B.C. worst for child poverty for sixth year

The good news is that fewer B.C. kids were living in poverty in 2007.
The bad news is that the “Best Place on Earth” has the highest child poverty rate in Canada, according to Statistics Canada.
Worse, perhaps, is the fact that despite six consecutive years of that dismal distinction, poor children — children generally — weren’t mentioned much in the provincial election campaign.
That bothered Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the legislature’s Representative for Children and Youth. Turpel-Lafond, the first representative appointed after Ted Hughes’ damning report called for an advocate and watchdog for children and families, was hoping for more.
“I was quite disappointed with the fact that the situation for children was not a central issue,” said Turpel-Lafond. It’s not just child poverty, she noted. There are also the grim stats for aboriginal children, on indicators from health to education to their over-representation in government care, and a list of other issues.
Instead, Turpel-Lafond said the campaign seemed to focus on the leaders’ personalities, with a nod to the economy and the environment as issues.
Based on her travels and contacts with British Columbians, Turpel-Lafond says the politicians are out of touch. The public cares about issues affecting children and expects non-partisan action.
That’s what she’s hoping for the new session. The representative reports to a legislative committee, which was supposed to be working for children and youth but too often bogged down in politics — “The government side was there to defend and the opposition side was there to attack.” She’s hoping all MLAs — especially the chair and vice-chair — will set aside past differences.
The need for effective action is greater now. Turpel-Lafond says the situation for children has deteriorated with the economy. Services like legal aid and family court are underfunded and demand is mounting.
But often, she says, the focus seems to be on managing the way the public views issues rather than actually tackling the problems.
There’s another risk as government looks at spending cuts to reduce a deficit soaring far beyond the budgeted $495 million. The Ministry of Children and Families was to get a 1.8 per cent budget increase to cover this year and the next two. Not 1.8 per cent a year; that’s the total increase over three years to cope with increasing caseloads and rising costs.
“The bottom line is when you cut services and programs there is one group affected more than anybody — poor people,” Turpel-Lafond says. “Poor kids get hurt.”
Which leads back to child poverty. If you want to predict children’s futures, don’t look at IQ, where they were born, age of parents, gender, race or any other factors.
Look at family income. Poor kids start in a deep hole.
You can have an interesting debate about how to define poor or low income. Statistics Canada uses the low-income cutoff (LICO). If a family spends more than 70 per cent of its pre-tax income on shelter, food and clothing, it is low income.
On average, an urban Canadian family of four with a total pre-tax income of less than $40,000 is considered low income. That’s two parents, working full-time at $10.25 an hour. Which sounds poor to me.
Across Canada, 9.5 per cent of children live in poverty. In B.C., 13 per cent of children do. Since 2001, B.C. has had a higher proportion of children living in poverty than any other province.
That was through, for the most part, pretty good times. As the economy worsens, more and more children fall into poverty.
Yet the provincial government has no plan specifically aimed at reducing child poverty. There are no targets or timelines or accountability measures.
Turpel-Lafond says there is nothing mysterious or magical about improving life for children in B.C. “We know what to do, we just aren’t doing it.”
The needs are greater than ever before. We’ll know in the next few months how seriously the government takes its responsibility.
Footnote: The representative’s role, as recommended by Hughes, includes monitoring and reporting on the ministry’s progress. The next update is due soon.
The impression from outside is that the ministry continues to struggle; the report should provide a decent briefing paper for whoever succeeds the retired Tom Christensen as minister — the fifth person to hold the job since the Liberals were elected.

Big plans, good start for new children's rep

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond is looking like a terrific hire as B.C.'s first representative for children and youth.
The office isn't open yet, but she made an impressive debut in an appearance before the new legislature committee on children and youth last week.
Turpel-Lafond, a highly regarded judge in Saskatchewan before she took the job, faces a big challenge. She's taken on most of the responsibilities foolishly abandoned by the Campbell government when it eliminated the Children's Commission and the Child and Family Advocate in their first term.
None of this work should be partisan. Providing support for scared little kids or struggling families isn't a left-right question; it's one of decency and pragmatism. The NDP did a lousy job of running the ministry and the Liberals have been as bad or worse. But down here almost everything is seen through a political lens.
Turpel-Lafond's pitch to the committee - while positive and upbeat - left any would-be partisans in a tough spot. Instead of a general briefing, she hit the ground running with a specific proposal for action within the next five months.
Turpel-Lafond asked MLAs on the committee to work with her on a plan for children and families that would look five to 10 years ahead.
The plan, built with the efforts of both parties, the ministries, First Nations agencies - Turpel-Lafond is aboriginal - and everyone else involved would set five to seven big goals that would be benchmarks for our overall progress.
The effort to reach those goals would cut across all ministries. And the representative, and the committee, would report on interim progress, looking at what was working and what wasn't and making sure government was learning from examples around the world.
That's not happening. The children and families ministry has performance goals, but they're short term, not very useful and changing.
Here's one example to show how the approach could work. In B.C., on any given day, about 9,000 children are in the government's care. For some, it's a brief experience before things get better back home; for about 40 per cent of them, it's life.
We are pathetic parents for them. Adolescent boys in care, for example, are 14 times as likely to try and kill themselves as children who aren't in care. Sure, some have lots of problems - a history of poverty and neglect, physical and mental health issues. But many are just kids who never got a chance.
Today barely one-in-four children in care finishes high school. That means a life on the margins - poverty, poor health, welfare or minimum wage and an increased chance their children will end up in care too. (Girls in care are four times as likely to become pregnant as teenagers as their peers.)
For a decade, we've accepted our failure.
Turpel-Lafond's proposal might see high-school graduation as a benchmark for children in care, or more broadly even children whose families have been helped by the government. So a target might be 75-per-cent graduation rate within 10 years; 40 per cent within five years. The task would be to look at why they aren't graduating now; remove those barriers; and report publicly and frequently on progress.
It won't be hard to improve. For example, a ministry study found kids in continuing care had an average stay of six years and moved almost once a year during that period. That instability undermines their chance of success in school. More children in care have been sent to live on their own at 16, another factor that works against graduation.
Tackling those kinds of problems is neither costly nor complicated.
And of course, failing to act carries its own price, forever. Even those who don't accept the moral obligation to help children should see the financial argument for investing in children to save decades of future costs.
Turpel-Lafond has the independence to go ahead with the plan on her own.
But the move to enlist the committee is a good way to begin building support for the idea that this issue really transcends day-to-day politics.
For more than a decade politicians from all parties have talked putting aside their differences and putting children first.
Turpel-Lafond has found a quick, positive way to put those claims to the test.

Children lose as government fights to keep secrets

Something has gone badly wrong when the person charged with looking after the interests of vulnerable children in B.C. ends up suing the government to get information.
And it's even worse when the government introduces legislation to allow it to keep secrets from the Representative for Children and Youth - and makes it retroactive to 2007.
The Liberals eliminated the independent agency monitoring the Children and Families Ministry and providing support for families and children in the government care after the 2001 election. It was dumb decision.
A damning report by Ted Hughes in 2006 revealed mismanagement and underfunding that hurt vulnerable children and families. The Hughes' recommendations included restoration of independent oversight, åsomething that the Campbell government had repeatedly insisted was unnecessary.
The representative's office was created as a result. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond - aboriginal, a Saskatchewan provincial court judge with an excellent academic background and an interest in child and youth issues - was hired by a committee of MLAs.
After a year on the job, Turpel-Lafond reported little progress had been made on the Hughes' recommendations. And she noted she had hoped for a co-operative report with the ministry, but was rebuffed.
That was a warning sign, it turned out. The ministry, it appeared, was not providing the co-operation you would expect if it accepted the idea of oversight and public accountability. It refused to provide briefings, tried to go around the representative and wouldn't respond to report recommendations. (Although other ministries, like health, did.)
From the outside, it was tough to judge all this. The ministry maintained it was co-operating, but the information requests were overwhelming and the representative's office was over-stepping its role.
But the latest developments suggest the government is trying to undermine the representative's oversight.
Turpel-Lafond has been working on a report on changes to the ministry's children in the care of a relative program. It provides support for relatives - most often grandparents - who care for children when parents can't. It's a useful alternative to foster care. At any given time, some 4,500 children are in the program. (About 9,000 are in other government care.)
The program wasn't even under the children's ministry until 2007. It was part of income assistance.
Turpel-Lafond wanted to review how the program is working after the changes.
That's important. There is no guarantee relatives will be able to cope with looking after these children. They might need financial support or help with the challenges. Not all homes would be suitable. Eligibility rules might exclude some families
And thousands of children's lives are affected by how well the program works.
Turpel-Lafond went looking for information. She asked for the reports that had gone to cabinet on the changes, believing those would be helpful.
The government stalled. It announced a replacement program - a new Extended Family Program - in February, with no details.
It said the representative could have the information, with conditions. The facts couldn't be revealed publicly. And the government would have a veto over any use of the information.
That's the law, said the premier's office.
But that's not the law the legislature passed in setting up the representative's office. It gives Turpel-Lafond the right to any documents, except those covered by lawyer-client privilege.
The Liberal government argues a different legal interpretation.
But the fact that it's also proposing to rewrite the law, changing the rules retroactively to dodge the representative's information request, indicates the government knows the representative has a legal right to the information, Otherwise, why change the legislation?
Turpel-Lafond talked about her role with the Calgary Herald last week. She explored the issue of independence.
"I'd be happy to work with a minister, but I'm not willing to have a minister say to me: 'Mary Ellen, you're not publishing that report.' Or: 'I'll release that report when I feel like it.'"
The Liberals promised, after the Hughes report, independent oversight. It does not like they meant it.
Footnote: Mary Polak, the minister, describes the legal case as a waste of scarce resources. But she supports both the amendments to the legislation and the court battle to maintain secrecy. The legislative committee on children and youth, created along with the representatives' office, hasn't met since March 3.

More warning signs from children and families ministry

It's looking like things are spinning out of control in the Ministry of Children and Families, based on a meltdown at a recent meeting of a legislature committee.
The ministry has a difficult, important job. In 2006, a review by Ted Hughes found it had serious problems and recommended changes. Those included the restoration of an independent officer of the legislature - the representative for children and youth - to report on successes and problems and make recommendations.
Hughes said the representative should report to a committee of MLAs charged with monitoring progress.
The government accepted the report, with Premier Gordon Campbell promising action on all the recommendations.
The committee - six Liberal MLAs and four New Democrats - was established.
But the ministry doesn't seem to have accepted the idea of real oversight and accountability. Last month, I wrote about the ministry's failure to respond fully when representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond raised questions about the measures taken to ensure the safety of children placed in the care of relatives.
At the committee meeting, the ministry appeared to be trying to do an end-run around the representative's office to avoid accountability.
The subject is serious. Turpel-Lafond reported in April on the deaths of four children in care in northern B.C. The report - "From Loss to Learning" - found significant systemic problems and made recommendations to address them.
The recommendations called for real change. "The ministry must strengthen practice and supervision in assessing child safety in the north region to prevent injuries or deaths of children in circumstances similar to those of Amanda, Savannah, Rowen and Serena," the representative reported. "Learning from preventable deaths is essential. This investigation found that current safety and assessment practices and planning practices for children have not shown marked improvement since when these children died." The legislative committee adopted the recommendations. Its agenda called for a progress report some six months after the report was presented.
Things went off the rails. The ministry wanted to have a manager talk about the report.
But Turpel-Lafond spoke first. She noted that she had been trying for six months, without success, to get the ministry representatives to sit down and respond to the recommendations.
"I and my staff are deeply disappointed about this fact," she said.
The Hughes report didn't propose the legislative committee be some sort of ministry management committee, she noted. Her office was to provide expert oversight and report to the MLAs.
Instead it looked like ministry managers were trying to cut out the oversight.
And not even in a subtle way. The MLAs on the committee had been sent a lot of information by the ministry five days earlier. But the ministry didn't send the same package to the representative's office until the day before the meeting.
The delay looked much like an attempt to subvert the office's role. Especially given the representative's effort, over months, to get a response from the ministry.
Turpel-Lafond told the MLAs that this wasn't the way things should be working, based on the Hughes report and the legislation. The representative's office should be reviewing the ministry's response and providing its analysis to the legislative committee.
Liberal MLA absences gave the New Democrats a majority in the committee room. They voted to adjourn to give Turpel-Lafond time to review the material from the ministry and report to the committee. A new date will be scheduled.
Children and Families Minister Tom Christensen has a good rep. He shouldn't be happy that the ministry is withholding information and failing to co-operate with an independent officer of the legislature.
But that's what has happened, even though Turpel-Lafond told the committee she had raised the problems with Christensen this summer.
That creates questions about Christensen's grasp of the tough portfolio.
And about where the ministry is going. Why would the children and families management team have such difficulties with the idea of oversight?
Footnote: There was good news at the committee meeting. Turpel-Lafond's efforts to arrange a Children's Forum, bringing together representatives from the ministry, coroner's office, ombudsman, health officer and all the other agencies involved have paid off. The members reported progress in a number of areas.

Liberals reverse child rep budget cut blunder

Score another one for democracy and Vaughn Palmer.
The Liberals made a big blunder earlier this month, practically and politically. Government MLAs on the legislative finance committee cut the budget request of the Representative for Children and Youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond.
After about 45 minutes of unfocused questioning, the Liberal MLAs decided to cut the proposed budget of the representative by 11 per cent. They didn't say where the office should reduce spending or offer any rationale. Turpel-Lafond had told them the cuts would make it impossible to do critical elements of her job, like investigating children's deaths,
But the Liberals went ahead. The New Democrats on the committee, who wanted to provide the full amount requested, were outvoted.
Why? The other officers of the legislature - the ombudsman, auditor general and the rest - had received their full requests. Why chop the representative?
Given the lack of any answers that made sense, it was hard not to notice that days before Turpel-Lafond had reported critically on the government's lack of progress on implementing the Hughes report. She found there had been no action on key recommendations designed to improve things in the troubled ministry of children and families.
The budget cut looked much like payback, petty, vindictive - and self-destructive.
The Liberal attack was led by MLAs Randy Hawes and Ian Black. It showed a remarkable lack of common sense or awareness of just what a mess the government has made of most areas affecting the lives of children and families over the last six years.
Hawes has tried to defend the cuts to the budget. He says there wasn't enough detail to satisfy him that the extra money Turpel-Lafond was seeking, so he pushed for a lower budget.
Fair enough, on some level. But 45 minutes of questions followed by a closed-door decision to cut funding doesn't seem like a serious attempt to find out about any concerns.
And if Hawes and his fellow Liberals didn't have enough information to approve the budget, the certainly didn't have enough to cut it, either.
The representative was looking for more money - an increase from $4.8 million to $6.6 million.
But that was no surprise. The office was created as a result of Ted Hughes report on the many problems in the government's support for vulnerable children and families. The agency started with a rough budget set up by managers in the attorney generals ministry, before there were any real plans or staff.
The government acknowledged the guess at funding. A year ago, the Liberal chair of the same committee assured Turpel-Lafond that money wouldn't stand in the way of working on a better future for B.C. children.
"As the budget moves forward, if you have any requests, if something isn't working, if you find that it wasn't enough or there have been changes, as a committee, we are mandated to be here for you," said Blair Lekstrom, then the committee chairman.
But the six Liberal MLAs on the committee didn't agree. The committee chopped $700,000 from the budget.
Hawes hadn't complained about a lavish $560,000 reno at the ministry of children and families. He and the other Liberals voted for a 29-per-cent raise and expensive pension plan for themselves. Then they got all careful when the advocate for children came looking for money.
The public reaction was quick and negative. Vaughn Palmer of the Vancouver Sun, one of Canada's best political columnists, is insightful but usually judicious in assessing politicians' performance. This time he called the Liberals on the committee "nitwits."
And Friday, the committee called special meeting to take another look at the budget. The premier's office had read the clippings.
You, and Palmer, helped convince the Liberals that it was a mistake. They could not get away with cutting the money for independent oversight in this area. They restored all the money they had cut.
In all, it's probably been useful. Turpel-Lafond need to establish her independence, She's done that by facing down the government on budget cuts.
Footnote: Liberal MLA Bill Bennett chairs the committee. I'm not sure if he deserves blame for letting the cuts go ahead or credit for working out solution after meetings with Premier Gordon Campbell. A pre-election cabinet shuffle is likely in June; Bennett, dumped over an abusive e-mail he sent, would be a good addition.

Children's ministry shunning recommendations to help kids

The ministry of children and families is a competency test for government. The Liberals, like the NDP before them, are failing.

They bungled the ministry in their first four years. As the scandals mounted, the government asked Ted Hughes to review the problems.

He blamed botched restructuring and budget cuts, in part. And he made 62 recommendations, including restoration of the independent oversight the Liberals had eliminated.

Premier Gordon Campbell promised to adopt them all. He appointed Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond as Representative for Children and Youth. Oversight and advocacy and complaint resolution were important for children in trouble, the government conceded.

But four years after the Hughes report, the ministry is ignoring the office. And Children's Minister Mary Polak looks badly out of touch.

Turpel-Lafond reports to a legislature committee, which met this month for an update. She told the MLAs most ministries had responded to her recommendations in two reports from last year.

But not the children's ministry, which had by far the largest role. Polak told reporters she was "perplexed." Not once, but 11 times in a 16-minute scrum. (Publiceyeonline.com has video.)

"We have been regularly meeting with her," Polak said. "She's aware of how we intended to be responding. Some of the reports, of course, have yet to be responded to. Some we have responded to."

The representative was clearer.

She told the committee about Kids, Crime and Care: Health and Well-Being of Children in Care, released last February. It found children in the government's care - some 9,000 this year - were more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system than to graduate from high school.

We claim responsibility for these children and then fail them. The report, delivered to the government a year ago, remember, had sensible recommendations.

Take one. After studying the factors that snared children in crime, the representative recommended that each time a child was involved with the justice system, the plan of care would be reviewed within 30 days to include steps to deal with the criminal behaviour.

If your son or daughter got in trouble, Turpel-Lafond told the committee, that's what you would do. You would look at their stresses, their friends, whether drugs are a problem. You would do everything to get them back on track.

And children in care need the same help.

The recommendation called for the ministry to have the first step - a plan to report quarterly on children in care involved with the justice system - by last November.

But a year after the report, the ministry hasn't responded to the recommendation.

It doesn't have to adopt the measure. The ministry could judge the recommendation not needed or impractical. "It's perfectly fine," Turpel-Lafond said, "to say we reject your recommendation."

But some response is required.

"In order for oversight to work and for change to happen when we do major pieces of work like this, there has to be engagement," she said.

And in her view - not really refuted by Polak - there has not been.

The second report, completed last July, dealt with the terrible story of a baby taken from his parents because they couldn't afford housing. He was injured and permanently disabled while in care. Now he is back with his parents.

The representative's first recommendation said that by Jan. 1 the ministry should have a policy for front-line staff that every effort should be made to avoid taking children from their parents because of poor housing. (Children need their parents and it's cheaper to help with housing than to pay for foster care.)

The ministry, Turpel-Lafond said, has not responded.

Something has gone wrong. If the process were working, Polak wouldn't have been perplexed.

Even days later, when the Public Affairs Bureau released its written statement on the problems, there was nothing about the ministry's actual response to the recommendations.

Polak is to present at the committee's next meeting on March 3. She needs to have real answers.

Footnote: It's unclear why the process has broken down so badly. But Polak or the committee is going to have to find a way to get it back on track.

Disabled kids aren't getting the support they need: report_

I can't imagine anything more challenging than being the parent of a disabled child.
It's not just the effort, the commitment that goes into making sure your child has the best life possible. Not just the exhaustion and expense and emotions and the toll on other relationships.
The parents also know that someday they won't be there. And then what will happen to their children, who can't care for themselves?
We've accepted the idea that this is a shared responsibility. That when parents can't cope, the government will provide help. Therapy and support, perhaps places children can go occasionally weekend a month while their parents have a small break, sometime specialized residential care.
Most of us would want to be there for those families.
But the provincial government isn't doing a good job. It's even ignoring a 2007 B.C. Court of Appeal decision that found the government has been breaking its own law by denying help to those who need it.
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the Representative for Children and Youth, has just reported on how well we're doing in supporting these children and families.
It's not great news.
Families who decide they need help can't figure out where to go. They face a "complex, fragmented service delivery system." That's a big barrier if you're already spending every waking moment caring for your disabled teen.
It's often not even clear where they should start. The Ministry of Children and Families and Community Living BC, the government's agency delivering services to people with developmental disabilities both have roles, too often poorly defined.
Even if families can find their way to the right office, the problems aren't over. Turpel-Lafond found wait times - or getting needed help at all - are a significant problem.
No one really knows what's going on. Or, as the representative puts it: "There is insufficient public accountability and measurement of child and youth outcomes. At present, with respect to CLBC and MCFD services to children and youth with special needs, it is not possible to decipher who is getting what services, by whom, at what cost and with what outcome. "
And there is the government's shame. It insists that once people turn 19, they are ineligible for help if they score at least 70 on an IQ test. Only five per cent of the population has IQ scores that low.
The policy discounts other problems that might keep them from making their way successfully - fetal alcohol syndrome, autism, ADHD, big psychological problems.
The B.C. Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal have both ruled the policy violates the government's own laws
But Turpel-Lafond says that continues to be the government's policy, despite the court ruling.
Her report includes examples that show the ridiculous destructiveness of the policy. A 17-year-old boy with a range of serious psychological and behaviour problems was removed from his last foster home after he assaulted the family's six-year-old son.
The children and families ministry had nowhere for him, so social workers arranged a placement in a Community Living BC home. There's a lot of support and supervision, so it's expensive - $8,000 a month. But he's doing well.
But he's aging out of care, as the social workers say. And although his IQ tested below 70 in the past, a new assessment put him just over the cut-off.
So, once he turns 19. Community Living BC says he's on his own.
Social worker and forensic services assessments say he won't make it. The young man is a risk to harm himself or others in the community once he turns 19 and the support is withdrawn, they say.
It's wrong and foolish stupid to condemn someone to a costly failure in life to save money - especially the long-term cost is much greater.
Turpel-Lafond has offered a useful guide for improvements. The government should welcome the help.
Footnote: Turpel-Lafond criticized policies that see help cut off for children in government care when they turn 19. "A prudent parent wouldn't send a developmentally impaired 19-year-old to the street and the state shouldn't do that," she said. Children in care should get transitional help until they turn 24. Christensen said the current policy would stand.

Liberals stumble – again – on children and families

I can't figure out why the Liberals are bungling the important work of protecting children and helping families.
They made a mess of the responsibility in their first five years, with reckless budget cuts and mismanagement. That ended with the Ted Hughes review of child and family services in 2005, when the problems spun out of control.
Hughes held the government to account. He blamed the problems in part on budget cuts and botched restructurings. And he made 62 recommendations to get things back on track.
It was an opportunity for a fresh start, and Premier Gordon Campbell grabbed it. He promised to do better. The government would accept and implement every one of the recommendations, Campbell said.
But the Hughes report was delivered in April 2006. And the government has a dismal job in acting on the recommendations.
One of things it did do was restore independent oversight, appointing a representative for children and youth.
This week, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the Saskatchewan judge who got the job, reported on progress on the Hughes recommendations.
It was horrible. She found only 18 recommendations had been implemented, or almost implemented. Progress was made on another 19.
But that left 25 recommendations - 40 per cent - where there had either been no action, or the Ministry of Children and Families hadn't been able to provide any information to indicate what had been done.
We're talking about protecting the most vulnerable kids and helping struggling families.
The recommendations that have fallen by the way were serious. Some dealt with making sure First Nations child protection agencies were fully supported in the terribly important and difficult work they do. (The death of Sherry Charlie, beaten after being placed in a home by a native agency, led to the Hughes inquiry.)
Hughes said the ministry urgently needed a functioning complaint process, both to help people and gather information about problem areas.
There should be an actual plan for the regionalization push at the core of the government's strategy, Hughes said.
But 19 months later, the ministry couldn't show that those basic recommendations had been acted on.
Worse, the representative's report - couched in polite language - said there were signs the ministry was paying lip service both to the Hughes report and the principle of independent oversight.
Turpel-Lafond said she had hoped the ministry and her office would do a joint, co-operative report on progress on the Hughes' recommendations, which they would present together. Children first and all that. But the ministry balked.
Turpel-Lafond also noted that after she reviewed ministry plans and asked about the lack of reference to the recommendations, it sent her the same document with a few references to the Hughes report inserted.
All this left the government in a bad spot. And then things got worse. When the ministry entered its public meltdown phase, Campbell hired Lesley du Toit, a South African who had been on a ministry expert panel, as a special advisor. Weeks after the Hughes report came down, du Toit was named children and families deputy minister.
Since then, there have been a lot of meetings and talking about transformation, but not much in terms things you can see or measure.
Du Toit did an interview with the Times Colonist - the first time she had agreed to speak with reporters at any length since taking the job. She maintained the representative was wrong in finding a lack of leadership on the recommendations,
Her explanation for the missing information on progress wasn't reassuring. "Part of that is because a lot of the progress we make isn't written into documents; it's progress that is made that can be reflected by saying, 'this is what we've done,'" she said.
Anyone who has been a manager knows that when people can't offer any evidence of actions - especially on specific recommendations like Hughes made - they generally don't exist. Talk of restructuring and continuums is not a substitute for actually getting things done in the meantime.
Campbell and the Liberals were rightly critical of the wretched job the NDP did in managing the children and families file.
Amazingly, they have done worse and are blowing their chance to make a fresh start and set things right.

For kids in care, a court date is more likely than a grad dance

Bob Ritchie is one of the interesting people I only know because I write a column. We've never met, but he's a prolific writer of letters to the editor and e-mails to politicians and journalists.
Ritchie lives in Qualicum; he's 78 and worked for B.C. Hydro, in an office job.
And he cares passionately about a lot of issues, from the need for a tougher stance on crime to what he sees as a crisis in the state of children and families in B.C. He looks at life in the province, and the future, and doesn't like what he sees.
I don't always agree with Ritchie, but I admire his commitment and bold approach to solving problems, and always read his e-mails with interest.
So do a lot of other people. A quick bit of research found he had raised issues publicly some 60 times in the last 12 months, with letters to the editor in papers around the province or mentions in columns or news stories. (And that is in what has been a very tough year for him personally.)
And I respect him. He gave me a shot this week, an e-mail with this subject line: "Paul please show me that you really care. I would sure like to get more out of reading your articles. You have seemed to have lost interest. Bob."
Ouch.
I haven't lost interest. It does get exhausting being fierce all the time, as Ritchie expects. It takes a lot of research to build an airtight argument. And I don't want to seem like a crabby nag.
But Ritchie is right. It is important to keep raising the issues that really matter.
Which leads, in a roundabout way, to a speech by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond last month.
The province's Representative for Children and Youth offered a preview of a massive research project that tracked the lives of 50,000 children born in B.C. since 1986.
The first results confirmed Ritchie's point that we need to do so much better. The data showed, Turpel-Lafond said, that children taken into the government's care were more likely to end up charged with a crime than to graduate from high school.
Think about the teens you know. How many end up facing in trouble with the law?
For adolescents receiving services from the Ministry of Children and Families, 44 per cent end up facing criminal charges.
More than one-third of children in care tracked by the study ended up serving time in jail. That shows major problems, given how hard the courts work to keep young people out of prison.
Of course, children in care very often start off with some big handicaps. Fetal alcohol effect (a big concern of Ritchie's), learning disabilities, emotional problems from neglect or abuse, or health problems from a rough infancy - these are going to take their toll.
Still, are their years in care improving their chances of success - of graduating from high school, instead of into the criminal justice system, for example?
For some youths, certainly. But the statistics suggest not for most of the children in care.
There are lots of areas for improvement. But there's a basic principle behind the failures.
Lots of kids only graduate from high school because their parents encourage, push and grind them. If they skip school or bring home a dismal report card, their parents lean on them any way they can. And the kids make it.
And lots of teens get in the same kind of scrapes with the law that kids in care do. But their parents sweep in and pull them back from the brink. They provide the support the courts are looking for when deciding whether to divert the case to some resolution outside the criminal justice system.
Not kids in the government's care. We've decided not to care enough about them.
OK, Bob?
Footonote: Practically, children in care as young as 13 end up with little support if things go sideways.
Foster parents can't track them and the ministry doesn't know what's going in their lives.
Turpel-Lafond notes almost 600 teens in care, as young as 16, are on "independent living" agreements, living in rooms or cheap apartments on their own. It is a formula for bad choices and worse outcomes.
The full report is to be released this fall.

Poverty meeting leaves premier looking bad

Liberal MLA Joan McIntyre didn't likely intend to take a shot at Premier Gordon Campbell.
But she did.
McIntyre chairs the legislative committee on children and youth, which held a session on child poverty this week. It was the premier's idea, sort of.
Last June, Representative for Children and Youth Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond asked for a meeting with Campbell and NDP leader Carole James to talk about child poverty.
B.C. has had the highest proportion of children living in poverty in Canada for the last six years, Statistics Canada reports. The recession likely increased the problems. The meeting, Turpel-Lafond said, would allow a non-partisan discussion of what is being done, and could be done, to help children.
"The premier and the opposition leader need to sit down together and think about how we're going to work on the child-poverty issue," Turpel-Lafond said. "Are we addressing it? Are we doing enough? Can we do more and work more collaboratively on it?"
The goal was action. "The issues are quite daunting, but I think good people working together can make change," she said.
James said yes. Campbell refused. He didn't want the issue to be politicized, he said. And the children's representative reports to the legislative committee. She should take up the issue there.
The result was this week's meeting.
But McIntyre's introduction set out clearly - even painfully - how little resemblance the session bore to the meeting sought by the representative almost a year ago.
McIntyre said she wanted to take time to make sure people didn't have "unrealistic expectations" about the outcome. The committee's focus is "strictly" on children at risk or receiving services from the government.
"I also wanted to clarify that developing a strategy or even providing a written analysis does go beyond our terms of reference and crosses over into the realm of government policy making," she said.
So the experts could talk. The MLAs could ask questions. The transcript would go up on a website.
But there would be no action, no recommendation, no report, not even a summary.
It's an anemic interpretation of the committee's role. Its mandate includes increasing awareness about the child welfare system. A report on the impact of poverty could be part of that role.
And it makes the premier's refusal to meet look entirely unjustified.
Especially as the alternative he suggested - going to the committee - was apparently guaranteed to produce no concrete results.
That's too bad. The risks of the meeting were minor and entirely political. The representative might point out problems Campbell would rather not see. James might use the occasion for partisan advantage.
The problems are real. StatsCan has reported B..C. has the highest rate of child poverty in Canada for six straight years. Any improvements have not been great enough to change that standing. (Poverty definitions are tricky; but StatsCan was comparing provinces using a standard approach.)
Across Canada in 2007, 9.5 per cent of children were poor. In B.C., 13 per cent of the children fell below the poverty line. That's some 126,000 children.
There's a good moral objection to needlessly subjecting children to a life of poverty in such a wealthy and skilled province.
There is also a strong pragmatic one. We love rags to riches stories because they are encouraging. But we pay attention to them because they are rare.
Children who start poor tend to stay poor. Poor children have less success in school and are less healthy.
That's not genetic or an indicator that poor parents do a bad job. It's a reflection of poor living conditions, inadequate nutrition and a host of other factors. Research indicates that poverty even affects brain development.
By leaving children in poverty, we are increasing the risk of a tougher adult life for them. And we are guaranteeing higher costs for society in future, while squandering a chance to benefit from these peoples' fullest contributions.
The government doesn't want to commit to a plan on child poverty.
But surely a meeting with the children's representative shouldn't have been impossible.
Footonote: The presentations to the committee were excellent, on everything from the costs of childhood poverty to plans in other provinces to measures that could provide immediate benefits. I'll present some of the highlights in a coming column.

Government failed girl found in home with her dead mother

Anyone paying attention - especially people being paid to do just that - could have seen things were going to end badly for the 15-year-old girl with Down's syndrome and her mom.
And things did end badly. The girl spent days alone in a dirty trailer with her mother's decomposing body last fall. She was filthy, emaciated and covered in an angry rash when found - and frightened.
When neighbours came to her rescue, she couldn't hear them. Her hearing aids had stopped working at some point in the past. No one had noticed. She had lived in needless silence.
B.C. Representative for Children and Youth Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond reported on the case this week. It is grim reading.
The desperate family's downward spiral occurred over years. There was ample evidence of deteriorating conditions for both mother and daughter. For almost four years, the Ministry of Children and Families had been warned the child was being abused and neglected. Investigations were incomplete and inadequate, failing to take the modest steps needed to get at the truth of the family's collapse.
As all this happened, the government was supposed to be providing children with special needs and their families help with assessment, planning and services. That didn't happen either.
Lord knows the child needed support. She was sickly and weak, needed leg braces and hearing aids and glasses. At 15, she had the intellectual functioning of a pre-schooler.
She was also a warm and loving child, lo9ved in turn by her mother.
In a family with money and savvy, she might have fared well.
But her mother was poor. When her car broke down, she had to give up the two jobs she was working. She was on income assistance – a life of poverty - and sometimes collected cans and bottles to get by. She couldn't afford a phone.
And she battled her own issues with illness, physical and mental, and, apparently, with alcohol.
Families of children with special needs are supposed to be getting support to make sure services are there. But the government shuffled responsibility to Community Living BC from the children's ministry in 2005, then decided that was a bad idea and shuffled them back in 2009. Supports were inadequate, caseloads overwhelming and children fell through gaping cracks.
And all children are supposed to be protected from harm by the ministry of children and families. That's impossible, of course. But in this case, the report found, there were complaints about the home and warning signs of obvious risk. At the least, this family needed support; it's likely the child should have been apprehended.
Instead, things got worse and worse.
Turpel-Lafond also found this case was not just an aberration, or the result of individual failures. "Is this a unique circumstance, a cruel anomaly?" she said. "Tragically, it is not."
One of the government workers responsible for supporting the child had a caseload of 200 families. There is simply no way to do the work properly under those conditions.
The government cut off the mother's income assistance in the month of her death, although it knew she was supporting a disabled child, without visiting the home or warning the children's ministry.
In short, the systems that were supposed to protect children and support those with special needs were structured to fail.
Children's Minister Mary McNeil promised action on the report's recommendations. But the public has heard that before. Only three years ago, Turpel-Lafond outlined the problems with supports for children with special needs. Nothing happened.
There's one simple test of the government's commitment. The report called on the government to assess the services, resources and support required for children with special needs, the province's current commitment and the actions that would be taken to close the gap.
Until that's done and released, it would be foolish to accept yet more promises of improvement.
Footnote: The ministry's initial position was that the case did not involve a "serious injury" so it did not have to report it to the representative. An internal ministry review found "all of the required standards were complied with" in its dealings with the family.
Which confirms that the problems are built into the current system.

A child taken away because his parents were poor

A child taken away because his parents were poor
This is a second column about a three-year-old boy. He started life healthy, loved by capable but challenged parents. But he was taken from them, based on legitimate concerns, at three weeks.
The basic problem was they couldn't afford a safe place to live. He moved through three foster homes in five months and then ended up in hospital, with symptoms suggesting he was shaken while living in the third foster home.
Now he's back with his parents. He's blind in one eye, can't walk and has cerebral palsy. His disabilities are permanent. But they're all doing OK.
The Representative for Children and Youth examined the case to find out what, if anything, could have been done to produce a different ending.
The ministry has already done an internal review. It found that required steps in investigating child protection concerns were skipped, available information wasn't considered and there was too little effort to learn about the child's extended family.
Once the boy was taken from his parents, care was "not fully consistent with legislation, policy and service standards," the internal review reported vaguely. Assessment, training and monitoring of the foster home were he was living when injured were all "were not fully consistent" with policy and standards.
The review resulted in mushy recommendations to review plans and send out memos and hold meetings.
The representative didn't find that adequate. And Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond offered a reminder of what this was all about - a child a few months old, removed from his parents by the state, completely dependent on the adults in his life for all his needs.
The representative's report noted that only one thing blocked the parents from keeping their child - the lack of housing. Everyone acknowledged that.
But in the five months from the time a child protection concern was raised until the baby was hurt, no worker or agency addressed that problem.
The income assistance ministry turned the family away when they sought emergency help; the children and families ministry didn't address the housing issue. If they had been found a one-bedroom, safe apartment, even a motel room, everything might be different.
Helping the family into housing might have cost some money and time. But even at $800 a month, that would be at least 50 per cent cheaper than foster care,.
And, as the representative notes, because of the injuries "the lifelong cost of caring for this child is unknown." I'll guess though, at something well over $4 million.
But there was no evidence that the ministry considered finding a motel room or coming up with a housing subsidy as a better alternative for the baby than apprehension and foster care.
The problems - poverty and no or bad housing - aren't new. The Hughes report, in 2006, noted that poor families were far more likely to have their children apprehended. The First Nations community that was home to this family has a housing waiting list of 200 people.
The representative noted that in First Nations communities, a housing shortage means many family member share one home out of necessity. The ministry acts as if parents have a choice about where the live. So their children are apprehended "largely because they are unable to immediately create a living situation that they could not reasonably be expected to achieve."
Even if people can find their way to income assistance, the representative found, the housing allowance leaves them $200 to $400 a month short of what is needed. A family of three, like this baby boy's, is allowed $660 a month for rent. Check out the apartments and basement suites in your community and see what is available for that rent.
The result, the representative found, is that children are taken from their parents because they are poor. "This places the basic human rights of children in jeopardy and tears families apart in tragic way, especially aboriginal families trying to recover and rebuild," the report found.
The baby boy's parents kept working to reunite their family. They finally secured suitable housing in November 2008. "They deserve credit for their determination, but will now care for a developmentally disabled child while continuing to struggle with poverty," Turpel-Lafond said.
All because, instead of finding them a place to live, the state took their child away.
Next: Isolated case, or a systemic problem?

Polak stumbles on issue of children at risk

It's tough to figure out what Children's Minister Mary Polak was thinking.
The Representative for Children and Youth had just released a detailed audit of a government child support program that found many problems.
The most significant was that ineffective - or non-existent - screening meant some of the 4,500 children had been placed in homes that posed risks. The audit found children had ended up in homes with past records of child protection issues or where caregivers had troubling criminal records.
The report included a number of recommendations - the first identifying an "urgent need" to rescreen all the homes. More than 1,000 children could be at risk.
No, said Polak. I disagree.
Polak did not dispute the report's findings of incomplete or missing home assessments. She didn't say why she believed there weren't risks. She just disagreed.
It was an inadequate response to a report involving children's safety.
Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond had audited the Children in the Home of a Relative program. The concept is excellent. If parents can't care for a child and a relative is willing to take on the responsibility, the program provides a small amount of financial support - $250 to $450 a month.
It's much better for children, as a rule, to stay with relatives than to go into government care. Their lives are more and stable and they remain connected with family. The financial support makes that possible - and saves government a great deal compared with the costs of care.
But there are still risks. The government belatedly realized that; in 2008, it started a screening process to make sure homes were safe and suitable and the relatives could actually cope. Once we're involved, as a society, in a child's life there shared obligations. The government has acknowledged that.
Front-line agencies have warned about problems with the program for years. The audit found they had grounds for concern.
"These children do, in most cases, become invisible to government and are unable to have their voices or concerns heard," Turpel-Lafond said.
Screening was inadequate and even when risks were identified, there was no action to protect the children's safety.
Polak's talking points in responding to the report were bizarre.
In rejecting rescreening, she said wanted to reassure relatives that they don't "have to be living in fear of us coming and knocking on their door."
It's a bad way for a minister to characterize front-line staff - as people families should fear.
A reporter asked if that meant relatives whose criminal records - perhaps for sexual assault - hadn't been identified before a child entered the home also wouldn't have to fear a knock on the door.
Ridiculous, Polak said.
But she didn't say why it's ridiculous, since the audit found children could be living in such homes.
The minister also suggested rescreening wasn't needed because no new children were being taken into the program.
The average stay is three years, she said, so the 4,500 children would move out of the program over the next several years.
That hardly reduces the risks.
Polak didn't have to accept all the recommendations. But when children's safety is involved, she did have to offer a credible response.
The Children in the Home of a Relative program was cancelled after the representative started the audit. It's been replaced by the Extended Family Program.
The report expressed concerns about that program as well.
Eligibility has been tightened, so fewer children and families will be helped. Some of the changes make little sense. Relatives who have legal guardianship won't be eligible; even though they were encouraged to seek guardianship under the previous program.
And while there are improvements in the plans, funding appears inadequate.
These relatives are making a great contribution and show the way families can stick together. Many are grandmothers raising grandchildren. Many are poor - 20 per cent are on income assistance themselves.
They deserve our thanks and support. And the children also deserve the basic efforts to ensure they are in a safe and secure home.
Footnote: The representative reports through the legislature committee on children and youth, which currently has no meetings scheduled. Given the ministry's response, chair Joan McIntyre, a Liberal MLA, should be calling a meeting as soon as possible.

Liberals stumble, again, on children and families

Monday was a bad day for the Liberals.
The anti-HST petition people passed the 500,000-signature mark - about one-third of the number people who voted in the last election.
The B.C. Rail corruption trial finally started.
And Ted Hughes - the Liberals' choice to review the troubled children and families' ministry in 2006 - complained the government was sabotaging the effort to restore trust in the system.
Hughes wrote Gordon Campbell with his concerns, but the wandering premier is in China.
Poor Children's Minister Mary Polak was left to respond both to the Hughes letter and a court judgment that found the government was illegally withholding information from the Representative for Children and Youth.
It did not go well.
First, a brief background summary. In 2001, the Liberals eliminated independent oversight of services for vulnerable children and families. Not needed, they said.
After a series of disastrous missteps, ill-considered budget cuts, re-organizations and scandals, the government asked Hughes, a respected retired judge, to investigate.
He made recommendations, including the creation of the independent representative's office to provide advocacy, monitoring and public accountability.
Campbell accepted the recommendations. Legislation was passed giving the representative broad access to information to allow effective monitoring. But the ministry never really seemed to accept the oversight.
When the representative's office decided to review changes to a program aimed at children in the care of a relative, the government wouldn't provide relevant documents.
Only if the representative agreed in advance to keep the information secret, the government proposed, might she be allowed to see the cabinet documents.
That made no sense. The legislations setting up the representative's office, introduced by the Liberal government and passed unanimously by MLAs, gave complete access to all documents, except those protected by lawyer-client privilege. The representative's right to the information was crystal clear.
So Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the children's representative, went to court to get the information. About 4,500 children are in the program; perhaps more should be. It's important to know how it's working.
The B.C. Supreme Court decision, handed down Friday, was a slap in the face for Campbell and Polak.
There is no justification for withholding the information, Justice Susan Griffin found. The law is clear and the government is refusing to accept it. She ordered the government to hand over the information and pay the legal costs for both sides.
So our money was wasted on lawyers' fees in a doomed effort to keep the facts from us.
The NDP set out to bash Polak around after the ruling. It's a tough spot for a minister, defending the indefensible.
Polak's talking points in question period were embarrassing and unworthy.
She continued to say the government had been prepared to provide the information; it just wanted control over how it would be used.
But the judgment shredded that argument. "I do not agree with the respondents that this case is not about document disclosure," Griffin wrote. "To the contrary, this is exactly what this case is about."
Afterward, Polak told reporters she hadn't read the entire judgment. It was delivered three days earlier. The court found she and her government had broken the law. A careful reading of it would take 30 minutes. It's baffling that she hadn't found time to read the decision.
Meanwhile, the government wouldn’t agree to withdraw new legislation to reduce the representative's access to information.
That prompted the letter from Hughes, who called on the government to abandon the changes, introduced in the legislature last month but not yet debated.
He noted his report called for a fully independent advocacy, monitoring and reporting role for the new office. The proposed curbs on access to information needed to fulfill those roles is wrong, Hughes said, and would "strike a negative blow to the heart" of efforts to rebuild public confidence in the system.
By Tuesday, the government had agreed to withdraw the bill. But the affair has, again, left the Liberals looking like bumblers on a critical issue.
Footnote: Hughes also noted the dysfunctional relationship that has evolved between Turpel-Lafond and Lesley du Toit, the deputy minister in charge of the ministry. He offered to play a mediating role; all parties should grab the badly needed help.
wilcocks@ultranet.ca

Four children's deaths, four children failied

I should have written about the children's representative report on four child deaths last week, when it came out.
But I am so tired of these sad stories, and there were other topics worth writing about: Gen. Rick Hillier's departure; the Conservative election spending scandal.
Really though, I was dodging. It gets hard to read the same reports and write the same columns year after year, hear the same empty reassurances from the ministers. So many ministers: 10 since I started writing about the ministry some 11 years ago.
New Democrat, Liberal, bright, not so bright, all unable to set the ministry on the right course. Otherwise, why the lurches in new directions every few years?
Not one of them wanted to see little kids suffer, but not one of them could ensure an adequate budget, consistent direction or competent management.
There's something to celebrate simply in having the report from Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the representative for children and youth.
Since the Liberals recklessly eliminated the Children's Commission in 2002, children's deaths were treated as inconsequential. After a shameful six years, B.C. is once again paying attention to the fate of the most vulnerable children.
That doesn't make it any less sad.
It's the details that get you. This time, it was a slice of the life of Amanda Simpson, beaten to death when she was four. That's a great age - kids are increasingly articulate but still unselfconscious. They mostly haven't learned to hide their hearts.
The ministry had contact with Amanda's family before she was born.
When she was two, Turpel-Lafond recounts matter of factly, they came to child protection workers' attention again.
"The oldest sister, then six years old, reported that she was frequently the only caregiver for her sisters, ages one, two and four years." the report says. "She complained of a headache and was very tired. She also requested some help with caring for her sisters.
"The child was able to describe in detail a meal and bedtime routine she had created to keep her sisters quiet: She fed them 'freezies and ice cream' and played with them. The child described a past incident in which one of her sisters had set off the fire alarm while playing with a lighter. She said that the girls were cold and wanted to start a fire to warm up. The fire department reportedly attended the home."
There's something haunting about the line - that the six-year-old, caring for three little girls, was just so tired.
The four deaths reviewed in the report were all in the north between 1999 and 2005. That's an indication of how badly things had fallen apart. Only now, nine years later, was Amanda's death given the respect of a proper independent review.
The problems the report raises are familiar. The ministry had difficulty recognizing and responding to child abuse and neglect. Social workers were unable to complete the child protection investigations in a reasonable time. When it did gather information, it wasn't used properly.
Even when risk was identified, support and supervision weren't inadequate.
And when the ministry identified problems and lessons in its own, generally superficial reviews of the death, it didn't share the information with frontline workers who needed it.
It was another grim report.
Children and Families Minister Tom Christensen didn't see it that way. He hasn't committed to any of the recommendations in the report.
And like the nine ministers before him, he insisted the ministry has things sorted out now.
But that's not what the representative said.
"This investigation found that current safety assessment and planning practices for children have not shown marked improvement since these children died," the report says.
Things will always go wrong in this ministry. It's simply inevitable that misjudgments will be made, sometimes with terrible consequences.
That just makes it more important that the government do everything possible to support workers, children and families.
And it's not.
Footnote: The performance of the Coroners Service, which the government claimed has been reviewing child deaths, was terrible. The reviews of the children's deaths were left incomplete, with no effective monitoring. The service's review of Amanda's death was stalled for two years because the coroner was "uncomfortable" with the task. The chief coroner took no action.

More evidence independent CLBC review needed

Chelsea McGarry is 18. The young Quesnel woman has Down syndrome, autism, early onset Alzheimer’s, diabetes and celiac disease.
It’s been quite a struggle. But Chelsea had been receiving enough supports and service to allow her mum, Shelley, to care for her at home.
Until now. Because when Chelsea turns 19 in December, those supports get chopped and her file transfers to Community Living B.C.
And that problem-plagued Crown corporation, struggling with underfunding, refused to approve a care plan.
Chelsea’s mother has been battling for support. Children’s Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond has advocated for her, and so has her MLA, Bob Simpson.
But only when Times Colonist reporter Lindsay Kines reported on the nightmare did CLBC agree to new meetings to resolve the issues, and the outcome of those is far from clear.
It’s yet another example of how vulnerable are, how fearful they are of making waves in case they face reprisals, and how badly an independent review of the troubled agency is needed.
CLBC was set up in 2005 to provide support and services to adults with developmental disabilities — mental handicaps — and their families. Many have other emotional, mental and physical problems that complicate their lives.
But every year since then, the amount of money available per client has been cut. Services have been reduced and the approximately 550 teens who “age out” and shift to CLBC supports face massive struggles to maintain the quality of their lives.
The corporation has pushed people from staffed group homes, sometimes after years of residence, into homeshares, a a cheaper alternative. CLBC has argued that some clients do better in the new settings.
But Kines uncovered a review of one of the companies managing homeshare services in the Lower Mainland. The consultants report, done for CLBC, was shocking. The consultant could find no evidence basic background checks had been done on some of those providing homeshares to vulnerable adults. There was a lack of training and poor oversight. Homeshare providers weren’t given the information they needed on client’s behavioural and health problems, leading to potentially dangerous incidents and a series of “crisis situations.”
The company, which manages 44 homeshare contracts, was stretched too thinly to properly monitor care. Its manager noted the rush to close group homes — almost 10 per cent have been closed — created similar pressures across the province.
It’s far from the only example of problems.
CLBC refused for months to provide information on wait lists, before revealing that 2,089 people — about one in six clients — receiving some services were waiting for supports to meet identified needs. Another 751 people were getting no services and waiting for help and support. It’s still not know how long the waits last.
The government was forced to come up with an extra $6 million in September because inadequate funding had left clients facing urgent threats to their health and safety, an indication of a basic planning and budgeting failure.
And the government effectively acknowledged the problems, recently firing the CEO of Community Living BC and the minister responsible, Harry Bloy. (The corporation has reported to four different ministers in the last year.)
New Social Development Minister Stephanie Cadieux has promised internal reviews and a greater focus on responding to families’ concerns.
That’s not good enough. CLBC has already betrayed families’ trust by repeatedly denying that people were being forced from group homes before finally admitting that was simply untrue.
And the attempts to deal with individual cases when they capture media attention themselves raises more concerns.
What of the people with developmental disabilities without advocates — those whose parents are dead, or families estranged? There is no one to speak for them, and many can’t do it themselves.
The government has acknowledged its failures in this important are. And independent review, with input from families and advocates, and a public report are needed to chart a way out of this crisis.
Footnote: The Representative for Children and Youth only has authority to investigate problems and advocate for individuals until they turn 19. Turpel-Lafond has suggested that be raised — perhaps to 24 — in recognition that adulthood is instantly attained on the 19th birthday. That too would be a useful change.

Child poverty meeting rejected by premier

It seemed a reasonable request.
The Representative for Children and Youth asked Premier Gordon Campbell and NDP leader Carole James to meet with her on the growing problem of child poverty.
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the representative, is worried. For six years in a row, Statistics Canada reported, B.C. has had the highest child poverty rate in Canada.
And the recession has greatly increased the number of children at risk.
Children's lives today, and their futures, should be above partisan considerations. Turpel-Lafond invited the two leaders to sit down and talk about what is being done, and could be done, to help children.
James said yes.
Campbell said no. He refused even a meeting, brushing off the Children and Youth Representative and the issue of child poverty.
There are reasons for the premier to worry. The representative might point out problems - that is part of the job, created in as a result of the damning Hughes' report on the government's failures on children's issues. James might look for political advantage.
But the plight of some 126,000 B.C. children - with that number growing each week - seems more important than those political considerations.
The problems are serious. For six years, Statistics Canada has reported that B.C. has the highest proportion of children in poverty. You can quarrel about the definition of poverty, but StatsCan is comparing provinces on the same basis. And year after year, B.C. ranks at the bottom.
Across Canada in 2007, 9.5 per cent of children live in poverty. In B.C., 13 per cent of children fell below the poverty line. That is an improvement.
But not enough to move B.C. out of last place on child poverty. And it still meant 126,000 children in B.C. were living on the margins.
That number is much higher now. The recession has sent families on a downward spiral. Jobs are lost - there were 103,000 fewer people with full-time jobs in May than a year earlier.
Some people find work at lower wages. Others go on unemployment insurance. When that runs out - and any savings are gone - they end up on welfare, now known as income assistance. The government has kept life on income assistance pretty miserable. The focus should be on helping those who can work to find a job, the Liberals maintained.
It's a defensible position when the economy is growing and employers are hiring.
But it not when families with no options are forced to live in grinding poverty.
In four months, the number of children living on welfare has jumped almost nine per cent. A single parent with two children who is considered employable receives up to $660 a month on income assistance for rent. It's tough to find a decent one-bedroom - for three people - for that amount.
In addition, the family on assistance gets $650 a month for everything else. Try it. Put $650 in a jar and see if you and two children can make it through the month.
Bus passes, food, insurance, clothes, school trips, a movie with friends for your daughter, swimming lessons. Which will you drop?
If you get reckless, and spend $7 a day on food for each of the three people, all the income assistance is gone.
That's a long digression, but with a point. Times are grim for a lot of children in B.C. - for a higher percentage here than anywhere else in Canada). We benefit when children make the most of their potential.
But Campbell refused a meeting to talk about how we could give more children a chance to build great lives here.
Other provinces have already set out plans for reducing child poverty, with timelines and actions and targets to measure progress. B.C. has not taken that basic step.
The children's representative offered a simple opportunity to look at a critical problem. And the premier said no.
Footnote: Campbell said the representative should discuss child poverty with the legislative committee on children and youth. The committee has not met in almost eight months, and in any case has no power to direct the government or bring about improvements.

Child care "system in crisis" starved in budget

Let us begin with four realities.
It's bad to be a kid in the government's care - in foster care or group homes. No matter how well it goes - and statistically, it likely won't - the care of the state is not the same as a family home.
It's challenging to give kids in care a real chance. When parents can't care for a child, things have usually already gone wrong. Children born into neglect, abuse, poverty, illness, disability - or simply unlucky - wear some scars.
It's certain that things will go wrong, sometimes with terrible consequences. Child protection workers, for example, make huge decisions based on their best professional judgments. Leave a child with a struggling family or send her off, with a little suitcase, to a home of strangers? Either way, the outcome can be bad.
And how we do in helping these children is one of those fundamental tests of whether we are a successful society, or a collection of self-interested individuals. There is no moral difference between walking past a lost toddler in the street and failing to pay attention to the life of a four-year-old in care.
The NDP had a leaked government report this week that suggested that, in some form, that's what we're doing.
The ministry of children and families had noticed that residential costs for the some 9,000 children in care were rising, even though the number of children being raised was stable and they weren't doing any better.
So it set up a group to look at why costs were going up.
They did good work, although the recommendations focus heavily on process and more study.
The report, completed last summer, found costs were rising for a lot of reasons.
The level of support required for children in care has risen. They are more likely to have serious health and behavioural problems. That could be seen as a positive, of course, because it might mean children with fewer problems are being supported with their homes.
Compensation, for foster parents and care home workers, has fallen behind. The ministry report noted that the pays is the same for hosting an international student, with few responsibilities, or a troubled 14-year-old foster child with attitude to burn.
Foster parents were either aging, or inexperienced. (About 12 per cent per cent were over 60.) Either way, they really weren't able to foster the more challenging children.
And schools, facing their own pressures, have become more inclined to expel or suspend students, the report found. That's obviously bad for the children and also increases the costs of providing care.
The results of all this compound the problems. The report found social workers were scrambling to deal with the lack of resources. That means less attention to the needs of the children - barely one in four children in care have the required plans for their development. And it means more foster parents give up in frustration.
The number of foster homes fell by eight per cent across B.C. in the 18 months prior to the report. In the North and on Vancouver Island about 15 per cent fewer homes were available; in the Interior, about 11 per cent.
As a result, foster homes often had more children than ministry guidelines called for and costly alternative placements became more common.
The report, done by the ministry's own staff, highlights real problems. It concludes that the review "revealed a system in crisis and in need of innovation."
You would expect some specific actions in response, starting with the most obvious - additional funding to deal with the problems.
But the provincial budget for child and family development is effectively frozen for the coming year - it will increase less than one-quarter of one per cent. The budget increases for the following two years are about the same.
It's no response to a "system in crisis."
Footnote: Child and Youth Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the legislative officer tasked with monitoring the ministry as a result of the Hughes report, said she had asked for any reports dealing with financial pressures. This report had not been provided by the ministry. Christensen could not say why.

Another child whose life we wrote off

"The Ministry of Children and Family Development missed opportunities to learn from its mistakes by failing to review a number of infant deaths, B.C.'s independent child advocate says," reports Lindsay Kines in the Times Colonist today.
"Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who examined the deaths of 21 infants for a recent report, noted that the ministry conducted its own internal investigations in just 14 of the cases."
All the deaths should have been reviewed based on the ministry's standards, the representative found. In the 14 deaths that were reviewed, "a number took too long complete, ignored key issues or failed to recommend changes that would fix identified problems."
The representative also said regional directors were reviewing cases in which they were involved - an obvious conflict of interest. Minister Mary Polak agreed and said some changes would be made. But the ministry has been "transforming" itself for years with no clear improvements. Where is the accountability for managers who failed to ensure an effective independent review process?
The article is here.
The representatives report, Fragile Lives, Fragmented Systems, is here.

But the individual case studies from the report tell much of the story.
Here's the second one. (The first one is in the post below.)

Case Example Two
This First Nations child was born into a home with other young children. The family lived in poverty and often relied on relatives, transition housing and motels for accommodation. MCFD became aware that the mother was expecting early in her pregnancy.
The mother had been admitted to hospital after being assaulted by her spouse during her pregnancy. Prior to the infant’s birth, 14 child protection reports had been made to the ministry, primarily about alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Four of these reports were made while the mother was pregnant with this infant; they included concerns about inadequate housing, emotional abuse of the infant’s siblings and substance abuse. One of the reports was investigated and not substantiated. The other three were not investigated. The MCFD file was closed before the infant was born.
According to the MCFD file information, the newborn was assessed at birth by a program in the local hospital that worked in conjunction with the public health unit. The program reportedly assessed newborns for medical as well as social/emotional risk factors. The newborn was assessed by the program as low risk and was discharged from hospital the following day. It does not appear the hospital was aware that the family had no reasonable housing and a history of substance abuse and family violence. It appears this MCFD information was not shared with the hospital following the infant’s birth.
The infant was seen three times by public health nurses from birth to three months of age. At the second visit, the mother reported that the infant had noisy breathing while asleep, which a doctor thought was possibly the result of a floppy epiglottis.
Approximately two months later the mother took the infant to see a doctor because the noisy breathing persisted and a cough had developed. The doctor thought these symptoms were possibly due to an infection and prescribed amoxicillin. At the third visit with the public health nurse, the mother informed the nurse that the infant’s noisy breathing persisted, and she also informed the nurse about the previous visit to the doctor. No follow-up regarding the infant’s breathing was noted on the record of the visit.
The infant died four days after the last visit with the public health nurse. On the evening of the death the infant had been left in the care of adolescent babysitters. There was no crib in the home. The babysitters placed the infant to sleep in a car seat that was on top of a soft mattress. Sometime later the car seat turned over, and the baby was asphyxiated.

The key point is that the child's bleak future was foreseeable and the death could have been avoided. The baby never really had a chance and no one took the small steps that could have made a difference for the children in this messed-up family.

I am trying to break you heart

I know we're heading to a long summer weekend, but everyone should read this report from Representative for Children and Youth Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond.
It's a review of the travails of a baby boy who was taken from his parents as a result of legitimate, but easily addressed concerns. All they really needed was help finding an apartment .
While living in his third foster home, and still not six months old, he suffered massive injuries, consistent, doctors said, with being shaken. He is back with his parents as a three-year-old with cerebral palsy, blind in one eye and unable to walk.
I have a friend who is troubled by the attention on these reports. She fears it slights or discourages the workers doing great things every day, in impossible circumstances.
I think paying real attention is the greatest honour we can do those people.