Representation Agreements: An important tool
By Joanne Taylor, Executive Director, Nidus Personal Planning Resource Centre and Registry
On September 1, 2011, amendments to the Representation Agreement Act and other personal planning legislation come into effect. This is good news for British Columbians, particularly for seniors and people with disabilities.
Joanne Taylor, Executive Director of Nidus Personal Planning Resource Centre and Registry.
The first time I saw the Representation Agreement Act was in 1992 at a meeting of the Project to Review Adult Guardianship. The ‘draft’ Act was being projected on a screen and we were taken through it paragraph by paragraph (I learned later to call the paragraphs Sections and Sub-sections). New to the process, I struggled to make sense of the language and concepts. At the same time, there was an excited energy in the room. What really impressed me was the mix of people – lawyers, notaries, seniors, people with disabilities, advocates, family members, consumers of mental health services, health care providers, staff of financial institutions, community leaders. I was intrigued. What could inspire people to sit in a crowded room reviewing legislation?
I soon learned that there was a lot more to the project than rules and regulations. I was witnessing law-making from the ‘ground up.’ The goal was to create a legal alternative to adult guardianship; the law reform process was being driven by the community. I had experience with the health system and understood how being labelled incapable could easily make a person invisible. But until then I had no idea that if an adult is found incompetent in a legal context, it means the individual becomes a non-person and loses their decision making rights.
The Representation Agreement Act provides a way for an adult to receive support with decision making, without losing their rights and while retaining their personhood. It does this by looking at capability from the individual’s perspective. Jon’s capability is defined by who Jon is, rather than by an absolute standard of who a ‘capable’ person should be. The duties of Jon’s representatives are to support Jon’s capability to express his self-determination. When using the Representation Agreement with a financial institution or hospital, more people come to learn how Jon is capable and to support his self-determination. In this way, Representation Agreements help make our communities more welcoming, and enable everyone to participate in them. These are goals shared by Community Living BC.
My involvement with Representation Agreements over the past 18 years has been to help put the law into practice. In 1995, a Resource Centre, now called Nidus, was established to facilitate education and the making of Representation Agreements. While participating in numerous government reviews of the legislation, Nidus continued to help people learn about and use Representation Agreements. The knowledge gained from these experiences is shared through stories, fact sheets and videos on our new website.
With the government’s announcement of amendments coming into effect on September 1, we celebrate the re-affirmation of the original vision for Representation Agreements and an end to uncertainty about their future. Representation Agreements are here to stay! Thanks in part to a grant from Community Living BC, we are able to provide timely and accessible information on Representation Agreements to the broader community and set a positive example for other provinces and countries.
For information on the amendments and Representation Agreements, please visit www.nidus.ca.
