Editorials

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Where is sympathy for Gage?

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 11/12/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

THE great-aunt accused of killing toddler Gage Guimond while in her foster care walked out of a court free last week, after pleading guilty to a separate charge of assaulting him and his sister in 2007. For that, Shirley Caroline Guimond was sentenced to time served -- 68 days -- in pre-trial custody, which gets credit of double time.

Initially charged with manslaughter, Guimond, has pleaded guilty, instead, to failing to provide the necessities of life to Gage, a two-year-old who was under the care of Sagkeeng child care agency for most of his short, tragic life. Having been taken from a safe, loving foster home, he was returned to a grandmother incapable of caring for him and then placed for about a month in Guimond's home. Guimond admitted to hitting, kicking and shoving Gage and his sister, for which she was sentenced last week.

The sentence for failing to provide necessities to Gage is to be handed down in January. The Crown will not yet speak of the details -- the "complexities" -- of the case that resulted in plea bargaining away manslaughter. The court was told that in July 2007 Gage was sat upon a chair at the top of the stairs to the basement. There was a pine gate at the top of the stairs, but Gage fell. A call to 911 was made immediately but the little boy died as a result of the fall after a couple of days in the hospital.

It is a bloodless account of a tragedy that has not been fully explained, despite a sweeping review into the actions and inactions of the child care agency. It has been reported that Guimond called the agency for help. The court was told she recognized she was over her head with the two children. She also said she was going to ask that they be taken away -- was going to make the call the day Gage fell -- but wanted the bruises from her "over-corrective" actions to fade first.

More detail may emerge in January, two and a half years after the fact. This is how those directly or ultimately responsible for the inexplicable damage done to small children escape responsibility and accountability.

The public knows a little of the story of Gage's short life and tragic death, but not because the authorities involved keenly felt their duty to explain how the system failed him. News reporting unearthed some details that those same authorities have obscured. Gage was in the care of a loving foster home, but removed out a sense of duty by the agency that asserted the necessity of family ties over his need for safety. He and his sister were given to a grandparent and then Guimond, who had never met the children.

The public is asked, in effect, to accept that a child abused and battered died of something akin to neglect in a mismanaged system that could not be nudged to act even after being warned of an abiding danger. The review of the child welfare agency's actions found so many holes, so much incompetence and mismanagement, that it is almost remarkable Gage was the only such child to die in July 2007.

A fuller explanation is required. As it stands, a woman responsible for keeping two children safe failed both miserably -- fatally with Gage. She pleaded her case, apologized and asked for the mercy of the court which she so far has received. If only Gage got half the sympathy.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 12, 2009 A14

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