DEVOLUTION hit Manitoba's child welfare system like an earthquake. Starting in 2003, child protection "devolved" from one central authority to four new ones -- two for native kids, one for Métis and one for everyone else.
Thousands of case files were moved. Manitoba's already-overburdened child welfare system was loaded down with massive changes.
Dr. Charles Ferguson, head of the Manitoba Child Protection Centre, says overload, not the devolution policy, is the big problem.
"People anticipated that (devolution would cause a lot of upheaval)," says Manitoba's Children's Advocate Billie Schibler.
"It was shaking up the whole child welfare system. It has been painstaking. It did affect morale and people became uncertain, many people began to second-guess. That's to be expected whenever there is a huge overhaul."
Most people involved in child protection think devolution was a good idea. Yet, although it was supposed to reduce the number of kids taken away from their families, the number of children in care is up 70 per cent since the policy was introduced.
Social workers who were already carrying excessive workloads got the added burden of preparing thousands of records for transfer.
Workforce turnover was tremendous, leaving inexperienced people in both supervisory and front-line roles.
Billie Schibler, the Children's Advocate, has recommended mandatory risk assessment.
Foster parents found they were educating social workers in the way things worked. That was if they even knew who their foster kids' new social workers were.
"I went through four (social workers) in a summer," says Cathy Wiebe, a 25-year veteran foster parent who sits on the board of the Manitoba Foster Family Network. "It was a lot of change. My kids are still feeling the effects of the decisions (those interim workers) made."
Wiebe says the case transfers should not have occurred all at once. She says the new aboriginal agencies should have been given the new files first, followed by those of children who had been in the system less than a year.
"We suggested that but we were shot down and told it had to be done all at once," she says. "I really wish it had been done slower."
Elsie Flette, CEO of the Southern First Nations Child and Family Services Authority, said that idea got a lot of consideration, but there simply weren't enough workers to keep parallel systems in place.
"We didn't do any of this quickly," she said. "It was a big system. It was very complex. We spent a lot of time on the front end trying to think through how to do this in the least disruptive way and recognizing no matter how it was done it was going to cause some disruption.
Schibler points out that most of the flaws in Manitoba child protection have existed for "a long, long time," and did not just appear when devolution happened.
Manitoba's system has been put under the microscope repeatedly in the last two decades. Since 1999, four judicial inquests and two external reviews have looked at the system, not to mention the reviews done every time a child with a CFS file has been killed.
"We're never finished flagellating ourselves," said Dr. Charles Ferguson, the director of the Manitoba Child Protection Centre.
Workloads are mentioned in every single report. They are so high, says Schibler, that social workers are aware that no matter how hard they work they can't ensure every kid in their caseload is safe.
"The best way to really engage with a family is to sit down and have a cup of tea, help them do the dishes, sit on the floor and play with the kids," said Schibler. "Who has time for that?"
Instead, she said, every caseworker prays at the end of every day, "please keep everybody on my caseload safe tonight because I know I didn't get out there and see every one of those kids."
The Child Welfare League of America, whose standards are generally accepted as best practice, suggests no worker have more than 15 active cases, 30 cases that are continuing services or followup cases, or a proportionate mix of the two. Schibler told the province to move to that standard.
The union representing social workers at the Winnipeg CFS agency says the average caseload is 38 in the General Authority, which looks after non-aboriginal children.
Flette said she believes there is a total caseload of between 25 and 30 for most workers in the 10 agencies under the Southern First Nations Child and Family Services Authority.
The province promised to implement caseload standards in 2003, and did so again after Phoenix Sinclair's death and when Schibler released her reports.
Flette says there are targets set, but not yet met.
There are no caseload standards and Family Services Minister Gord Mackintosh doesn't intend to set them.
"To try and define how you measure workload is very, very difficult," said Mackintosh.
He said his government has invested $11.5 million for workload relief and plans to hire 150 new workers before the end of 2009.
He said 74 have already been hired, two-thirds are front-line hires, the remainder are supervisors and support staff.
Unlike caseloads, the province does have a standard for monitoring kids in care. These children must be visited by his or her social worker at least once a month.
But that standard is breached constantly. Proof? In the spring of 2006, social workers were given 30 days to have face-to-face contact with each of their kids to make sure all were safe.
If the standard of once-a-month visits was being followed, the directive would have been redundant.
Almost all the kids were accounted for in the 2006 sweep except for a handful the authorities said were chronic runaways.
Wiebe said months can pass without a visit from a social worker. She said sometimes they'll call and say they can't make it out to her home but they trust her and know her kids are being taken care of.
But Wiebe says that's not fair to the kids.
"Those social workers should know how he got a good grade in spelling," she said. "They should be that involved."
She doesn't blame the social workers, though.
"I watch the workloads they have. They are trying to do the best with what they have."
Workers don't have time to fill out proper paperwork which means, Wiebe says, kids arrive in foster care without a lot of information for the foster parent to go on.
Wiebe said a social worker once dropped off an 11-month-old girl at her home and didn't know the child's name.
"We called her Peanut for three days," said Wiebe. "The system is so busy trying to protect kids and running from crisis to crisis and it is so short of staff they didn't even have the time to tell me Peanut had a name."
Social workers also seldom conduct a risk assessment for kids when they first come into contact with the system or at any time while the kids have active case files.
Of all seven CFS kids who were killed between 2003 and 2006, not one ever had a formal risk assessment done, including when they were returned to their families.
Schibler recommended the province put in place a formal risk assessment tool and make its use mandatory. A year has passed since that report came out, and another child - Gage Guimond - has died violently while in care.
And yet still no risk assessment tool or standard exists.
"The problem is finding a risk assessment tool that is culturally appropriate," says Flette. "We've looked at a lot of tools that if you apply them to our families, because of the historical history of our families, everybody would be high-risk and you could make a case to remove all kids."
When social workers don't have time to work with families, the most common result is that kids are brought into care.
That costs more money. Where do agencies find the money, asks Flette. They cut staff and they cut funding for the programs which can help families stay together in the first place. Which means higher workloads and even more kids coming into care.
On March 31, 2007 there were 7,241 kids in care, up more than 2,000 in the last decade. The term in care refers to kids in foster homes, living with a relative appointed by child welfare authorities, or in an emergency placement such as a shelter or even a hotel.
Devolution was supposed to lead to fewer kids in care. The idea was that aboriginal agencies with aboriginal staff would be better poised to work with families without removing kids, and that they would better understand the cultural traditions which a non-aboriginal social worker might see as neglect.
Flette says it is just a coincidence that the biggest jumps of kids in care has happened since devolution, which began in late 2003 and was completed in spring 2005.
"It's too simplistic to say its because of devolution for sure," said Flette. "We need to look a little bit more at who and what those numbers represent."
But devolution caused a major turnover in staff, and inexperience, Flette acknowledges, means more often than not more kids are brought into care.
"Workers that are more experienced are less likely to apprehend children because they're able to work with families," she said. "They can tolerate risk a little bit. This is a risk management field. Every day you're making that decision - can I leave this child or not?"
The staff turnover was the result of the mandate of aboriginal authorities to hire more aboriginal staff. In Winnipeg - where more than two-thirds of the devolution transfers took place - most of the staff were not aboriginal.
Some of those workers were seconded to the aboriginal agencies temporarily until the agencies could train and hire enough aboriginal workers.
But plenty of workers quit, rather than be seconded to a temporary job.
"In this devolution there was a huge number of departures from the child and family services employment list," said Ferguson, who works with social workers regularly as he deals with incidents of child abuse. "Countless experienced workers vanished."
The supervisory ranks were hit particularly hard, Ferguson notes.
Flette argues an inexperienced workforce is not new since devolution. It's always been a job, she says, where burnout and turnover are high.
She also rejects claims that the aboriginal workers weren't as qualified or didn't have the same level of schooling as the people they replaced.
"That's the same systemic crap that happens and says they only got the job because they're aboriginal," she said. "We're hiring people into positions designated as aboriginal with the same training. They have the same hiring rules."
Although a social work degree is preferred, provincial regulations make it acceptable for agencies to hire workers with a high school diploma and good standing in the community. More than a third of the 999 child welfare social workers in both the aboriginal and non-aboriginal agencies don't have a degree.
They are supposed to take the time to take courses and are to be mentored by staff who do have degrees.
But workloads are so high workers have reported the mentoring program is a farce and Schibler said all new workers, with or without a degree, need mentoring when they first start out.
"The reality is with the intensities of that type of work I don't know how well you can really equip somebody to step into that job," she said. "That's why mentoring is so critical but it doesn't happen. It may happen in spurts here and there, but it certainly doesn't happen to the degree that it needs to."
Ferguson is also concerned about training.
"We virtually never get to train anybody in the child and family services system," he said.
It means he spends a lot of time arguing with social workers about what they are supposed to do when he is in the middle of a child abuse investigation.
And it also means workers often lack the ability to recognize abuse.
"It's not an issue of court-related experience or treatment or accessing resources," he said. "It about how to understand accidents from non-accidents."
Devolution means social workers now have a new priority to try and keep aboriginal kids with their families. It's not a new concept but there is a far greater emphasis on it now.
Flette says, from an aboriginal point of view, the best place for a child is with their family. If they can't be with mom or dad, that means Grandma or Grandpa or Auntie or Uncle are the next best thing.
"We've seen the results of our kids growing up in non-aboriginal homes," said Flette.
That means even if a child is flourishing in a non-aboriginal foster home, the social workers will move that child to a family member's home.
Manitoba witnessed how wrong a family placement can go in July when two-year-old Gage Guimond was taken from a stable foster placement and moved first in with his grandmother and then his great-aunt.
His great aunt is currently charged with manslaughter in connection to Gage's death.
Flette would not discuss that case but said she makes no apologies for believing aboriginal kids belong in aboriginal homes.
Cathy Wiebe, who has had many aboriginal foster kids, says she doesn't understand why the system seems to insist aboriginal families are the only way a kid can maintain a connection to their culture.
She said most foster families make every effort to ensure kids keep ties to their communities, attending aboriginal gatherings and understand and participate in traditions and ceremonies.
"It's not about one specific culture. It's about raising kids to be all they can be," she said. "Kids need to be exposed to their culture, but they are."
Former Tory Family Services Critic Mavis Taillieu said she fears a child's best interest is being confused with the best interests of a culture as whole.
"In a perfect world, yes, the child should be with their family," said Taillieu. "But if you're going to move a child you better be moving them to a better place. To move them for any other reason than because it's a better place, that's wrong."
mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca
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