CFS hoped violent cycle could be broken by Phoenix Sinclair’s mom

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This article was published 07/09/2012 (5061 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The social worker who carried Phoenix Sinclair from a Winnipeg hospital and into agency care didn’t assume, in those first few days, that it had to be permanent.

“We’re a bit in a business of hope,” Marnie Saunderson told the inquiry into the Manitoba child’s death, which opened its third day of testimony this morning.

Saunderson, then an intake worker for Winnipeg CFS, handled Phoenix’s file for a few days in April 2000. The order to apprehend Phoenix at the hospital wasn’t unusual, she said, and didn’t necessarily indicate it should be permanent.

“The idea is that people can get help for some of the issues that plague them, that cycles can be broken,” she told the inquiry, which sits in a Convention Centre meeting room. “That we can help people be their best and perhaps give a shot at parenting, with some of the right support.”

In the end, Phoenix’s mother Samantha Kematch did not break that cycle. Raised in a family shattered by addiction and abuse, Kematch visited the same violence on her daughter.

Phoenix was slain by her mother and step-father, Karl McKay, in 2005, only months after Winnipeg Child and Family Services returned the child to her mother’s care and later closed the file.

The two were later convicted of first-degree murder, and are currently serving a life sentence.

At the time Phoenix was born in April 2000, Saunderson testified, Kematch’s own case file — she was permanently seized from her abusive mother as a child — was “a terribly sad story,” but it was far from unusual in the world of social work.

She told the inquiry how family cases complicate as cycles of poverty, abuse and agency intervention harden into hopelessness that passes through generations.

“Often children who have been raised in care after experiencing loss and victimization… Turn out to be fairly angry teenagers,” Saunderson told the inquiry. “Ms. Kematch’s (file) sadly is pretty typical.”

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On Thursday, Saunderson had testified about groaning caseloads when she joined Winnipeg Child and Family Services — then a private agency — in 1994. At the time, she was handling as many as 40 files as a family service worker, she said, double the number she considers manageable.

Though many changes have been made in the intervening years, Saunderson warned a supervisor as recently as 2009 about how administrative backlogs and caseload burdens had brought an intake unit to a “critical stage.”

This morning, asked to offer her wish list on how to improve child welfare in Manitoba, Saunderson’s request was simple: more outside resources to help take the load off CFS, and more staff.

“There needs to be more social workers,” she said. “There are not enough social workers to do the job in my opinion.”

Testimony continues today with evidence from more social workers who handled Phoenix’s file in the weeks after her birth.