FAMILY Services Minister Gord Mackintosh said Monday his government is committed to improving the child protection system with more staff and better tracking of how the system is working.
But he said he stands 100 per cent behind devolution, the process by which aboriginal leaders were given control over child welfare services to their families.
Devolution marked a change from one central authority overseeing all child welfare to four authorities -- two for First Nations kids, one for Metis and one for all others.
Mackintosh made his statements in the wake of a Free Press series detailing the chaos in Manitoba's child welfare system caused when the province imposed devolution on an already understaffed and problem-plagued organization.
Mackintosh said the death of any child "is unacceptable" and that every one of the children who died should be central in the thinking as the system is rebuilt.
But he said "devolution was not to blame" for the deaths.
"We will continue to take the strong advice of the outside and independent reviews that devolution is critical to how we must rebuild the system," he said.
"There cannot be a return to a foreign and imposed child welfare system for aboriginal Manitobans. Devolution will continue. Period. Aboriginal people have to have greater control over their own children and how they're raised and protected."
Mackintosh said there will be improvements made in the information collected by his department because he is not happy much of the information requested by the Free Press for the series was not readily available, if at all.
"There are going to be enhancements to not only timely access to data but the analysis of that," said Mackintosh. "This information must become available almost immediately."
The Free Press began asking the government for information three months ago, both to the department of Family Services and Housing and via access to information requests.
Most of the requests were delayed beyond both the normal 30-day deadline and the 30-day extension allowed. Only one of more than a dozen questions has been answered to this point.
It took the department several weeks to provide basic information including how many kids in care are permanent wards and how many licensed foster parents there are.
Mackintosh said he believes heavy workloads -- which his government has been told to address by at least three judges and the Children's Advocate -- will be lessened as the province moves to a prevention-based model of care over the next few years.
He said there will be resources put in place to ensure social workers have the time to work with families in an effort to keep them together.
Liberal Leader Jon Gerrard said the government has to stop coming up with excuses for not setting workload limits and not having standards for things like risk assessments for children coming into care.
"The new provincial structure doesn't take away the need for provincial oversight and province-wide standards," said Gerrard. "It's a rather black mark on the province that they're not able to do that."
mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca
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