overworked. That the resources are insufficient. That the alternative—restraint, ejection, police—is worse. Every one of those statements has been said, in those words, in every previous era of institutional confinement. The provincial commissions of the early twentieth century heard them. The Ontario Hospital reformers heard them in the 1950s. The Huronia administrators said them until the doors closed in 2009.

The fact that the people inside the institution find the practice difficult to give up is not a defence of the practice. It is a description of how institutions metabolise cruelty into routine.

IV · ReckoningThe reckoning that always arrives

There will be a public reckoning for this. There has been one for every previous chapter. The only questions are how long it takes, how many children pass through the rooms before it arrives, and what the apology will read like when a future premier finally stands up and delivers it.

The apology, when it comes, will not be enough. The 2013 apology was not enough—Huronia survivors are still suing, still testifying, still dying without seeing the records the province kept on them.⁶ An apology is what the Crown offers when accountability has already failed.

Samira deserves accountability now. She deserves the records of every minute she spent in that room. She deserves a formal finding that her year of exclusion was unlawful under the Education Act⁷ and discriminatory under the Ontario Human Rights Code⁸—a discrimination claim the Supreme Court of Canada has already made plain in Moore v. British Columbia, where Justice Abella wrote, for a unanimous bench, that “adequate special education… is not a dispensable luxury” but rather “the ramp that provides access to the statutory commitment to education made to all children.”⁹ She deserves an independent provincial inventory of every other “calm room” in every other board, and every other child who has been excluded under the same euphemism. She deserves, at minimum, the protections this province extended—eventually, posthumously, inadequately—to the children of Huronia.