In the house that once belonged to Maria Grieco, it’s as if time has stopped. Golden light streams through the curtains of her bedroom window, glancing off a framed relief of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus on the wall. Plastic flowers sit in vases on each bedside table, flanking a neatly made bed that Maria hasn’t slept in for nearly two years.

Maria moved into the house in northwest Toronto when she immigrated from Italy in 1967. It’s where she raised her two sons, and where she lived through the death of her husband in the ’80s, and into her old age.

After her son Alex Grieco moved back in 1998, his life revolved around his mother’s care. Even at 90, Maria remained stubborn and fiercely independent, starting every day by feeding the birds and cleaning the moss-green carpet that covered the front room. “I’d be going to work in the winter time, it’s snowing, and she’d be out there with a shovel,” says Alex, now 62, burly and greying, with a soft-spoken voice. “She was the type of lady that—you can’t stop her, you know?”

But by 2020, it was clear she was losing her independence. She wanted to mow the lawn, but couldn’t pull the cord anymore. She started using a walker. Alex’s partner, Donna Bardy, who is trained as a personal support worker (PSW) and helped with Maria’s care, started noticing signs of dementia. The couple arranged for help at home a few times a week. Then early one morning, Maria fell in the living room, splitting her head open in a gash that needed 12 stitches. Alex and Donna could see that her care would take more than what they could offer at home.

In the summer of 2024, Maria entered Villa Colombo Vaughan, a 160-bed non-profit long-term care home tucked into a forested area off Highway 27, south of Islington Avenue. The home is managed by UniversalCare Canada Inc. and owned by Villa Charities, which also owns Villa Colombo Home for the Aged, a North York long-term care home which, according to Ontario’s Attorney General, had one of the highest rates of COVID-19 cases in the first year of the pandemic. During that time, the North York home was put under Humber River Hospital’s management after the Ontario government determined it had inadequate infection control.

Maria only spoke Italian, and the draw of Villa Colombo Vaughan was that it was advertised as offering culturally specific care for Italian residents, including staff who spoke the language. But a month into Maria’s stay, the couple say they started to see what felt like gaps in care. They say most of the staff could not, in fact, communicate with her, leaving her without anyone who understood her for several hours a day. Then came two falls in rapid succession and a series of incidents that Alex and Donna say point to a pattern of mistreatment and neglect. “She went through a lot of torture,” Alex says. When speaking about particularly painful things, his eyes drift away to a spot above your head, and he speaks as if holding something back.

The couple began to intervene regularly and to complain with increasing urgency, first to the administrators, then to the Ministry of Long-Term Care. They meticulously documented everything, and asked for correspondence from the home in writing. Where grief and exhaustion turned Alex inward, the ordeal made Donna more herself—someone who rallies, who organizes dates and paperwork, and answers every message or email promptly, any time of day or night. If she believed Maria had received improper care one evening, Donna would be writing detailed emails about it to the Ministry of Long-Term Care and the home’s administrators the next day. The Local has seen footage and viewed documentation, including correspondence from the home, that corroborates many of the family’s accounts.

Then in July 2025, Donna and Alex received their first restriction from Villa Colombo Vaughan: the home’s administrators banned Alex from visiting Maria in the home for three days, citing concerns about his behaviour. The second restriction, this time against both of them, lasted three months without any explanation, the couple say. The third began in February 2026. Maria died the following month.

Each time, Alex and Donna allege, the restriction followed a major complaint from the couple regarding Maria’s treatment in the home. Villa Colombo Vaughan’s administrators, the couple says, weaponized its code of conduct and safety protocols regarding resident care to punish them for their complaints to the ministry.

Villa Colombo Vaughan declined to speak with The Local for this story, and did not respond to detailed questions about the family’s allegations.

Others have reported similar events at long-term care homes across the province. Five years on from the unanimous passing of a motion in the Ontario legislature to end the misuse of trespass and restriction policies by long-term care homes, advocates report that families are still being banned from seeing their loved ones in long-term care as punishment for complaining about resident treatment. The scale of the problem is unknowable: each case is siloed, and there’s no way to track everyone affected by restrictions. But the ensuing harm, advocates say, is tangible, with families afraid to complain about mistreatment by a home, and aging people forcefully kept apart from those they love during their final years of life.

About two months into Maria’s stay at Villa Colombo, Alex and Donna installed a surveillance camera in her room. They were concerned about issues Maria kept bringing up about her care, and wanted to see what was happening for themselves.

On the night of Maria’s first on-camera fall, a PSW set up a portable commode next to Maria’s bed after tucking her in. When the other PSW asked her about it, she said cheerfully, “In case we don’t get her.” Adding, “sometimes, she can balance.”

But Maria’s family say she was a known fall risk. Alex and Donna say they’d posted signs on the wall emphasizing the point. Not long before the fall, “we told them, ‘Listen, do us a favour,” Alex says. “‘Do not put anything by the bed. Do not put the commode. Do not put the wheelchair. Do not put nothing by the bed.” If Maria thought she could reach whatever was near the bed, they said, then she would take a chance, and she’d risk a fall.

That morning, Maria woke at 6 a.m. and moved in slow, unsteady steps to use the commode. She fell on her attempt to get back into bed, hitting the ground head-first. For five minutes, she screamed “aiuto, aiuto”—Italian for “help,” perhaps the word that passed Maria’s lips the most in the final year and a half of her life—but no one came. Alex and Donna say her room was within earshot of the nurse’s station in the hallway.

A PSW finally arrived and found Maria face-down and bleeding, unable to move herself. While the PSW waited another 12 minutes for a staff member qualified to move her, all she could do was try to reassure Maria in what appears to be the few Italian words she knew. “Ambulanza,” she said, struggling. Another PSW, left in the room with Maria for a few minutes, just stared wordlessly from the doorway while the elderly woman sobbed and reached a hand out to her.

Caring for elderly residents in long-term care is difficult work. Overworked staff struggle to keep up with constant requests and concerns from families. Mistakes can happen. Emotions run high. It isn’t uncommon for the family members of residents in long-term care to become fixated on their loved one’s well-being in the home, to be hypervigilant, and to get angry when they see their loved one hurt or mistreated. The problem is, inevitably, cyclical: if you fear your family member isn’t being adequately cared for in a home, you’re more likely to become hyperaware of how staff are treating them, which makes you prone to pick up on more issues. Hostility between staff and families can feed into itself.

But experts in health care provision say that no matter how challenging the relationship with a resident’s family becomes, no matter how querulous they may be, it’s unthinkable to ban a long-term care resident from receiving visitors unless residents or staff are at risk of being harmed or abused.

“Protecting staff is important, yes, and you cannot have abusive people going into facilities,” says Ian DaSilva, chief operating officer of the Ontario Personal Support Worker Association and Canadian Support Workers Association. “[But] denying someone access to their family is akin to a prison. I am not convinced that they have the constitutional power to do this.”

He argues that it’s dangerous for staff or administrators to get to arbitrarily decide who is allowed into the home. If the home has concerns about a visitor’s effect on staff or resident safety, he says, the only reasonable step is to involve the proper authorities, including police.

Doris Grinspun, chief executive officer of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, recognizes how difficult work can be for staff in any long-term care setting, and especially in homes that are under-resourced. “But as staff, we are hopefully educated and trained to understand that there is no ‘demanding’ patient, family member, or resident,” she says. “There are people with needs that need to be responded to, and we need to find the best ways.”

For the families of some long-term care home residents, the toll of being prohibited from seeing your loved one can be more unbearable than the toll of caring for them at home. Carole Brisson-Balfour, a paralegal in her 60s living in Welland, Ont., opted to take her mother out of long-term care rather than endure a visitation ban. At home, Brisson-Balfour is caring for her 86-year-old father, a daughter with multiple sclerosis, and her husband, who has a stage four cancer diagnosis. “[But] I either don’t see her and it tortures her and me, or I take her out and figure it out on the way,” Brisson-Balfour says, beginning to cry. In some ways, she says, having the space and time to care for your elderly mother is a luxury. “I’m just a little exhausted.”

In 2018, Maria Sardelis began advocating for the rights of families of long-term care residents and people with disabilities living in congregate care following her own 300-day ban from seeing her mother in an Ottawa long-term care home. When Sardelis was removed from the LTC home, her mother, who had dementia, burst into tears. With Sardelis gone so long, her mother’s dementia somehow led her to believe her daughter was in prison. “She’d call me and she’d say, ‘Maria, Maria, are they feeding you?’” Sardelis says. When the ban was lifted and the two were finally reunited, her mother leaned over to her conspiratorially one afternoon and said, in her native Greek, “It’s just the two of us here. Now tell me, how did you escape?”

The third time Villa Colombo restricted Alex and banned Donna from seeing Maria was in February 2026. In a letter to the couple, the home wrote that the restriction was pending the outcome of an investigation into a “number of complaints” about Alex and Donna’s behaviour at the home—they didn’t specify a particular incident that had led to the decision. But just a week beforehand, Alex and Donna had complained after workers at the home tried to place a catheter for Maria multiple times in the same day, causing her pain and distress. The couple allege she had been held down despite refusing the procedure, and that for the next three days, she repeated the details of the experience to Alex over and over again, distraught. (The Local has seen footage of the incidents.) He and Donna asked the home repeatedly for the names of the nurses who’d been present during the procedure, including in the days before they were banned, because they intended to make a complaint to the College of Nurses of Ontario.

Alex defied the restriction the day after he received the letter, visiting his mother in the morning. He was worried about Maria’s ability to eat without him. “I really didn’t believe that they would be able to stop me from seeing her, and helping her the way I usually do,” he says. In camera footage from Maria’s room, the home’s administrator, Anna Maria Urbanowicz, arrives to talk to Alex, reminding him that he’s been restricted from the home. Maria sits next to him in her wheelchair, small and quiet. “If you have to, call the police,” says Alex. “I’m here with my mother. I haven’t done anything. If you have evidence, just show me.”