Why MCFD Minister Mitzi Dean Needs to Resign

Of course Mitzi Dean should resign as children and family development minister.

Dean should have resigned in June after revelations of horrific abuse of a sister and brother she was supposed to protect in a foster care placement a judge described as a “house of horrors.” The emaciated 11-year-old brother died as a result of the abuse.

I won’t detail the tortures the children endured over 18 months after they were taken into government care. But imagine young children you know subjected to beatings, degradation, starving and despair. With no escape, and no one to protect them. Just waking up each day into a nightmare.

The principle of ministerial responsibility holds that cabinet ministers are accountable not only for their own actions, but also for the actions of their subordinates. Dean had been the minister responsible for only five months when the boy died, but the principle applies. (Unless the government is willing to blame its failures on Dean’s predecessor Katrine Conroy, now the finance minister.)

You might excuse Dean if the children were abused and tortured despite the ministry’s best efforts to protect them. No minister can watch over every foster home in the province.

But that’s not what happened. MCFD failed the two children and enabled their abuse. The ministry requires social workers to visit foster homes every three months to check on the children. No one had checked on the abused children for seven months.

And as The Tyee’s Katie Hyslop and Jen St. Denis have reported, the Children’s Ministry routinely fails to meet its own requirements to ensure the safety of children taken into government care.

In fact, they found that none of the regions audited in 2020 or 2021 met even a 50 per cent compliance rate with ministry standards of child protection.

And this month, The Tyee reported the multiple failures in the East Fraser MCFD office responsible for ensuring the safety of children taken from their parents. The ministry workers failed to do required visits and skipped initial screenings of prospective foster parents and caregivers, including criminal record checks.

None of this is new. The ministry has stumbled from failure to failure over its 23-year life. Children continue to die, have their futures limited and be subjected to lives that no parent would want for their own children once taken into government care. A series of damning reports from the independent Representative for Children and Youth office have failed to bring effective change.

In April, that office released a report checking in on recommendations it had made over the previous five years. MCFD had made no progress on a third of them. Less than 20 per cent had been fully implemented.

The problem here is not as simple as bad foster parents or social workers. It is a broken system.

BC United, the BC Green Party and the First Nations Leadership Council have called for Dean’s resignation or firing. (Both the children and foster parents in this case were Indigenous; Indigenous children account for 68 per cent of kids in government care.)

Green MLA Adam Olsen noted in the legislature this week that in opposition, the NDP would have called for the same. Olsen pointed out that in October 2015, when Stephanie Cadieux was minister, then-opposition leader John Horgan was clear about that.

“The minister, he said, was responsible,” said Olsen. “He demanded the minister protect children and not the institution, and he called for new leadership.”

Olsen added that there is “a culture in responsible governments where ministers who embarrassed the government resigned in order to protect the honour of the office.”

“It appears, from the behaviours of this government, that there is no honour left in this ministry.”

After the horrific revelations, Dean said she shares the “pain and the anger and the outrage that everybody has.” But while two social workers have “left their job,” no one in MCFD management has paid a price for the children’s horror.

The deputy minister — in place for seven years and the top manager — remains at work.

It’s accepted that governments will have policy failures at times. But this is a moral failure.

About 5,000 children are in government care right now. As British Columbians, you and I have taken responsibility for keeping them safe and giving them a future, at least until they can be reunited with their families.

But we’re doing a terrible job.

Olsen argues that B.C. is overdue “to finally tear down the child welfare system in British Columbia and rebuild it brick-by-brick.”

He’s right.