Expose the facts on CFS

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/07/2009 (6082 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE 27-year-old woman charged last week with murdering her toddler had long been involved with child welfare agencies. Her two older children were seized young and are wards of the state. The child she is accused of killing — a little girl who had suffered a lot of abuse, police say — was returned to her just months earlier by a judge, with CFS’ support. Reportedly, the girl’s fatal injuries were inflicted at a treatment centre where she lived with her mother. Is there no safe place for a child?

A casual observer of the child welfare system could wonder as much, as case after case piles up, along with the gruesome details of injured and slain children.

Manitobans have heard a litany of problems stemming from underfunding both at the provincial and especially the federal level, have learned of the rush to devolve the responsibility for child welfare to poorly equipped native authorities. But the public is prevented from getting timely, straight answers as to how agencies and workers failed to protect those under their care.

The Child and Family Services Act specifically forbids public release of the authorities’ reviews of deaths of children. It is a convenient, prescribed secrecy that deflects accountability. It is a rule that Family Services Minister Gord Mackintosh must change to recognize the public’s right to know.

The CFS Act mandates the lack of transparency, but authorities lean on a backlogged court system to avoid accountability. Authorities and the government routinely cite pending criminal trials in refusing to release recommendations flowing from their reviews. Inquests, the only means available to publicly scrutinize an agency’s actions, are delayed until a trial, and any appeal, is over. Trials and inquests take years to start.

Phoenix Sinclair is a horrendous example of the system dropping the ball to lethal effect. The five year old was dead for months before CFS noticed she was missing, her death revealed by a step-brother. Phoenix’s mother and her boyfriend are appealing their murder convictions. Phoenix died four years ago.

In 2006, Mr. Mackintosh released recommendations flowing from a review of CFS’ involvement with Phoenix, which implied CFS’ own actions played into the tragedy. Without detail, though, one can only read between the lines.

A scan of Free Press files finds 13 children have died unnaturally under the care of CFS since 2000. For some, inquests are pending, In most, inquests were held so long after the fact that their results were almost irrelevant. Officials often admit as much.

Susan Redhead, 15, committed suicide in 2000 after she was returned to a father recently released from jail for sexually abusing her. A 2004 inquest report recommended the agency responsible monitor for court orders against sex offenders.

In 1996, Nadine Beaulieu, almost 2, was hit so hard in the stomach, it ruptured and she died slowly, as fluids leaked, poisoning her. The inquest found her foster parents had no training, and had a criminal history themselves. An inquest released its report in 2004.

Cassandra Coralee Wilson, almost 2, died in 2003, just weeks after being returned to her mother, who was found guilty of manslaughter early this year. No inquest has been held.

The lack of accounting for the obscene toll mounting under the watch of CFS agencies is appalling. It is also unnecessary because the province can choose to release a report — it did so in 2006 in the death of Gage Guimond, a toddler slain after being taken from a loving foster home and sent to live with a distant relative he did not know. The Guimond report pulled no punches, pointing to nepotism that promoted an unskilled agency worker and to the fact the relative’s home was not vetted. All this before a trial and inquest.

That shows that whatever excuse authorities invoke to protect themselves from timely scrutiny for their failings is irrelevant. As long as reviews can be hidden behind the CFS act, though, an institutionalized web of silence will persist.

As long as the reviews into children’s deaths are kept secret, Manitobans have no proof the minister’s vows to fix the system’s weaknesses have translated into anything useful for the agencies tasked to protect society’s most vulnerable.