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BC's Paralyzed Child Protection System

If Judge Ted Hughes can resolve the latest 'near stand-off', he'll chalk up a rare win in a century of setbacks.

Tom Sandborn 16 Feb 2011TheTyee.ca

Tom Sandborn reports on labour and health policy issues for the Tyee. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at [email protected].

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Minister for Children and Family Development Mary Polak: In talks with Hughes.

Ted Hughes, the respected retired judge who authored a landmark report on child protection services in B.C. half a decade ago, is trying to rescue that system -- again.

Hughes is holding discussions with the premier's office in hopes he can help resolve a long simmering dispute between the Ministry of Children and Family Development and Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the current incumbent in the office (the Representative for Children and Youth) that was created in response to his 2006 report.

In November, Hughes described conditions between the ministry and its watchdog agency as a "near standoff", and called on Premier Campbell to intervene.

Since then, the representative has issued a special report to the Legislative Assembly in calling attention to the ministry's failure to report to her office some injuries experienced by children receiving its services, and a second report underscoring her concern that the Ministry failed to properly review seven out of 21 infant deaths that occurred for children receiving services between 2007 and 2009.

Turpel-Lafond has recently issued what she labels as her final report on government progress, or lack thereof, in fully implementing Hughes's recommendations. She notes: "The representative estimates that less than half of them are complete or fully operational. The disappointing reality is that far too many Hughes recommendations have never received the attention they deserve, and at this point likely never will."

Asked about this claim, Minister of Children and Family Development Mary Polak told the Tyee by email that she disagrees with Turpel-Lafond about her ministry's record in completing the recommendations of Hughes.

"In some cases this results from the fact that her report did not re-examine recommendations in past reports (2007, 2008). That means that the RCY has not reviewed MCFD progress on many of these recommendations since 2007 or 2008. In others, the work is ongoing in nature (strong quality assurance functions, standards, training) or the context has changed (First Nations are no longer support [sic] the pursuit of regional Aboriginal authorities)."

John Greschner, chief investigator for the representative's office, informed of the minister's position, reiterated that Turpel-Lafond stands by her judgement that more than half the Hughes policy reforms have not been fully implemented.

Hughes himself declined to comment on this issue.

A year of conflict

The flurry of critical comment from the representative's office at year end capped a year of conflict between Turpel-Lafond and the provincial government. In May last year, Turpel-Lafond went to court to demand access to cabinet documents she needed in order to discharge her duties, a move that Minister Polak dismissed as "a waste of scarce resources," at the time.

Within a few weeks, Turpel-Lafond won a ruling on access to the contested documents, an event that was closely followed by a government announcement that it was withdrawing proposed legislation that would have closed the door to such access in part, some observers thought, in response to an offer from Hughes to mediate in the dispute.

But the troubles between the representative and the government continued through the end of 2010, with Turpel-Lafond reporting in a December statement that the Ministry for Children and Youth was systematically failing to report to her some of the harmful incidents involving children who were receiving services.

For example, under a ministry reporting protocol called CFS Standard 25, the representative was not informed of an incident involving a mentally challenged child who was left alone with the body of her dead mother for days. Turpel-Lafond noted that she only learned of this incident through the media.

Turpel-Lafond said the government left her out of the loop by relying on a reporting protocol, CFS Standard 25, that is outdated because it existed before the Hughes Report and the passage of the RCYA. The same protocol was inadequate, Turpel-Lafond said, because it created a category of "serious incidents" that allegedly did not need to be reported to her office, including such obviously grave matters as incest and sexual assault.

Turpel-Lafond asked the ministry to file to her office a plan to remedy this shortfall in reporting by Jan. 7. The ministry has yet to file such a plan. However, both the ministry and the representative's office told The Tyee that discussions about a new protocol for reporting critical incidents are ongoing, and Minister Polak emphasized in an email to The Tyee that all deaths involving children receiving services from her ministry are regularly reported to the representative.

The unresolved dispute between the ministry and representative, it appears, is about reporting of harm less than death, and about the definition of the phrase "critical incident."

A century of turmoil

An opposition observer believes that the representative's office has been treated with "disdain" this year in the government's response to her funding requests.

"Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond made a compelling argument for a modest funding increase to her office so that she can keep up with the workload of advocating for kids and investigating critical injuries and deaths of children in the province. The B.C. Liberals provided less than half what she needs," said Doug Donaldson, New Democrat MLA for Stikine and the deputy chair of the legislature's finance committee in a release dated Dec. 8, 2010. Donaldson said that Ms. Turpel-Lafond had requested $776,000.00 to fund five new staff positions, but the government essentially cut that allotment in half, only providing her with $334,000.00 for that line item in her budget request.

In this context, Hughes has once again made himself available to try to improve the troubled relationship between the representative and the ministry.

"I am in discussions with the premier's office," Hughes told The Tyee. "We are endeavoring to resolve the issues."

This is only the latest chapter in a long chronicle of trouble, scandals, investigations and sometimes frantic efforts at reform and restructuring at the ministry. A series of reports in the past 15 years have rendered scathing assessments of B.C.'s treatment of children, including the Gove report in 1995, B.C. Child Advocate Joyce Preston's 1999 report "Not Good Enough," and Ted Hughes' 2006 report.

But matters of child welfare policy and practice have been contentious in this province since the end of the 19th century. In 1892, the Alexandra Orphanage opened at the corner of Homer and Dunsmuir in downtown Vancouver. In 1919, the province's first Superintendent of Neglected Children was appointed, and by 1927 the province's first big inquiry into the failures of systems designed to protect children (the BC Child Welfare Survey) was conducted, following accusations of ". . . graft, perjury, falsifying of accounts and general scandalous conditions" in the operations of Vancouver's Children's Aid Society.

Scroll forward to the beginning of the 1960s, when Ruby McKay resigned her position as superintendent of child welfare, saying:

"It was no longer possible in the face of the government's restrictive policies to fulfill the responsibilities of Superintendent of Child Welfare. The job simply couldn't be done without more staff and money. . . Despite many personal pleas for help, the government did nothing."

Responsibility spread too thinly?

During the decades that followed McKay's resignation, child welfare policies continued to be controversial when noticed, but too often far from public attention in B.C. Gradually the horrors inflicted on aboriginal children in federally sponsored residential schools in the province came to light, and, as those unlamented institutions were closed, the provincial welfare system absorbed the population that had previously been segregated, until, by the end of December, 2010, according to MCFD spokesman Darren Harbord, 55 per cent of children in ministry care were of First Nations origin. Harbord was not able to tell The Tyee how many of the 84,000 children in the province who had come to ministry attention and had a file opened last year were native.

In the 1990s, public attention was drawn to shortcomings in B.C. child protection services by the tragic life and death of Mathew Vaudreuil, who, despite innumerable contacts with the ministry, was not protected from an abusive mother, who, horribly damaged herself, in the end killed her son. This outrageous failure of child protection led to the Gove Report and its list of proposed reforms. However, despite the best efforts of Justice Gove and many dedicated social workers, the system continued to malfunction, and yet another scandal led ten years later to the Hughes report, with its own long list of suggested reforms -- source of contention between Turpel-Lafond and Mary Polak's ministry.

The Gove report notes:

"When Matthew died he was five years and nine months old. Not including supervisors, 21 ministry social workers had been responsible for providing him with services. At least 60 reports about his safety and well-being had been made to the ministry. He had been taken to the ministry. He had been taken to the doctor 75 times and had been seen by 24 different physicians."

Clearly, when it comes to reforming a broken social service system, more is not necessarily better. The theme of unproductively multiplied entities and interventions recurs in the Hughes report, which notes that in the decade between Gove and Hughes, the ministry churned through nine different ministers, eight deputy ministers, and seven different directors with lead responsibility for child protection.

Churn has slowed: Polak

According to Minister Polak, since the Hughes report the rate of change has been a bit more modest, although she still notes in an email to The Tyee that "Tom Christiansen was Minister from Aug. 2006 to June 2009, when he decided not to seek re-election. I became responsible for this portfolio in June 2009, and have remained here since that time. Prior to Mr. Christiansen was the Hon. Stan Hagen. The current Deputy Minister has been in place since 2006. There are currently two Provincial Directors responsible for child protection services."

For Adrienne Montani, head of the child welfare advocacy group First Call in Vancouver, a key reform lies outside child protection agencies in the larger economy. She points out that in 2008 B.C. again had the worst numbers for after tax child poverty in Canada, a dubious honour it had held for seven years straight at that point.

Montani calls for government policies like a guaranteed annual income and a living family wage program, both of which, in her view, would help reduce the crippling role that poverty plays in creating and exacerbating difficulties in children's lives.

Montani also supports the call by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond for a comprehensive home visiting nurse program across B.C. as a way to protect early childhood health and development, especially in low-income homes.

Linda Korbin of the BC Association of Social Workers, echoing the concerns of Ruby McKay in 1960, told The Tyee recently that MCFD needed more professionally trained social workers and more adequate resources. Referring to the Gove, Preston and Hughes reports, Korbin said:

"Every one of these reports is a wake up call, but no one is waking up. This is a crisis that requires more than a defensive response from the government."  [Tyee]

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