More answers in the sad case of Sherry Charlie

VICTORIA - Two weeks after releasing a five-page summary of its review of the death of 19-month-old Sherry Charlie, the government changed course and made the full report public.
And the full version revealed significant omissions in the summary.
Sherry was battered to death almost three years ago, days after being placed in the care of relatives under a new ministry policy. The man who beat her, the father in the Port Alberni home, had a long and violent criminal record. He was on probation for assaulting his spouse. The children’s ministry had already investigated concerns about the well-being of other children in the home.
Sherry wasn't properly protected.
There's no shattering differences between the summary and the full report on most of the facts.
But the ministry's summary left out significant context about how this came to happen, and what needs to be done prevent similar cases.
The summary reported that Usma Nuu Chah Nulth Community Services, acting on the authority of the ministry, placed Sherry in the home of her uncle, the man convicted of manslaughter in her death. (The ministry believes - rightly - that placing a child with family is generally preferable to foster care with non-relatives.)
The agency had not done a criminal record check. It had done only one reference check. It had contacted the ministry to find out if there were any previous concerns about the home. There were, but the ministry didn't tell the agency about them.
The whole process was new to all concerned. The government had just proclaimed the sections of a six-year-old act that set up a separate, less involved procedure for placing children with family and friends as an alternative to foster care. Sherry was the first child the Nuu Chah Nulth Agency placed under the new policy.
The summary acknowledged problems. "The newness of the policy, the lack of training and the lack of clarity on the requirements contributed to some confusion in the agency," it said.
But the report adds useful detail. The six-page policy was faxed to the agency that summer, with no follow-up or training, and the language suggested the guidelines were optional.
And it adds context about the change. "It was introduced in 2002 as an element of MCFD's new strategic shift, placing more onus on communities (families, informal support networks) to care for children, to reduce the number of children in foster care by a specific percentage and, in the opinion of the review to reduce costs," the report says.
Children and Families Minister Stan Hagen disagrees with the report. Placing Sherry in foster care would have been less costly, he notes, since the federal government would have paid.
But the finding is consistent with other, similar concerns about the ministry's direction, and it is relevant. It should have been disclosed.
Just as the report's observations about the wider issues that led to the case should have been disclosed. The report notes sherry was from Ahousat, a small island community about 40 minutes from Port Alberni by boat.
"The resources available to social workers in small, isolated communities are often woefully inadequate; there are often waiting lists for alcohol and drug treatment programs, day care facilities are inadequate, family support programs do not address underlying social problems," says the full report. "The lack of resources and the isolation result in agencies having difficulty supervising the progress or lack of progress a family is making."
To me, that's important enough to make the summary.
Hagen has, to his credit, acted to deal with the obvious perceived conflict involved in having ministry staff summarize reports that may be critical of their actions. Future reports will simply be released in full, subject to editing for privacy issues.
But the three-year delay, the reluctant disclosure and the missing information are all troubling.
Things are going to go wrong sometimes in this ministry.
What the public, the children and families served, and the people on the front lines all deserve is quick, full disclosure, and fast action to fix any problems.
Footnote: Sherry's brother remained in the home for five months after her death on Sept. 4. The summary said "between September, 2002, and January, 2003, the agency and ministry received information that the coroner was suspicious about the explanation for the child’s death." The full report shows the ministry was told Sherry's death was suspicious on Sept. 17.

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.

A child is dead, and three years later big questions remain

VICTORIA - Little Sherry Charlie shouldn’t have died.
The Port Alberni toddler was battered to death days after being placed in a foster home.
The man who beat her, the father in the home, had a long and violent criminal record. He was on probation for assaulting his spouse.
The children’s ministry knew there was a risk. It had already investigated concerns about the well-being of other children in the home.
But the ministry, and the First Nations agency that arranged the placement, both failed Sherry. And a little girl - 19 months old - died a terrible death.
Bad things happen. And in the difficult world of the ministry of children and families, some things will inevitably go very wrong.
When they do, the public needs quick, complete answers, to help avoid future errors. We are the ones responsible.
It took the government almost three years to release a report on her death. There were reasons for some delays. But taking three years to report on the death of a child is inexcusable.
When the report was finally released, the public got a five-page summary - prepared by the ministry - which left huge unanswered questions. The actual report, still secret, was almost 50 pages long.
The summary confirms that Sherry shouldn’t have died. It reveals that the ministry and Usma Nuu Chah Nulth Community and Human Services made major mistakes.
But while it offers up some facts, it does not provide needed answers.
The Nuu Chah Nulth agency, acting on the authority of the ministry, placed Sherry in the home of her uncle, the man convicted of manslaughter in her death. (The ministry believes - rightly - that placing a child with family is preferable to foster care with non-relatives.)
The agency had not done a criminal record check. It had done only one reference check before Sherry and her few possessions were dropped off at the home.
Why not more diligence? The summary doesn’t provide the needed answers. The agency may have violated ministry policies, the summary says. But it adds that the agency staff thought the policies were just guidelines.There was no training in the new rules. Nobody really knew what it all meant.
Why not? Was the ministry unclear? Were things happening too fast? Was there no money for training? Did the push to find family placements take priority over proper checks? Those questions aren’t answered in the skimpy summary.
When the First Nations agency did try to to get information, the ministry failed.
The agency asked the ministry to check its files to see if there were any issues with the prospective foster family.
There were. The ministry had information about past concerns in the same home. But it didn’t disclose them to the First Nations agency.
The summary says only that the failure was “inadvertent.” But why did it happen? Are ministry files incomplete? Was the worker too overloaded to check? Was training inadequate? No answers.
In the 15 days Sherry was in the home before she died, were there any follow-up visits to see how how was she doing? The ministry summary doesn’t say.
All this matters because we need to know if the problem has been fixed. If frontline workers are prevented from doing their job because budget cuts have left them with too many clients, and too few resources, we need to know. If training is inadequate, or systems don’t work, we need to know that.
Three years after Sherry’s death the only completed review has been done by the ministry - an obvious conflict of interest. The public still doesn’t have answers to basic questions.
The immediate solution is simple - release the full review, edited to protect individuals’ privacy rights.
The real answer is to bring back the Children’s Commission, eliminated by the Liberals, and restore effective independent review of the ministry.
Sherry didn’t have to die this way. At least let’s make her death mean something.
Footnote: The ministry contracted with Nicholas Simons, then employed with a First Nations service provider on the Sunshine Coast, to conduct the still-secret review. Simons is now the newly elected NDP MLA from the area, an indication of how long this has taken - and that the government can expect informed questions when the legislature resumes sitting in September.

Campbell just can’t admit Children’s Commission error

VICTORIA - Why is it so hard for the government to accept the obvious - that it made a serious, damaging mistake in eliminating the Children’s Commission in 2002?
The inquest into the death of toddler Sherry Charlie has wrapped up, a two-week review that outlined a string of failures.
No one - not the government, the RCMP or the First Nations agency involved - emerged from the inquest with reputation intact.
All made serious errors, either in placing Sherry in the home where she was beaten to death or investigating her death.
Human error, systemic problems, shabby investigations, botched communications, sloppiness - it was a dismal, depressing two weeks.
Sherry, only 19 months old when she was battered to death, never really had much of a chance. The agencies and people that were supposed to support her and keep her safe failed. Their failures weren’t the result of bad luck, or a rare confluence of events. The system didn’t work.
Sherry was placed in the care of relatives, even though the father in the home had a long criminal record, including convictions for spousal assault. Even though the children and families’ ministry had investigated previous reports about the safety of other children in the home.
And even after Sherry’s death and an autopsy that found evidence of repeated abuse, her brother was left in the home for five months.
The jury’s 19 recommendations make a start at addressing the problems.
Sherry’s life was in the hands of Usma, a First Nations’ agency that operated under delegated authority from the ministry of children and families. That’s a sound approach, ensuring workers are more knowledgeable about local issues and more trusted. But the jury urged that social workers at those kind of agencies should not have lower levels of training than ministry staff.
Sherry’s placement was one of the first under a new ministry ”Kith and Kin” policy, which stressed the value of finding a family member to care for a child as an alternative to foster care.
Again, a positive policy. But it was introduced in haste, with inadequate training. Proper criminal record checks weren’t required. (That problem wasn’t fixed until the last few weeks.) Rules around home and reference reviews were inadequate. The ministry guidelines were incomplete.
Fix it, the jury said.
The jury made 19 recommendations in all, to police, coroner, the health care system, the ministry and Usma.
The last recommendation was sent specifically to Premier Gordon Campbell. Bring back the Children’s Commission, eliminated by the Liberals in September 2002 - the month Sherry was kicked and beaten to death.
The commission would not have kept Sherry alive and safe.
But it would have examiner her death. It would have reviewed the Kith and Kin policy when it was introduced, and warned of problems. The public would have known some one was watching. Just as the public would have known that 713 child death files were abandoned incomplete in a warehouse.
And all those things would have happened automatically.
Premier Gordon Campbell rejected the jury’s calls for an immediate restoration of the commission. He wants to wait, he said, until other reviews of the ministry by Child and Officer Jane Morley and Ted Hughes are complete before making a decision. The final report from Morley is due at the end of June.
Campbell could plead for time to determine the best way to restore what was lost when the commission was eliminated, and a chance to incorporate Hughes’ recommendations.
But almost everyone involved in child protection and supporting families has called for the restoration of effective independent oversight.
Campbell could easily have acknowledged the error in eliminating the commission, and promised to accept the spirit of the jury’s recommendations. The details could await the various reports still to come.
Getting rid of the Children’s Commission was a mistake. It weakened protection for children, and removed an important independent voice that celebrated ministry successes, and warned of problems.
It’s time to face the facts, and fix the problem.
Footnote: The NDP pretty much called for minister Stan Hagen’s resignation this week. That’s the last thing the ministry needs after a decade of instability. But Hagen has to begin dealing publicly with the wide concerns about the issues facing the ministry, something he has been unwilling to do.

Two decades of failure on at-risk children, families

Note: Please read the specific examples in the posts below after reading this. Or, if pressed for time, just read them.


It’s now been 20 years of failure when it comes to the most vulnerable children in this province. Based on the scarcity of commitments from leadership candidates, another dismal decade could lie ahead.
The Representative for Children and Youth has released her latest report, on the deaths of 21 infants whose families had been involved with the children’s ministry in the year before the children died.
These babies didn’t really stand much of a chance. Many people in “the system” — the ministry, health authorities — knew the risks for them were high. But the response was fragmented. The people who could have helped were overworked and unsupported. We failed them.
None of these were easy cases. The children faced tough lives even with the best support in the world. The families were dirt poor. They lived in dismal housing: Mould-ridden hovels, motel rooms, overcrowded houses.
Most of the families had issues with addictions, mental illness and domestic violence. Almost three-quarters of the children were aboriginal.
You should read the report, Fragile Lives, Fragmented Systems, at rcybc.ca. Especially the case examples, which set out the circumstances of some of the families, and was done — and not done - to keep the children safe.
The measures that could have helped aren’t all complicated or expensive. The representative found there are no provincewide rules or guidelines for child protection workers involved with a family expecting another child. (And where there are protocols, they weren’t followed.)
In three-quarters of the cases, the ministry had received reports that children already in the home might be at risk while the mothers were pregnant. Investigations were slow and in some cases inadequate. In only three of the cases was there evidence of planning for the infant on discharge from hospital.
Perhaps as a result, there was little support for the families after the babies were taken home. They were left living in terrible conditions, with no effective help in finding adequate housing, for example.
Public-health nurse visits could have helped protect the children and support the often ill-equipped mothers. But the province hasn’t created a standard of nursing support for at-risk infants.
And, of course, B.C. still has no provincial plan to address its ranking as the worst province in Canada for childhood poverty.
Just before the 2001 election, I wrote about the New Democratic government’s cruel mismanagement of the children’s ministry.
The column quoted the final report of Children’s Advocate Joyce Preston, an independent legislative watchdog foolishly eliminated by the Campbell government.
She described a decade of failure on the part of the NDP. “For the most part it has been a case of all talk and no action,” she said. Under the NDP, the ministry was underfunded, short-staffed and mismanaged, I wrote then.
Gordon Campbell promised much better. I believed him. But it was all empty talk.
The most obvious broken promise was the 2001 election campaign commitment to stop the “endless restructuring” that wasted resources and created disorganization.
Campbell had also stood in the legislature and urged an end to partisan fighting over vulnerable childen. All MLAs should figure out what the children and youth needed and find the money to support them, he said.
He repeated the promise in writing before the election. The children and families spending would be based on the need, not some arbitrary budget allowance, he pledged.
Campbell and the Liberals did the opposite. Budgets were slashed, without any analysis or plan. The Liberals launched — and spent tens of millions on — a plan for regional authorities, and then abandoned it. Almost 10 years after the Liberals were first elected, and the ministry is still perpetually “transforming,” though how and into what is unclear.
The Liberal government has defended its poor performance. It’s tough to keep social workers. There were staff shortages. We’re trying. Things will improve.
It was all exactly what the NDP government said a decade earlier.
Infants, children and youths who at risk, or in danger, deserve protection. Families need help. And for 20 years, the provincial government has failed them.

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.

Judge for yourself if infants protected and families supported

I've been posting case examples from the Representative for Children and Youth report Fragile Lives, Fragmented Systems.
Here are number five and six; the first four are in posts below.
You can read and judge if the system is working to protect children.

Case Example
This infant was born to a First Nations mother who had one older child living with her. Two older children had been removed by the ministry in the past and were living with relatives. There had been 12 child protection reports over a 10-year period. The reports involved drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence as well as exposing the children to dangerous situations and general lack of supervision and neglect. Investigations had found at one point that the family lived in very substandard housing requiring immediate attention due to the risks to the children.
The eleventh report regarding the care of the sibling was received when the mother was in the early stages of her pregnancy. It was not investigated. A second report was received subsequent to the infant’s birth, which also was not investigated. Both reports were signed by a supervisor and closed. A number of months later, after another report that was not documented as a child protection report was received, the children were removed.
By not responding to the initial report, the opportunity was lost to assess the family circumstances and plan for the birth of the infant.

Case Example
The mother of the infant had been diagnosed with FASD at a young age. Her capacity to parent was limited. Prior to the infant’s birth she had transferred the care of her first child to her former spouse as she was unable to handle the child’s behaviour. She used harmful substances while pregnant with her second child. Her prenatal substance use, limited capacity and lack of financial resources were factors that the staff in the hospital felt placed her at risk.
The infant was born prematurely and was transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit due to high medical needs. Prior to discharging the infant, health professionals noted concerns about the home the infant would be living in, the mother’s capacity and her social situation. The infant was discharged at six weeks of age.
When the infant was two months old, the social worker contacted the public health nurse to request that she provide information to the infant’s mother regarding safe sleep as the mother had informed the social worker that the infant currently slept in a car seat and also in the mother’s bed. The public health nurse contacted the mother, who said that she did not have a crib for the infant and could not afford one. The mother said that the infant was currently sleeping in a playpen. The nurse discouraged the mother from using a playpen and encouraged her to purchase a crib. On the same day, the nurse contacted the social worker regarding financial assistance for a crib. The public health notes indicate that the nurse planned to follow up with the MCFD social worker in two weeks. However, there is no indication of any further follow-up regarding the infant’s sleeping arrangements.
Over a number of weeks the mother’s capacity to take care of the infant began to deteriorate, and beginning at three months old, the infant was provided temporary respite care with increasing frequency in three different homes. The ministry social worker requested and received approval for the purchase of a playpen for the infant to sleep in while in respite care in one of the three homes because the caregivers did not have an appropriate place for the infant to sleep.
The third home offering respite care was an MCFD-approved foster home. The foster home file information did not indicate that the foster parents had received any specialized training with respect to caring for infants or caring for infants with high medical needs. In this home the infant also slept in a playpen. On the night of the death the infant was put to sleep on its side in the playpen, with a blanket placed against its back. A couple of hours later the caregiver found the infant unresponsive.
A post-mortem examination following the infant’s death indicated that an untreated kidney infection caused the death, and an inter-current viral infection and aspiration pneumonia were contributory. A pediatric review of the infant’s medical and post-mortem information indicated that the kidney infection was treatable, had it been recognized earlier. However, the infant’s symptoms may have been misinterpreted as a cold or flu.

Charlie case piles up doubts about children's ministry

VICTORIA - Jamie Charlie was three.
His sister, not yet two, had just been beaten to death in the home that was supposed to be a refuge. The man who did it, the father in the home, claimed that Jamie had pushed his sister down some stairs. The boy was set to grow up thinking he had killed her.
Except days later an autopsy found that the severe injuries couldn't have been produced by a fall. The RCMP was called, and the ministry of children and families. Both children had been placed in the home by a First Nations' agency working under the ministry's authority.
Then a criminal record check arrived, too late for Sherry. The man who killed her had a long record, including violent offences. When Jamie and Sherry were sent there, he was still on probation for assaulting his wife.
The ministry launched its first investigation. At the least there was a dark cloud over that Port Alberni household.
But two months later the next steps in Jamie's tough life were being decided in provincial court. Usma Family and Child Services, acting for the director of child protection, needed approval to apprehend him, and decide on where he should go.
And despite all the warning signs, the plan was to leave Jamie in the home where Sherry died - despite the suspicions, the history of violent crime and other concerns.
Worse, the judge didn't get the real story. The court was told only that Sherry had "passed away" in a "tragic accident." That was by then known to be untrue.
Victoria Times-Colonist reporter Lindsay Kines uncovered the information, the latest revelation in the discouraging saga of Sherry's death.
The ministry's first response was to suggest that this really wasn't a ministry problem; it was something for the First Nations' agency to deal with. Its social worker made the court appearance.
Children and Families Minister Stan Hagen quickly moved beyond that position. The agency acted on behalf of the director of child protection. The government remained responsible.
But four days after the news broke, the ministry said it had searched the files and didn't know about the court hearing, or Jamie's placement. "There are no records in any of the ministry files that anybody realized that this had happened," Hagen said.
That's a bad thing. A critical decision was made, and the ministry had no process for staying informed.
It's even more worrying that despite supposedly thorough investigations into Sherry's death - at the very time the court hearing took place, and over the last three years - the government never found out about the hearing. The court records existed; a call to the agency should have produced the information. Questions about why Jamie was left in the home have been raised publicly by his family, and the opposition.
Yet no one in the ministry had investigated effectively enough to find out about the court appearance, or the misleading information presented on behalf of the director. A reporter had to get at the facts.
It was significant information. Child and Youth Officer Jane Morley immediately asked for permission to launch an investigation into Jamie's placement. Attorney General Wally Oppal is expected to grant her request.
That, along with the coroner's inquest announced Tuesday, means eight investigations are under way into this death.
Less than two months ago Hagen was maintaining that a flawed internal review had provided the needed answers. "The director's review is a complete story from start to finish," he told the legislature.
Since then there have been more and more questions that the government can't answer, and more and more reviews into Sherry's death, and the ministry's work.
Things will go wrong in the ministry, and the results will sometimes be terrible. That's the nature of the work.
But the succession of revelations - each of which seems a surprise to the ministry - raises basic questions of competence, and undermines public confidence.
Footnote: The question now is how widespread these problems are. The decision to eliminate the Children's Commission, without having any effective replacement process for reviewing child deaths, has created the risk that children are falling through the cracks, and that lessons aren't being learned.

Too little information on the way we treat kids in care

VICTORIA - The Gove Inquiry, looking at the horrific death of a little boy who should have been saved, was clear.
"Death and serious injury reviews should proceed promptly. . . "  The Liberals and the NDP both supported Judge Thomas Gove's recommendations for children and families' reform.
Now it's ten years on, and a little girl is dead. Sherry Charlie was only 19 months old when she was placed in a Port Alberni foster home. Weeks later she was dead. Her foster father, Ryan George, pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Sherry was battered to death.
It's not just another sad story. Because before Sherry was sent to the home, there were warning signs. George had a long and violent criminal record, and was still on probation for spousal assault.
Sherry died in September, 2002. Two-and-a-half years later, no review of her death has been completed. The public hasn't been told if any avoidable errors were made, or if it could be happening again as you read this column.
It's a big commitment, taking on the responsibility for children. On any given day that's the role the government - on your behalf - takes for some 9,000 children in British Columbia. It is difficult, but necessary. And it creates obligations.
We aren't honoring those obligations, according to three people who should know. Former children's commissioner Cindy Morton, children's advocate Joyce Preston and former B.C. ombudsman Dulcie McCallum wrote Gordon Campbell nine months ago because they were worried that British Columbians no longer know how well the ministry is serving the people who desperately need its help. They wanted a confidential meeting, to talk about solutions.
But they never got a response, despite three follow-up calls over several months, and decided to release their letter publicly.
The Liberals eliminated the offices of the children's commissioner, and children's advocate in 2002.
Nothing would be lost, they said. The BC Coroner’s Service would take over investigating and reporting on children’s deaths. But the coroner's budget was cut, and pressures mounted.The service hasn’t released a single review of child deaths, which were prepared every three months by the children's commission.
A new position, the child and youth officer, was established to replace both the children's commission and the youth advocate.
It hasn't been an adequate replacement. Officer Jane Morely may be active behind the scenes, and raised important concerns in her last annual report. But the public accountability has almost vanished.
It's a serious loss. The children’s commission's last annual report, in June 2002, found the ministry had acceptable care plans for only half the 9,700 children in care. It examined 107 cases in which children in care suffered critical injuries, and found half didn't have adequate care plans, and many had been poorly placed in foster homes and moved frequently.
Are we doing better, or worse by those children today? We don't know.
Gordon Campbell used to support the role of the children's commission and the children's advocate. He championed their work, and used their findings to hold the NDP government to account.
The Liberals have, by any reasonable standard, mishandled the ministry. Their initial plans for a 23-per-cent budget cut - obviously unrealistic - had to be abandoned, and the cuts scaled back (but not eliminated). A restructuring plan went wildly off-track, with the deadlines missed by years. Only in the last year has some stability emerged.
Those problems make it more critical that the public receive complete, independent reports on how the ministry is doing. It's not a question of second-guessing frontline workers, or finding fault. It's simply fulfilling our duty to children and families.
We - you and I - have taken on responsibility for some children in very tough circumstances. The evidence over the last decade is that government has great difficulty in meeting the huge challenge of offering the life and hope.
We need to know the job is being done right. And that means independent, public reporting.
Footnote: The coroner and ministry both say they will soon complete reports on Sherry's death. Advocates have been pressing for answers for at least a year, including information on whether the pressure to reduce costs affected her placement, and whether her foster home was appropriate to her needs and adequately supported and supervised.

A little boy, failed by the system and forgotten by the rest of us

It’s fitting, in a grimly symbolic way. 
Just when attention might be paid to the little boy who fared so badly in the government’s care, a swirl of bigger news stories pushed him into the shadows.
We don’t know his name. The little boy has a right to privacy. Not much else.
The representative for Children and Youth set out his story — how he went from a healthy baby boy to a three-year-old who had suffered devastating injuries that left him with cerebral palsy. He’s blind in one eye, can’t walk yet and faces a life of struggle.
The boy was born on July 9, 2006. His mom was 20; his dad 24. They were from the same First Nations community and had rough childhoods themselves.
But they loved their baby and were capable of nurturing him. They moved back into the boy’s grandparents’ home on an unidentified reserve to care for him.
It was not a great place for an infant. On July 28, someone called the ministry of children and families and said it was not a safe home for a child. Alcohol abuse, neglect, even physical abuse were possible.
The ministry responded admirably. Social workers checked the files and made immediate home visits. They checked on the baby boy, who was doing well. They explained to the parents why the grandparents’ home was not safe.
The mother understood. She said they were going to live with another relative as an interim measure.
There was a 200-person waiting list for reserve housing. To deal with the concerns, she needed help from the ministry of income assistance to get off-reserve housing.
And the mother applied for the help. The income assistance ministry told her to come back after the mandatory three-week wait, if she had found a place. She was denied interim financial assistance.
In September, the ministry received a report the family was back in the grandparents’ home and, apparently, other concerns were raised. The investigating social worker decided the risk was serious enough that the boy should be taken from his parents.
An RCMP officer and social workers from the ministry and the aboriginal agency that provided services found the mother walking her two-month-old son in a stroller.
She had been living in the grandparents’ home for a week because they had no money to live anywhere else, the young mother said. She had been in the hospital for several days and the boy’s father had been caring for him.
And the workers took the baby away.
He was placed in a foster home that day. (A relative who provided foster care offered to take him. That offer was apparently never followed up on.) The parents suggested two other relatives who could care for the child. The ministry says it couldn’t reach them; the family says they were never called.
The ministry came up with a risk-reduction plan that would allow the child to be returned to his parents, once housing was secured and support was provided. But it didn’t do the required plan of care for the child. This is tangled and difficult work, of course. The social worker referred the parents to family counselling. They didn’t go.
The first foster home placement was on a 30-day contract. When it ended on Oct. 2, the baby was moved to another foster home.
In early November, the boy’s mother requested the ministry return her child because she had found shared housing. It wasn’t safe enough, workers decided.
Meanwhile, the child’s second foster mother became ill. So on Dec. 12, he was moved to a third foster home.
It’s worth pausing to think about this. The baby was barely five months old and had been with his parents and in three different foster homes. All good intentions aside, as a parent or grandparent, how do you think a child you loved would handle those changes? How long would he cry for a missing blanket or a person he had come to associate with comfort?
On Dec. 18, the baby boy had a successful supervised visit with his parents. Two days later, it all went wrong. The foster home reported he was unwell. At B.C. Children’s Hospital, doctors said his injuries were consistent with having been shaken. Criminal charges were laid against a caregiver in the foster home and then later stayed.
After almost a month in hospital, the baby was sent to his fourth foster home in January 2007.
In July, he was returned to his parents and started receiving support because of his massive disabilities. He has been making progress in their care since then, but is struggling with permanent, severe disabilities.
Next: What did we learn from this family’s tragedy?

Going backward on support for families who step up to help children

The B.C. Association of Social Workers offers informed and balanced analysis. Thus the concerns about changes to supports for grandparents and other family members who step up to care for children should be given serious consideration. Children need families.


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BC ASSOCIATION OF SOCIAL WORKERS
MARCH 11, 2010

“EXTENDED FAMILY PROGRAM” OFFERS IMPROVED SUPPORTS FOR SOME, BUT DISQUALIFIES TOO MANY OTHERS

Effective April 1st, the provincial government will institute changes to support services for family members/family friends who have stepped in to care for a child whose parents cannot look after them. The Child in a Home of a Relative (CIHR) program under the Ministry of Housing and Social Development will be phased out, with no new applications accepted after March 31st, 2010. The new Extended Family Program (EFP) under the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD), heralded by the provincial government as a way to “support strong, stable home environments and ensure the safety and well-being of children and youth who are temporarily unable to live with their parents,” states its most important goal is to “improve outcomes for children and youth.”

The majority of these children will be living with their grandparents. In fact, there are more children being raised by their grandparents in BC than there are in the foster care system. A recent survey by Parent Support Services Society of BC and the University of Victoria School of Social Work indicated that half the grandparents raising their grandchildren had the children placed with them by MCFD. Grandparents have been referred to as ‘the underground foster care system’ for good reason.

The BC Association of Social Workers has reviewed the new Extended Family Program, and has identified some major concerns:

Although anyone currently in receipt of CIHR benefits will continue to be covered under that program until the child reaches the age of majority, after March 31st, the only apparent option for a relative who undertakes the care of a child is through the Extended Family Program. If they do not qualify, they will be left with very few supports – and indeed many will not qualify. Two major flaws are apparent in the planning for the EFP:

• The only gateway to the new program is through the child’s parent, who must request and agree to the arrangement. Too often that parent cannot be found, suffers from a mental illness or addiction, may be incarcerated or street engaged, may have an estranged relationship with the grandparents or simply may be unwilling or unable to cooperate for a variety of reasons.

• The new policy disqualifies any relative with legal guardianship of the child to receive services, even if they have great need. This is despite the fact that MCFD staff and often lawyers advise grandparents (or other relatives) to obtain legal guardianship because of the protection it affords the child and the grandparents in decision making and acquiring services for the child.

Unlike the CIHR plan, which covers children until they age out, the service plan under the Extended Family Program will be reviewed every six months, and supports will continue “as long as there is an assessed need and the parent agrees that the out-of-home placement remains the best option for the child.” This leaves relatives unable to plan far into the future as all or some supports could disappear in a very short time. The agreements are “not expected to continue beyond 24 months maximum... unless an assessment of the child’s needs supports a longer timeline.” Two years in the life of a child who has likely experienced substantial turmoil, and whose parents may have chronic problems that interfere with their ability to parent, is extraordinarily brief. Many grandparents hope that their child will be able to parent again when well. Sometimes that is possible. Often the children stay with their grandparents until they are grown or the grandparents are too old or ill to care for them. But this program can only assure them they will receive help for between 6 and 24 months.

As for the screenings and assessments, we are concerned that these procedures now become the responsibility of MCFD. No new funding or staffing has been allocated to handle the additional workloads in an already under-resourced ministry. While we support the need for in- depth assessments, adding this task to social work caseloads which are already too high in most regions will only result in critical delays across the board to families needing help, and create untenable situations for professional staff.

We do not note any appeal system for people refused under the new program, nor is there any increased advocacy funding or service to assist with navigation, clarification, problem solving etc. In fact, it has been reduced, with the elimination of LawLINE, which was often the first step in receiving legal rights information.

We applaud the services the new Extended Family Program will provide – financial help, respite care, medical, optical and dental benefits, increased access to counselling services – it’s all good. But why, we ask, has this program been designed to deliberately exclude many of the families who need it most – the family members who cannot locate or have an estranged relationship with the child’s parent, the grandparents or other relatives who fought for legal guardianship to protect the child’s best interests – many of whom live near or beneath the poverty line or struggle on fixed incomes, and who have undertaken responsibility for a child or children who may have many special needs.

Currently, 4500 families receive benefits under CIHR and less than 200 under Kith and Kin agreements. With the tight screening criteria of the Extended Family Program, it is likely that few families will qualify. For those who do, it will be a wonderful benefit. For the vast majority who do not, it will be devastating.

BCASW asks the government to review this program in the light of our concerns, and institute the changes that will ensure no children are excluded from the help they need to live in a safe and secure family environment. Specifically, we ask that:

• Legal guardians be considered eligible for the EFP • Caregivers be allowed to apply for the EFP in circumstances that preclude a parent from giving consent
• The program be reframed from a ‘temporary’ stopgap to one that offers help until a child reaches the age of majority, where it is in the child’s best interests. • Funding be increased to MCFD to handle the additional workload • MCFD establish an external advisory body that includes social workers, legal advocates and other stakeholders
• MCFD recognize the unique hardships and contributions of grandparents and other relatives/close family friends and demonstrate its commitment to supporting children to remain with extended family on a long term basis if needed.

Chaos, confusion and coroners' secrecy put boy at risk

VICTORIA - There's some new appalling detail on almost every page of the report into why a little boy was left for months in the care of the man who beat his 19-month-old sister to death.
The government finally released Child and Youth Officer Jane Morley's report Friday, after sitting on it for three weeks. The report paints a terrible picture of failure, of a system snarled in rigid bureaucracy and plagued by paralysing secrecy, suspicion and indecision.
Ministry of children and families staff were keeping secrets from Usma, the First Nations' agency delivering child protection services to the family. Usma workers were keeping, it turned out, the same secrets from ministry staff.
Pleas for help and direction from front-line workers were ignored by senior ministry staff.
Even as chaos and confusion mounted, no one at the top levels of the ministry stepped in, called people together and sorted things out,
And all the while the Coroners Service, responsible for child death reviews, was refusing to provide critical information - including the details of the terrible injuries that killed Sherry Charlie - to the people charged with protecting her three-year-old brother Jamie and the other children in the Port Alberni home.
It's a grim recitation, made bearable only because the children weren't physically harmed.
Sherry Charlie, who had been placed in the care of family members by Usma on behalf of the ministry, was beaten to death Sept. 4. Within five days preliminary autopsy results made it clear to the coroner and police that she hadn't died from a fall down a few stairs, as the family claimed. She had head and abdominal trauma, a lacerated liver, internal bleeding and other injuries.
But neither coroner nor police shared that information with the ministry or Usma for almost two months.
Some scenes in the report stand out, moments that can convey the bizarre way this case was handled. By late October, eight weeks after the killing, the coroner had told ministry staff - vaguely - that Sherry's death hadn't been caused by a fall down stairs. But the coroner had insisted the information be kept secret.
Usma was about to extend Jamie's placement in the home. A senior ministry official was concerned enough to call the Usma supervisor and ask if she was sure that was the right decision. The puzzled Usma worker asked if the ministry knew something that she didn't.
Instead of answering, the ministry manager allowed a silent pause. She thought that was a good way to hint at problems; the Usma worker thought she was acknowledging there were no concerns. It was a ludicrous way to deal with a child in danger.
What also stands out is the failure of the Coroners Service to discharge - or even grasp - its responsibilities. It took four months for the coroner's service to produce an autopsy report on Sherry's death, which confirmed the original findings. It took another two months of effort to get the coroner to provide the report to the ministry.
This despite a legal requirement that coroners, like others, immediately report to the ministry any facts that raise questions about a child's safety.
It's grim. The Coroners Service priority appeared to be the police case, not children's safety.
Worse, Morley notes that the coroner involved and the Coroners Service both tried to argue that she shouldn't be allowed to comment or report on the possibility that the service had made mistake, broken laws or make any comments that "reflect adversely on the Coroner's competence." It's an incredible attempt to deny public accountability and hide from independent scrutiny.
The other alarming element to all this is that the facts are only coming out now, more than four years after all this happened.
And for much of that time the government has insisted that there was no need for an investigation, that the case had been properly handled and the Coroners Service was handling its responsibilities effectively.
Morley's report shows that none of those claims were true.
Footnote: The report includes on recommendation which urges the government to create a "system of multi-agency child death teams" to investigate when a child dies unexpectedly in the home of a caregiver and other children remain in the home. If the system had been in place, Morley says, police, coroner, the ministry and Usma could have worked together quickly and effectively.

Brandon died, and his mother deserves answers

VICTORIA - One phone conversation with Dayna Humphrey demolishes all the government's evasions on child death reviews.
Humphrey's son died more than two years ago, weeks after he was placed in a Surrey foster home. Like any mother, she wanted to know what happened, how her cheerful two-year-old could have ended up slumped in a too large wheelchair, restraint straps pressing on his neck, no longer breathing.
No one would tell her. The ministry of children and families didn't return calls. She waited seven months for a coroner's report. It was a one-page judgment, that said the cause of Brandon's death was undetermined, didn't even mention that he was in a foster home or government care and made no recommendations.
Humphrey thought placing Brandon briefly in the government's care was the best choice.
He was born three months early, weighing less than two pounds, and suffered from deafness, cerebral palsy and other problems.
Humphrey's marriage had ended. She had two other children, and needed to find work. The 24-hour care that Brandon needed, the challenge of physiotherapy and learning sign language, were too much, and she couldn't get assistance. So she placed Brandon in care for three months to get her life organized for the challenges ahead.
And then he was dead.
Humphrey tried for almost a year to get answers. "I've been slapped down at every step," she says, in a quiet voice. Finally, she gave up.
Then came the admission that files on 713 child deaths had been forgotten in a Victoria warehouse.
"I woke up at 6:30, like I do every morning, to get ready for work and turned on the news and there it was, right in front of me," says Humphrey. "I was devastated. I'm angry. I'm hurt."
She wondered whether proper reviews into those deaths would have yielded lessons that would have saved Brandon's life.
And then she wondered if other children might die, because no one was learning from Brandon's death.
Dayna Humphrey is the perfect rebuttal to the government's claims about child death reviews.
She shows that the reviews are essential, and that since the Liberals eliminated the Children's Commission meaningful reports have ceased. And she proves that there is now no way for families to get the answers they deserve.
Solicitor General John Les has claimed that the forgotten files weren't really forgotten, because the coroner did an initial report.
But the report on Brandon's death shows how inadequate those reviews are when it comes to children's deaths.
A child is in a foster home, left unattended in a wheelchair that doesn't fit him, and dies. And the result is a one-page report with no recommendations. It doesn't look at why a proper wheelchair wasn't available; why he was left alone; whether the number of children in the home was a factor; or even whether support would have allowed Brandon to stay at home.
Les maintains that a child death review team in the Coroner's Office has done detailed reviews on 526 children's deaths over the last three years, including Brandon's.
But only two have been released. Chief Coroner Terry Smith says he has neither the budget nor the legal authority needed to do the reviews.
And while Les says individual death reviews may be released, the coroner says that won't happen.
Questions about Brandon's death have been raised in the legislature every day this week. But Les said he hasn't asked for a copy of the child death review.
He has no answers for Brandon's mother.
When the Children's Commission, she would have got those answers. And British Columbians would have been confident that the death was properly reviewed, and lessons learned.
"That's exactly what it is I'm looking for - an independent third party that can look at these," Humphrey says. "I want to know that somebody out there is looking for my son's voice."
"All the children and all the parents deserve that much."
Footnote: Les continued to say in the legislature this week that the coroner would be releasing both individual reviews, and reports that looked at trends in deaths and specific issues. The coroner's office say that it has no plans to issue individual reports. Parents won't get answers there.

Children and families needs share of surplus

VICTORIA - The voices of children aren't easily heard in our society, especially the thousands of children in foster care, or in families struggling to get by.
That's what makes Jane Morley's reminder that those children, along with the families of the mentally disabled, shouldn't be forgotten when it comes time to spend B.C.'s surplus.
Morley is the child and youth officer for B.C., the watchdog charged with ensuring we do right by the people served by the ministry of children and families.
The Liberals' New Era has been bad for those people, those children lugging their few belongings from foster home to foster home, or the families desperate for help in caring for a disabled child. Budgets have been chopped, and the ministry has been plagued by mismanagement and half-baked plans.
Now B.C. plans on a surplus of more than $1 billion this year, and even more in the next two years.
Everyone has ideas on how to spend it. Cut taxes. Get real per-student education funding back to where it was three years ago. Shorten waiting lists. Build roads.
"The advantages of tourism promotion, infrastructure enhancements and increased law enforcement resources, along with many other initiatives new and old, have been drawn to our attention by a multitude of thoughtful and articulate interest groups and public officials," Morley noted in a recent comment piece.
But children and families - or at least the most vulnerable ones - are often unheard in the competition for public attention and money.
The government's budget consultation questionnaire gives people a checklist of possible ways of using the surplus. The list doesn't include restoring cuts to the ministry, or improving the lot of children and families.
"In the competition for shares of what are always limited public resource (even with a budget surplus), the voices of children and youth are not loud: they need champions to ensure that they are not forgotten when scarce resources are allocated," Morley says.
The children's ministry has seen its budget cut by $145 million since the Liberals were elected. (Even though in opposition the Liberals, including Gordon Campbell, said the ministry didn't have enough money to do the required job.).
It's time to put a significant sum back into the ministry, Morley says.
"The existence of a surplus is an opportunity for the government to provide the up-front resources necessary to achieve its goal of transforming a child welfare system that has been in place for decades and which is not easily amenable to change," she says. Fund the cost of changing the way services are delivered. Provide money to figure out what works. Pay for the move towards local control, and get the money into communities so they can decide what needs to be done.
"Real transformations do not come about easily or cheaply," she says. "The government should now spend some of the surplus that has become available on the children and youth in British Columbia."
Morley isn't alone. The BC Association for Community Living has also asked the government to reverse the cuts to ease a "crisis" in services for disabled adults.
The association has been a big defender of the government, keen to see the transition to an independent authority and willing to try and cope with reduced budgets.
Executive director Laney Bryenton says things have just gone too far. Waiting lists for services are growing, and families - including some elderly parents caring for adult children with mental disabilities - are stretched to the breaking point.
It's time to push for more money, she says, or at least the return of the money that was cut - and helped create the surplus.
Morley gets the last word.
"The voices of children and youth are not loud," she said in a report earlier this year. "They need champions to ensure that they are not forgotten when scarce resources are allocated."
Consider it a personal challenge.
Footnote: The money available to support children and families has been cut by eight per cent since the election. At the same time, inflation has pushed up the cost of providing most service by up to 10 per cent. All in a ministry Campbell used to argue was under-funded by the NDP.

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.

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.

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.

Start fighting for real Olympic gold
By Paul Willcocks
VICTORIA -- OK, enough celebrating (or moaning).
Now it's time for all British Columbians to figure out how the Olympics can work for them.
That's especially true for communities outside Vancouver and Whistler, both already guaranteed huge benefits from Games spending. But it should also be a key challenge for everyone -- housing advocates, arts buffs, small business, First Nations -- who wants to stake a claim on some of the touted Olympic benefits.
And just as importantly, it should be a priority for the Liberals if they want to reap the hoped-for political and economic benefits from the multi-billion-dollar project.
Nobody was celebrating the victory more than the Liberals, who hope for an economic and psychological boost from the Games.
That can happen, but it's going to take a serious government effort to ensure that the Games aren't another example of the regions paying the taxes, and the big city getting the benefits.
Support for the Olympics is already tepid outside the Lower Mainland. A pre-Christmas poll found that about 60 per cent of those living in the Lower Mainland thought their region would benefit from the Olympics, but only 30 per cent of those in the rest of B.C. thought their communities would see any benefits.
Their concern is warranted. Vancouver and Whistler know what they're getting. Most of the $1.3 billion in Games spending identified by Auditor General Wayne Strelioff last year will go to those communities, for new facilities and improvements to the Sea-to-Sky Highway.
They'll also get a new transit line to the airport and an expanded convention centre.
So far, municipalities across the rest of the province have been invited to apply for a share of $40 million for Olympic Live Sites in their communities. They're grumbling that the money seems pretty mingy compared to the snowstorm of dollar bills settling on the Lower Mainland. It's a legitimate complaint.
Organizers point to intangible benefits --everything from increased tourism to foreign investment. They claim economic benefits of $6 billion to $10 billion.
But the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives -- two groups that rarely agree -- have both questioned the validity of the claims, noting that they are based on unreliable guesses and assumptions.
That doesn't mean spinoff benefits won't exist. But the people of the Lower Mainland and Whistler will be able to point to tangible benefits -- a rink, a road, housing.
The rest of the province is relying on ghostly economic benefits.
Those will have to be fought for.
Strelioff's review of Games planning was generally positive. But he warned that good luck and good management would be needed to keep costs on budget.
And good luck, a favourable economy and excellent management and marketing will be needed to reap the economic benefits. Strelioff quoted a consultant who did the economic impact studies for the organizing committee. "These benefits will not materialize automatically," they said. "They must be earned by a focused, adequately funded and skillfully executed marketing program."
That's the challenge for communities, and the government. It's going to take vigilance, creativity, will, money and political pressure to make sure that every decision taken over the next seven years considers how the Games can have the greatest benefits for all British Columbians. Every activity that can be pushed outside Vancouver and Whistler, should be. Every effort has to be made to ensure that the underlying key message promotes the province, not the city and the resort.
The barriers to tourism and economic growth in the rest of the province have to get the same priority that will now be given to improving the Sea to Sky Highway and the new Vancouver transit line. And some of the leadership has to come from Liberal MLAs, who should be insisting on a formal, public process for driving regional Games benefits.
Enough talking about the Heartland. It will take action and commitment to deliver any benefits from the Games.
Footnote: The Liberals have a lot resting on the Games' success. They're unlikely to be threatened in the next election, less than two years off. The vote after that will be held in 2009, less than a year before the Games. The success of the project could end up being a key issue in the campaign.
willcocks@ultranet.ca

The Liberals are letting down children and families
By Paul Willcocks
VICTORIA - There's not much to celebrate in the Liberals' decision to cut spending on helping vulnerable children and adults.
The cuts have been scaled back. But it's still difficult to see any real plan behind the decision to cut support by $185 million - about 11 per cent. And that means kids who depend on us, not by choice, are at risk.
Children and Families Minister Gordon Hogg unveiled the cuts at a televised cabinet meeting. Afterwards he defended $70 million in cuts slated for next year, saying his staff assured him that the cuts could be made safely.
But then Hogg made the same claims for the plan abandoned earlier this month, which would have seen a total of $360 million in cuts. That plan turned out to be based on bad information and wrong assumptions, he told cabinet.
That's what virtually everyone outside government has said all along. And it is what they continue to say about the current cuts.
Hogg did little to ease concerns.
The biggest savings are to come from reduced spending on services provided by agencies, including $5.7-million cut to funding for agencies that support vulnerable youth and struggling families. The money is supposed to go to new, better programs. But those programs don't exist, and the change was flagged as a potential health and safety risk in a ministry report to cabinet.
So were other measures that remain part of the government's cost-cutting plan.
Ministry staff may be over-cautious, or the concerns they raised addressed.
But Hogg didn't inspire confidence that a plan is in place. He said no group homes will close, while briefing papers said homes will be close and about 200 long-term residents will be moved. He said money will be saved because communities will develop the capacity to support children in their homes. But asked how capacity would be built while the ministry is cutting 20 per cent of its staff and squeezing contract agencies, he suggested Rotary Clubs and volunteers will play a larger role.
That's a fine goal. But to base a spending cut on the emergence of volunteers is reckless.
it always looks easy on paper, chopping a million here and there and hoping people can cope.
But these cuts affects people who rely on us. The government plans to cut $1.1 million - about 25 per cent - from a fund that helps foster parents with extraordinary expenses. (This was another cut red-flagged as a health and safety risk in the ministry report.) Some foster parents are abusing the system, he says, and some children are getting things in care they couldn't get at home.
But I've talked to too many foster parents about how hard it is to get the money for a grad dress or summer camp. Cutting the amount available by about $100 child just shifts that cost on to foster parents, or penalizes children.
The Liberals have taken positive steps. Moving to a new regional model of service delivery, with separate aboriginal and non-aboriginal authorities, makes sense. The concept of emphasizing early intervention and support for troubled families is morally and fiscally sound.
But restructuring while attempting to achieve unreasonable spending cuts is dangerous, and the potential victims are the people who have the least ability to defend themselves and the most to lose. They deserve better.
Gordon Campbell used to think so too, regularly calling on the NDP to increase funding for the ministry, warning that its work is too important to be threatened by short-term, short-sighted spending limits.
The government had options. The best would have been to cancel the next round of cuts, leaving the money in the budget. The ministry and the new agencies could push on with the plans. But if things had taken longer than planned, or the threat to children and vulnerable adults had proved real, the needed funding would be there.
Footnote: The government doesn't have money to maintain services for children in foster care. It does have enough money for an ad campaign, including full-page newspaper ads, offering a misleading defence of its education funding policies. In opposition the Liberals rightly attacked using tax dollars to sell government policies; now they're writing the cheques.
willcocks@ultranet.ca

Barkerville needs more time in government hands
By Paul Willcocks
VICTORIA - I rolled into Barkerville the fall before last, swooping up the winding road from Quesnel. It was afternoon, with the low sun fighting dark clouds, and winning, and six inches of new snow on the main street.
The place was magic, a window into the incredibly difficult and risky times that shaped this province. I didn't feel like I was looking at the way things used to be, I felt like I was walking through that time.
We never saw more than a handful of other people. Wonderful for us, but even for October an indication that perhaps more can be done to attract people to the heritage site.
That's one of the things the government hopes to achieve by handing about 15 heritage sites, like Barkerville, to contractors, either companies or communities or non-profits.
The bigger goal, critics argue, is to save money by cutting funding for the sites. And in the process regional economies will be damaged and heritage put at risk, they say.
There's no right answer. Some heritage sites can be easily turned over to a private contractor or a local historical society. If the scale is small, the responsibilities relatively straightforward and the opportunity to increase revenue exists then contracting out the operation can make sense. Emily Carr House in Victoria and others across the province have been privately operated successes for years.
But the experience with Barkerville shows how the risks and problems mount when the sites are bigger. And it should be enough to make the government go slow in its plans to get out of the heritage site business.
The Barkerville experiment has the region very concerned, with good reason.
The province called for proposals in May, seeking an operator. No companies were interested - the chance for profit just isn't there. The District of Wells looked hard at taking over, at least in part because Barkerville is vital to the local economy. But the district has also now dropped out, saying that even with spending cuts and admission increases they would lose $250,000 a year on the site.
Now Communities Minister George Abbott says the government will try and reach out to other operators, and may go back to Wells with an offer of more money. The goal is still to have Barkerville off the government's hands by next spring.
The government should abandon that timeline, and the target of short-term savings. The fact that nobody who has looked hard at the potential costs and benefits has been willing to take on Barkerville is a warning. Rushing to find someone - anyone - to take over is too great a risk.
The obvious threat is to heritage values. Barkerville is a remarkable living museum, a chance for us to understand what it was like to risk everything to hunt for gold, or to start a new life in a strange land thousands of miles from home. Its 150 buildings and collection of some 300,000 are a treasure that help us understand who we are.
But the economic risk is just as serious. Barkerville's 100,000 visitors a year are an important part of the local economy. Putting that at risk by rushing forward is too dangerous.
Abbott does say the government will keep running the site if it has to, but with a reduced budget. That too is short-sighted.
This isn't all some new problem created by the Liberals. The NDP launched the contracting out process for heritage sites, and cut heritage spending.
The impact of those cuts in creating a pent-up need for major capital improvements is one of the things deterring prospective operators. (A decade ago half-a-dozen people managed the Barkerville collections; that's now down to two.)
Nothing says the government's plan won't work. A well-organized, well-financed group, with a clear mandate for preservation and growth may be found.
But it's not working now. And the uncertainty being created, and the fears of a rushed and short-sighted decision, are hurting the economy.
Footnote: One problem for the Liberals is the lack of models to learn from It's difficult to find any governments that have given up control of major heritage sites like Barkerville. The experiment is being watched - nervously - across Canada.
willcocks@ultranet.ca

Liberals flip-flop on urgent need to rescue children
By Paul Willcocks
VICTORIA - What can you do if your 14-year-old daughter skips school, starts using heroin and living in a cheap motel twice her age? What can you do if she refuses all help and takes off for downtown Vancouver?
Just about nothing, right now. And the Liberals have broken their commitment to change the law to allow children in imminent danger to be held for treatment, whether they like it or not.
It's not an abstract issue. Parents confront similar problems every day. And what they find is that under B.C. law no one can help them; a parent who drags a child home could be the one who ends up in court.
That's outrageous, that we can let a child choose to die through reckless and dangerous behaviour and do nothing.
The Liberal used to think so too. They repeatedly demanded the NDP enact a secure care law, one that would allow children at risk, perhaps working as prostitutes or living in crack houses, to be plucked from danger. The New Democrats dragged their feet, finally passing a poor law that they never implemented.
The Liberals were clear: secure care was urgently needed and should be a priority for the New Democrats.
Only one year before the election Gordon Campbell rose in the legislature and demanded the NDP act on a 1998 task force report outlining a sound plan for secure care.
"This is a problem that has been identified for years in this province," Campbell said them. "We know that there are countless families in the province of British Columbia who understand the urgency and the necessity for providing secure care for our children and youth in this province. Again my question to the minister is: what is the holdup? Why is the minister stalling on this matter, which has been so clearly identified as a matter of true risk to the children in the province?"
That was then. Now the Liberals are in power and what once was an urgent matter of life and death has become a low priority.
Childrens Minister Gordon Hogg says the government won't introduce a safe care bill this spring. The Liberals have too many bills to pass, and secure care won't be introduced before the 2003-4 sitting.
Even then, the bill will be much narrower in its focus than the legislation the Liberals supported in opposition.
The Liberals deserve credit for abandoning the NDP's effort. Any such legislation has to balance the rights of the child with the need for protection. The NDP bill, by allowing detention for up to 100 days, went too far.
But their failure to act is shameful.
Hogg offers some justifications, including the cold reality that even if children were plucked from danger, they couldn't get treatment. There's not enough space for seriously troubled youth voluntarily seeking treatment. "We don't have a lot of resources in place," Hogg said. "That's partly why I'm not uncomfortable with not getting on the legislative agenda."
That's not an explanation the Liberals accepted in opposition. Then, they argued the government had a duty to provide services for children at risk. The NDP expected about 10 children at a time would be held under the act - hardly an impossible burden.
Hogg also said the Liberal bill will narrow the focus of secure care to sexually exploited children.
That's not enough. The task force recommendations, accepted by the Liberals, stressed that the plan must include children at risk of serious harm from drug addiction or physical danger, not just sexual exploitation.
Hogg says parents of 13-year-old drug addicts should call the police, have them arrested and hope they'll get help through the courts.
But parents have tried that, and found the courts and over-burdened police are set up to deal with criminals, not lost children.
The Liberals are offering too little, too late.

Paul Willcocks can be reached at willcocks@ultranet.ca

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.