Children and Youth — Issue No. 5 — Wednesday, November 27, 2013 (HTML)

370 HSBC Executive Meeting Room, Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue
580 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C.

Present: Jane Thornthwaite, MLA (Chair); Carole James, MLA (Deputy Chair); Donna Barnett, MLA; Mike Bernier, MLA; Doug Donaldson, MLA; Maurine Karagianis, MLA; John Martin, MLA; Darryl Plecas, MLA; Jennifer Rice, MLA; Dr. Moira Stilwell, MLA

2. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions regarding the Ministry of Children and Family Development.

• Beverly Dicks, Assistant Deputy Minister, Provincial Office of Domestic Violence and Strategic Priorities

• Martin Wright, Executive Director and Chief Information Officer, Modelling, Analysis and Information Management Branch

4. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee regarding the process undertaken by the Ministry of Children and Family Development to respond to recommendations by the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth.

5. The Committee recessed from 11:50 a.m. to 12:13 p.m. and from 1:01 p.m. to 1:14 p.m.

6. The Committee considered its upcoming work, including the development of a follow-up process regarding the implementation by the Ministry of Children and Family Development of recommendations by the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth.

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
CHILDREN AND YOUTH


CONTENTS
Page
Ministry of Children and Family Development: Overview and Response to Recommendations of Representative for Children and Youth	117
M. Sieben
R. Mjolsness
B. Dicks
M. Wright
D. Thomas-Wightman
C. Heavener
Follow-up Process for Ministry of Children and Family Development Response to Recommendations	148

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Good morning, everybody. My name is Jane Thornthwaite, and I'm the Chair of the Select Standing Committee for Children and Youth. I thought what we'd do on our second day, because we've got some new people here, is go around and introduce ourselves, starting off with my co-Chair.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Carole James, Deputy Chair of the committee and MLA for Victoria–Beacon Hill, critic for Children and Families.

M. Karagianis: Maurine Karagianis, MLA for Esquimalt–Royal Roads, also the critic for women's issues and child care.

D. Donaldson: Good morning. Doug Donaldson. I'm the MLA for Stikine. I live in Hazelton, on the Gitxsan traditional territories, and I am the critic for Aboriginal Relations.

D. Barnett: I'm Donna Barnett. I'm the MLA for the Cariboo-Chilcotin and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources — for Rural Development.

M. Bernier: Hi, I'm Mike Bernier. I'm the MLA for Peace River South. Good morning.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): And then we have our members from the ministry, who are presenting today.

Maybe, Mark, you could introduce yourself, and we'll go through the people that you've got here with you.

M. Sieben: Sure. Thank you, Chair. My name is Mark Sieben. I'm the Deputy Minister for the Ministry of Children and Family Development. To my far right is Bev Dicks, who is assistant deputy minister for strategic initiatives. To my immediate right is Randi Mjolsness, who is the ADM for policy and provincial services.

To my immediate left is Cory Heavener. She's our ADM and provincial director of child welfare. To Cory's right is Dawn Thomas-Wightman, who is our executive director for aboriginal services and our designated director for aboriginal services under the Child, Family and Community Service Act. And to Dawn's left, around the corner there, I guess, is Martin Wright. He is the ministry's chief information officer.

We've got John Greschner from the rep's office, who is also here, in the back, and also Chief Doug Kelly.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): Good morning, everyone. I'm Kate Ryan-Lloyd, Clerk to the committee.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Then we've got our Hansard people, Ian Battle and Alexa Hursey.

The agenda basically has our overview. We'll be throwing it over to Mark, and then the committee will have some extra business after that.

Ministry of Children and
Family Development: Overview and
Response to Recommendations of
Representative for Children and Youth

M. Sieben: First, I too would like to acknowledge Grand Chief Doug Kelly, who is here with us today and is a frequent commentator and leader in First Nations aboriginal child welfare. He's also the chair of the First Nations Health Authority.

I would also look to acknowledge, as well, as you did, John Greschner, deputy representative, riding shotgun with us today, with whom we do lots and lots of work.

First of all, I appreciate the opportunity to come before you with my colleagues here to share with you a glimpse of MCFD. The intent, as we discussed with the Chair and co-Chair a month ago, is to give you a sense of the footprint for the Ministry of Children and Family Development, how we are put together, what it is that we do overall and to give you a sense of some of the strengths.

We also want to have some amount of candid conversation with you where we have some challenges. We look forward to sharing that with you and then receiving some
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questions towards the end of our time with you. What we are not here to speak with you about, in any detail, in any event, is the two reports that the representative tabled with you yesterday. I'm quite open to taking a question or two of a general nature.

As we will share with you a little bit later in our slide stack, we have a process in play with the representative's office by which we develop a thoughtful response to their reports. That takes some amount of effort and some amount of time. In conjunction with that, and as a result of it, it would strike me as perhaps an opportune time to circle back with this committee and respond in more detail to the questions that I am sure occur to you and which I saw reflected to a certain extent in Hansard.

I noted with some interest that when Mary Ellen was here yesterday, she said that she thought this was, I think, the 27th time since her office was established that she had come to visit. I would defer to the Clerk regarding how many times MCFD has come, but my bet is that it's under ten. It's probably not much more than that. That strikes me as something I would very much like to address.

I would appreciate more opportunity to come and speak about MCFD business more regularly. I think it's important that we come and speak with you in conjunction with the reports that are tabled. But I would also look to bring some amount of business here, apart from responding simply to the representative's reports, given that MCFD, its footprint and our responsibilities go quite a bit beyond that.

One of the areas that we'll touch on later on this morning pertains to performance measurement. We've done a fair amount of work there — more work yet to do, which Mary Ellen reminded us about. But we have a product that we think is pretty robust in comparison to what's available cross-jurisdictionally. Martin will talk a little bit about that later, but that strikes me as a pretty good place to start — again, once we can get through a report or two.

It is important to me that MCFD comes on some regular basis and speaks to the committee in conjunction with the response to the individual reports that the representative tables with this committee. We would look forward to any invitation that you might have in that regard on a regular, ongoing basis.

Here's a quick pie chart that reflects the ministry's budget according to our service lines. We're kind of big as a provincial ministry, whether we're talking about the B.C. government or otherwise. There is about $1.2 billion invested in programs and services directly into communities. The little bit that you see there for executive and support services is the headquarters-type action.

MCFD's footprint, compared to how children's services are framed up in other jurisdictions, is quite large. Alberta has recently moved to a model of governance where they have an extremely large social services ministry.

It varies considerably from province to province. Some have a traditional child welfare–income assistance split. Nova Scotia is a pretty good example of that. Other jurisdictions might have some form of a mixed model and some cluster of services that we might have. B.C., by any comparison, is a large patch of work for children's services, still somewhat unique in its approach.

Taking into account those budget numbers, here our six service lines are broken down with a little bit more information regarding caseload and nature of services. Just as you're scanning through that, I'll note a few sort of factoids that go with this.

MCFD serves about 155,000 children and their families a year. That's approximately 17 percent of the children population to 18. About six out of every 100 children and youth in B.C. have a significant special need, and we're involved with most of those children.

As an example of one of our special needs areas, the number of children receiving autism funding from MCFD has increased from what was a total of 600 in 2004 to 8,900 currently. On average, 148 new children are enrolled each month into the program, with a net increase of approximately 1,200 kids each year. Budget-wise, the budget is now more than ten times bigger than the original $4.1 million program in 2001. That just gives the nature of some of the challenges that a ministry such as ours faces in trying to cope with demand and an earnest need for service.

Another example is the nursing support services caseload. Nursing support services are available for extremely medically fragile children who are moving from the medical system, usually from hospital, and who require a system of nursing supports in order to make it viable for them to live at home. It's as much a health service as it is a children's service.

The nursing support service caseload is expected to grow by about 4.5 percent each year, with the overall number of kids increasing gradually. As a constant, the acuity and complexity of the clients is increasing at an even greater rate. As an example, in 2006 and '07 a little less than 1,100 hours per child were required for support service, and in '12-13 this has changed, at a little over 2,000 hours per child. Of course, that has implications for MCFD's budget too.

About three out of every 100 children in care in B.C. receive some form of child and youth mental health services. We have great success with our mental health services, once we are able to get the services to the young people. We have challenges on wait-lists, though, and for accessing services in a number of places in our community.

Nearly 1,300 children and youth in government care have been adopted over the course of the past five years. However, there are still more than 1,000 children needing
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a permanent place to home. That's good to keep in mind, given this is just the close of adoption month. The proportion of children age 12 or older eligible for adoption has also steadily increased since 2003 and '04, another challenge that we necessarily need to wrestle.

The rate of youth in custody in Canada is eight per 10,000. In B.C., however, that rate is three per 10,000, so B.C. stands out in terms of how it responds to the challenges associated with youth justice and youth in custody.

I noted a little bit earlier that in terms of governance models, MCFD is a little bit different than in most other places. In some ways it's more the cleaner model, with government doing more. Whereas, for example, in Ontario it's Children's Aid societies that do most of the child protection–focused work. In Nova Scotia there's a split between government-run services and community-based boards.

For MCFD, what our model consists of is a number of program areas that are delivered provincially through offices located in Victoria. They tend to be the big-bucket services, where we've got a lot of people going through.

Child care operating fund, which provides support to child care providers, and child care subsidy, which provides a subsidy amount for low-income parents seeking financial support to obtain child care.

Running the early childhood registry, which all the ECEs who want to work in licensed child care settings necessarily have to meet criteria in order to work in such centres.

Provincial services for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, which is based here in the Vancouver area.

The child and youth mental health friends program, which is often commented upon and a very popular program that we get lots of interest in cross-jurisdictionally. It's targeted at grade 4 students and delivered through schools to address anxiety- and depression-based concerns as a preventative measure.

The Maples Adolescent Treatment program, also located in the Vancouver-Burnaby area.

Adoptions, youth education assistance fund, youth custody — all of these are managed provincially from Victoria, while they may be based here in Vancouver.

Our more regular place of business, I suppose, and where people know us best, is the local district office. That's what you see framed up off to the right. We're currently organized according to 13 distinct service delivery areas — not regions, as I have to continually remind myself. Within those 13 SDAs there are 47 local service areas. Each of the LSAs has a community service manager who is responsible for service in that local service area.

There are about 3,000 staff engaged in providing services through the SDAs. Altogether, the ministry has about 4,200 roughly, sort of give or take. We also provide a number of services through contracted partners. That includes services like infant development programs, supported child care development, early child development. They are often provided through community partners such as children development centres.

Note that in the bottom you see a little green area which references our work with the delegated aboriginal agencies, which Dawn is responsible for. They are tripartite creatures between ourselves; local First Nations communities — in most cases but for two, urban aboriginal ones that we fund directly; and the federal government, which is the primary funder for on-reserve services here in B.C. and all over Canada.

A number of the delegated agencies provide additional services, some of which are commented on in Mary Ellen's report that she tabled with you. Most of those services are preventative in nature and something, between Dawn, Cory and myself, that we're looking to do more of. We'll probably speak a little more of that — just more focus and more work with our delegated aboriginal agencies.

In the middle, the provincial office is where all of us spend some amount of time, in any event. The provincial office of domestic violence, which Bev is the ADM responsible for, is based there. And we are still inching our way ever so more closely to launching the office of the early years, which is a commitment that this ministry is very much looking to fulfil. We'll have an opportunity to speak about that a little bit later as well.

Here's the team that is assisting me in trying to run all of that which we just described for you. I'll make a few comments, particularly regarding the people that are assisting me with the presentation today.

I have been working in this sector since about 1998. I first started as a youth and family counsellor for a not-for-profit that was providing services to at-risk kids and kids who were referred through court for probation. Then I joined the ministry in 1990 as a child protection social worker. I did that for a bunch of years and then did a bunch of other things too, all up until about three years ago, when I moved to be the deputy of social development.

Included in that was a stint as the provincial director of child welfare, from an acting basis starting in 2005 and then permanently from 2006 to 2008. Then I moved back to MCFD just this past June, so I've been the deputy here at MCFD since June 10, 2013.

Cory, sitting with me, joined MCFD in 1999, again, as a front-line social worker. She, too, did a bunch of different things, including running our provincial training program for a number of years. Then when I was the provincial director of child welfare, she was our executive director for quality assurance.

She left the ministry in 2007 and moved to work in the Office of the Representative, where she was the director of critical injuries and death investigations. She worked
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in the representative's office for approximately five years, I guess, and then moved back to become the ADM and director responsible for the provincial office of domestic violence in 2012. This past September she was appointed the provincial director of child welfare.

Dawn, who sits on her other side and sits with Cory and me on the ministry executive, joined the ministry in 2000. She worked for MCFD in 2009, when she, too, went and spent some time with the representative's office, where she was the associate deputy representative for aboriginal services. Then she returned to the ministry in the role that she currently has.

Martin Wright is a social economist, and Martin thinks he joined the ministry in about 2001. All the time blurs. He was with us till about 2006, I guess it was, then moved to the Ministry of Health and did a number of other things, including moving to the representative's office, where he worked as associate representative for about a year and a half or so. Then he came back to MCFD.

Bev Dicks, off to the side here, was first a child welfare social worker in Newfoundland for five years and then moved out to the other coast and joined MCFD in 1988. She, too, has done a bunch of different duties in MCFD, almost all of them service delivery–related, until I asked her to take on these new duties associated with the provincial office of domestic violence and other strategic projects, such as being the MCFD boss of ICM, which we'll talk a little bit about later too — quite an honour, I'm sure, for Bev.

Randi Mjolsness started working in government in 1973 as a financial assistance worker and has had a very varied and distinguished career doing a variety of work, mostly in children-serving capacity — for the most part, a big chunk of that was in developing services for children and youth with special needs — then took the role as assistant deputy minister for all of MCFD's policy. Back in 2008, I guess that was, Randi.

I'll also note that Anne Sandbu, who is not here today but is framed up in one of those little boxes, has been with the ministry for a couple of years. She moved from Health and is our executive financial officer and our ADM for management services.

Allison Bond is one of the longest-serving ADMs in government, if not the longest at this point. We had the pleasure of welcoming Allison aboard MCFD just this past August. Allison has been asked to run our service delivery area, so she's in charge of the services in the regions.

A quick snapshot on things that keep me up at night, anyhow. MCFD I always refer to as a ministry of challenges and opportunities. There's a mix of things here — very much some of what you heard about yesterday with two reports pertaining to the aboriginal themes. Aboriginal service improvements is a big concern for all of us here, particularly Cory, Dawn and myself.

We look forward, perhaps, to a question or two, and Dawn can give you a sense of what we're up to.

There are two different tracks that we're looking to do more and more work on. One is increased and more focused support for delegated agencies — our current existing delegated agencies, both urban and on reserve. The other is…. The delegated agencies cover about a little over 100 of the First Nations communities in B.C. There still is a large part of the province on reserve that is covered by MCFD.

We have lots of kids in MCFD care, as opposed to delegated agency care, who are First Nation aboriginal kids. It is imperative, in our view, that we do better in terms of application of our MCFD policy overall. Increasingly, we're looking to indigenize MCFD policy, given that is particularly our primary focus of service on the child welfare side.

For an example of a policy project that is quite exciting for us…. Historically, there have always been two different sets of policies on the child welfare side. There's the MCFD main policy and then, over the course of the last ten or 15 years, what we refer to as AOPSI. I can never remember what it's called.

So we're looking at actually bringing all of that policy together so that we have one set of policy on child welfare for the ministry, regardless of whether they're talking about delegated agencies or within the ministry. We can talk more about that later.

Cooperative gains is a challenge for this ministry as well as for our sister ministries in the social services sector. We're seeing our way through it, through this year. This is a tough, ugly year for many of us and just as tough for our contracted agency partners who deliver services on our behalf. But we are seeing our way through it and trying to find ways by which we might utilize the opportunity to find some efficiencies within the sector.

The early-years strategy, which we have a slide on a little bit later that Randi will speak to — we can tell you what's up there, inclusive of the launch of the early-years office. That, in our view, has a lot of hope and a lot of promise and lots of opportunity for us to do better things on the upstream side in order to produce, over time, some downstream benefits that we are not often enough able to count on in the work that we do on the child welfare side.

Our residential redesign and caregiver support networks — I saw this referenced a couple of times in Hansard yesterday. Residential redesign was a project that was instigated shortly after I left the ministry in
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2010, I guess it was. It was added to in terms of scope and ambition a little bit. It's important for me and the work that we're doing that we not lose sight of the basics, so we're refocusing our intent on some of the residential redesign work.

It's really important for us that we focus on recruitment and retention of foster parents as a place to begin and find ways to support those people that we rely upon in those roles. Caregiver support networks is one means by which we can do that, where we put more expertise in a particular skilled caregiver who can act as a support for others.

The complex care initiative, too, was something that was referenced in some of the discussion yesterday. That's the work that's being done in the Maples that will soon allow us to be providing care to kids who have difficulty being cared for in normal residential resources and will also be linked to community-based beds in order to build a network of supports for children with complex care needs across the province.

Young adult services is an area where Minister Cadieux has asked us, notwithstanding the challenges that MCFD has, to do increasing amounts of work. There are two different opportunities here for us. One is: what more is there that MCFD can do? There always is a little bit more that you can find to do somehow, using our current policy vehicles, such as agreements with young adults, and some of the work that the representative's office has led, such as support for tuition waivers through post-secondary institutions.

Also, much of the province, in my view, lays in us harnessing the collective resources that are available across government for young adults, and that we find some means by which to direct them and focus them, specifically for kids who are coming out of the care of MCFD with a sense of prioritization, almost, for kids for whom the director and the ministry are the primary guardian.

Child and youth special needs services are also often receiving comment, but I noted up front that many of our services have real impact. However, we have a desire to have more consistency in our approach across the province, given that some of the responses varied. They're too varied, in our view, so we're looking for a greater set of expectations of what a parent might experience from one part of the province to another. We're also looking for ways by which we can speed up our intake process and deal with some of the wait-list issues that we have. This, too, I'll speak a little bit further on a little bit later on.

ICM. I refer to this as the final phase of ICM. We're currently in what is now the last year of development for the integrated case management system. I expect there may be a question or two on that. I'm quite happy to try to take it on and let you know where that's at.

On the whole, I'm pleased to say that it is very realistic for us to be offering a functional case management model based on the ICM platform for our child welfare workers. We'll be limiting to that in MCFD. We are very much looking forward to a life beyond ICM beginning in 2015.

Managing our overall budget and maintaining responsiveness for all social services in the ministry in this tough environment are big strategic priorities. It is a challenge and one that takes all of our collective effort and ingenuity and a great amount of effort on the part of our staff.

We also are anticipating the soon-to-be-released three-year provincial plan to address domestic violence. This, like our early-years initiative, is out the door later than we would like. But we are still committed to getting this work done through this fiscal year.

It has been a challenging year in a number of ways. It has been a unique year in a number of ways — in terms of the May election, the summer sitting of the Legislature and the budget realities that we are working with. Notwithstanding that, all of the work that's on the table is getting done. Unfortunately, it's just a little bit later than many of us would have liked. That certainly was promised about a year ago. But it's getting done.

Not showing up on the list of strategic priorities, but I wrote it in on mine…. It's something that we've discussed a lot, you know, within our senior executive team and with Minister Cadieux. There's more work on permanency planning and adoptions. This, too, is an area, like child and youth mental health, in my mind, where a great amount of work was done from about 2002 to 2008. Then there was some amount of drift in focus on other areas, some of which Mary Ellen spoke about yesterday.

It is our intent to go back to these areas where B.C. really was moving forward with good intent and refocus our efforts to do more. Adoptions is one of them, where we've got some ideas and we're looking forward to provoking some discussion and awareness among potential adoptees about what opportunities exist for our kids and for them as prospective parents.

We spoke a little bit about the early-years strategy and the opening of the early-years office, noting that, yes, it is a little bit later than we would have liked to get it done. I'll ask Randi to speak now to what our overall intent is, based on the commitments that were made by government a number of months ago now.

R. Mjolsness: Good morning. The early-years strategy is a cross-ministry initiative that involves Education, MCFD and the Ministry of Health. The area covers our population of kids — with some prevention activities as well — from birth to the age of six, with the child care programs being from birth until age 12.

The initiative is very strength-based. It's building on what we already have accomplished in British Columbia — the early childhood development, the early learning framework of the Ministry of Education, the all-day kin-
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dergarten, the approaches that we're using in licensing as well as in curriculum development for early childhood educators.

It moves from population-based programs right through to targeted programs for kids with special needs. It's inclusive of the infant development programs, the aboriginal infant development, supported child development programs and aboriginal supported child development and the early intervention therapies, including culturally appropriate ways of doing speech and language and occupational and physiotherapy with aboriginal children.

The initiative itself, in terms of the strategy, has four main components, foundational pieces that we're looking at in terms of coordination and collaboration opportunities. That includes two elements, one at a provincial level and one at a community-based level.

The provincial office for early years will have an executive director. Right now it will be housed in the Ministry of Children and Family Development, as a lead ministry for government. That will include also three staff people and a contracted community agency person. The focus of that office is to hold the ministry's feet to the fire around what they are doing in these important beginning years.

The early-years centres will be in each of the LSAs that we spoke about, which match the Ministry of Health and, to some extent, the school districts. These centres will be an opportunity for networking, for coordination, for collaboration around the programs that are operating in that community and serving the same population of children. It will also be a hub of activities as well as support and mentoring. It will build, again, on what is already in that community.

The affordability part of the strategy is looking at an early childhood tax benefit, which will be offered starting in 2015, but it's important that families get information about that this year because it's important that they file their 2013 tax return. That's what will form the approach for 2015. That will offer $55 a month per child under the age of six to families in B.C.

Around access, we've been challenged over the years around ensuring that the regulations and the licensing that are in place are focused on health and safety and that some of the regulation that is set up around that licensing that impedes the opportunities for child care centres in schools and in hubs where families gather is not impeding access for families. We will also be doing a series of capital investments in child care for creating more spaces, offering capital grants around that and also increasing our operating funds.

In quality enhancements, we're looking again to build on what we already have. We're one of the few jurisdictions in Canada that has a real connection between the early years for children before they start school and what is happening in school. The early learning framework — we're going to be updating with the Ministry of Education and looking at opportunities for out-of-school child care curriculum development and expanding training requirements.

The next slide pertains to the three-year action plan for domestic violence that MCFD is also committed to getting out the door this fiscal year. This, too, is long in expectation. It was referenced a couple of times in discussions with Mary Ellen yesterday, so we thought it appropriate to give you a quick status report regarding where this initiative is at.

I should note that while MCFD is the ministry responsible, and pleased to be so, for both the early-years initiative and the provincial office of domestic violence, this cross-ministry work is tough work. That adds a complexity, in addition, to the crazy year that it has been for most of us.

Bev, if you could speak to where we're at with the domestic violence action plan, please.

B. Dicks: Sure. I've had the privilege of being the ADM of this office now for about eight weeks. The office was set up based out of a recommendation from the RCY in 2012, so it's a relatively new office. The initial focus of the office was to coordinate a cross-ministry action plan to address the RCY recommendations flowing from the report Honouring Kaitlynne, Max and Cordon: Make Their Voices Heard Now.

A lot of the work that has been done has really focused in that area, around addressing that report. We've worked on some strong training focus, because that was identified as one of the issues that we needed to look at in that area. So we've done a fair amount of training, and it's been provided to child welfare workers, to school personnel and to support workers in the sector, mostly focused on victim services for violence against women and transition house program workers. It's been a real partnership in developing that training.

We've had staff from the sector working with us on the curriculum for that training and moving that forward. It's actually a three-day training program that we've put out — so it's fairly intensive — around the work that we do.

We've also included, as I said, transition house program workers and police officers around their initial response when they're dealing with women and children who've experienced domestic violence. Over 14,000 professionals in the province have received training to date out of that initiative.

With regards to the three-year plan, we spent the last year and a bit doing some fairly extensive consultations with regard to getting some public input from both government and anti-violence community partners as to
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what they would like to see as to the focus for the domestic violence plan. As Mark alluded to, we're hoping to have that plan released fairly soon.

What we heard, mostly, from our partners is they really want us to focus on…. Prevention and training is a very strong focus, which we have started to move out with already. But we also heard that….

We did a mapping exercise across the province to try to determine what services were available now and what the gaps were in those services. We've been able to identify, with the support of our government partners and our community partners, that there are four main areas — there are more than four areas but four that we see as the primary areas at this point — where there are gaps in services. We'd like our partner ministries, who are, for the most part, providing those services…. Really, Justice is the primary ministry that provides services to women and children with domestic violence, and also to perpetrators.

What we're looking at is that we want to close some of the gaps for men who are offenders in this area, but we want to look at intervening prior to the men going through the court process. So we're looking at ways that we can actually change some of our outcomes to actually prevent domestic violence versus having the reaction after the incident occurs.

We very much are looking for supporting services to aboriginal women and children. Aboriginal women experience higher rates of violence and also more extreme violence in their communities. We are looking to provide direct services to aboriginal women and children, and there's a real gap in that area.

We're also looking at…. One of the best-practices areas that has been identified is the domestic violence units that were developed. There are four in the province right now. That's an integrated approach where you have a victim services worker, child protection staff and either municipal or RCMP actually working together on a team, and they're dealing with the high-risk cases. They're getting involved right away when that risk is assessed and identified.

We're finding that there are really good outcomes out of that process as well as another process, called Integrated Case Assessment Teams. Those are teams that we're looking at developing around the province that are also about professionals in the community working together — communicating, sharing the information, ensuring that it's not because of a lack of information-sharing that we're not addressing the issue, and working with the families as soon as possible.

The other area of a gap that we've identified — it's primarily in rural-remote communities, but it is an issue around the province — is around a lack of support for both transportation and housing.

We're getting a lot of stories shared by women, particularly in some of our more northern, remote areas, around the fact that there's no transportation system where they can access the service, where they can independently leave the family home and get to, for example, a transition house or services in their community because there isn't a strong transportation system in that area. You have the whole scenario of women hitchhiking on the highway in the north and all those issues. Those are some real, tangible things that we've heard from women who have lived and experienced this world — that that's what they need.

The other area is around housing — in particular, affordable housing for women when they want to leave the situation that they're in, having access to affordable housing. And the whole issue that women in some of the communities where there is some intensive resource development at this point…. You're finding that the base rate for, say, a basement apartment has increased hugely because of the demand in the area from resource development, so what was accessible historically is now not accessible to them on a very limited income.

Those are the areas that we've identified as gaps and hope to work with. We're not a direct service office at all, but what we try to do is, through influence, encourage our partner ministries and identify these areas for our partner ministries for them to focus their funding to look at these gaps in that area.

M. Sieben: Thanks, Bev. That sums up where things are at. Stay tuned for release of the plan, which we anticipate will speak to at least some of those themes.

The next slide. I put this slide in for a couple of reasons. First, I believe that my predecessor, Steve Brown, visited with the committee and spoke to the operational and strategic directional plan at an earlier juncture, so I thought it was appropriate that we let you know that it still exists and that we have not lost it.

One of the unique characteristics of a deputy minister gig is you inherit the work of your predecessor — for better or for evil, I suppose. I'd make the point of giving Steve a tremendous amount of credit for the couple of years that he was with MCFD in looking at pretty much every aspect of business and then trying to identify where work could be done in order to improve services for children, youth and family. It really was encapsulated in the operational and strategic directional plan, which he tabled with this committee some time ago now.

Where things are at now is an updated plan…. The intent was always that the plan gets worked on, the key actions get addressed and new actions are developed in conjunction with those as they get resolved.

It's an evolving plan. We have a new version that is soon going to be tabled. We haven't shared it with John and our friends at the representative's office yet, which we intend to do before we go public. That is going to happen, and then you'll see a version of an updated operational and strategic directional plan. That's one reason I put the
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slide in the deck.

The other is that it also speaks to the nature of the work that MCFD has been in over the course of the last couple of years — a lot of analysis regarding where we need to go in order to make things better and what it was going to take in order to get there.

Finally, it's important for me, in my relatively recent return to MCFD, that I have asked people to focus as much as possible on what we absolutely need to do and what we can be extremely confident in what we can deliver to our stakeholders, to our staff and to the families that we serve.

I had a slide in here that people told me to take out, but I'm going to reference it anyhow. This has become a bit of a mantra for me, and that is: simplify, clarify and prioritize. That's my current approach. It's not a vision for a ministry that lasts for a period of time, but it's where MCFD is right now. We need to simplify, clarify and prioritize the things that we do and make sure that we do them well before we get to the real big ambition stuff, much of which is encapsulated in Steve's plan.

When you see the new version, you're going to see a version that is focused on what we can do over the course of the next while given the practical realities that we have to live with and a number of the challenges that we spoke to in the caseloads at the beginning and that we'll come and speak a little bit about in the closure of these slides.

Next slide. One of the strategies by which we can undertake improvement is Lean. A quick slide on where Lean activities are at for MCFD. Lean is a cross-government initiative that's been in play for a couple of years now, and I'm pleased to say that we're seeing a great amount of traction here for MCFD for each of these initiatives.

There has been a fair amount of buy-in amongst staff at a local working level as well as at a policy level for what we're able to do with Lean. So we've turned Lean loose on the child and youth mental health intake process to see how we can make that go better. A big Lean event happened a couple of weeks ago, and we're now synthesizing that to see how best we can implement it.

The child care operating fund is the primary means by which government provides support to child care operators, and we're looking for ways that we can make that work better for those that provide child care in the communities.

Appendix 4s are something that have always been around MCFD. It's a provision in the collective agreement that allows workers in the social services sector to identify where there is more work and less time. The intent always is to try to find ways by which to assist staff meet the requirements in standards while staying within the terms of the collective agreement. At times it's difficult for them to do that, given the nature of the work and given the demands that are associated with caseload-driven social services.

It's been at times frustrating, I'm sure, for staff who put the energy into putting up an appendix 4. It's frustrating for the GEU staffers, and it's frustrating for me as a deputy who has to plow through them, because at the end of the day you're really looking for a way to resolve what seems to be unresolvable.

However, Lean offers us an opportunity by which to do that. So with GEU buy-in, we're turning Lean loose into the various areas that have identified a challenge with the intent of addressing them as much as possible. That leaves us with a residue, which is true, hopefully, which a guy like me can then take a whack at.

The Competency Assessment Guide speaks to a particular program area in Cory's area of business. Delegated social workers all get a letter from the provincial director of child welfare, or the designated director in the regions, identifying what they've met, criteria, and have been trained in order to do work under the Child, Family and Community Service Act. It's been a process that has been pretty much status quo since it was instigated in 1997, I guess. So we're bringing Lean to that too, to find ways that we can make it go quicker, to get more flexibility for our staff in the regions.

Perhaps I'll check in with the Chair. We're about an hour into our presentation, Chair. There is probably a natural point of break after another four slides, so we could either plow through that, which would probably take another 15 minutes, or we could break now.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): When you say "plow through," are you saying that after that, we could open it up to questions?

M. Sieben: We could. Or the last set, we would take your advice on that. There is a series of slides, too, which we had previously shared with yourself and the co-Chair, regarding our interaction with the representative's office that Cory will lead us through too.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Why don't you finish what you're doing, and then we can open it up to questions for the first section and then move onto the second section.

M. Sieben: And then come back. Great. Thank you. So if you can bear with me…. I'll do the slides justice, but we won't dilly-dally either.

Performance management is also a topic that I saw referenced yesterday and quite often when the representative comes and visits with the committee. We thought that we should speak to that — efforts being done within MCFD. In my view, Mary Ellen is absolutely right that we should be doing better.

With that being said, while we will embark on that
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path, and we will do better, we're doing better than anybody else in Canada, too, in our view. We have a couple of products that are up on our website, initial performance management reports across all of our business lines, that we thought we should bring to your attention. It might be an area that we come and visit you on in more detail should you have interest.

I'll ask Martin to speak to what this work has consisted of, where we are right now and where we hope to go.

When you look at the ministry's website, there is a myriad of reports there. The ministry has done quite a lot of public reporting over the years. There you'll see things like service plans, annual reports, various outcomes-related reports on things like education and so forth. It's quite fragmented. There are a lot of reports there.

So as part of the operational and strategic directional plan, about a year and a half ago or so we thought that what we should do is bring some coherence to this. Of course, the representative is absolutely right. We need to develop this further.

The idea was that we would do a public report that looked at performance management of the ministry overall. The three objectives of the public report you'll see on the screen in front of you. There are really three key objectives.

The first is, of course, public accountability — hugely important for the ministry. We want to be accountable to the public. We know, as Mark mentioned earlier, that there are a lot of things in our ministry, and it's not always easy for people to know exactly what it is we do beyond the child welfare piece.

The second piece is, of course, quality improvement. No matter where you are, whether you're in British Columbia or whatever ministry you are, there's always opportunity, of course, in the public sector for quality improvement. This is nothing new we're doing here. This is pervasive across the world.

The third aspect, of course — it's part of that public accountability piece, really — is to improve public understanding of the work that we actually do. We have six service lines. We don't have, you know, just a narrow focus on child welfare, as important as that is.

The idea, then, was: let's produce two reports every year that we could make public that would take the public through our six service lines and provide some information as to what we do as well as how we're doing.

There are two broad categories to that public report. The first part of the report really is given over to a description of the ministry: the six service lines, the numbers of clients we serve in each of those service lines, which we call caseloads, as well as the financial piece — the budgets, the expenditures.

The second component of the report was the performance indicators, which is really answering the question: how were we doing? So we've explained what it is we're doing and now how we are doing. There are two elements to that.

The first is looking at our operations. When we look at our operations, there are things there that we know that we could improve our performance on, things that are good yardsticks for us to improve — things like utilization rates, for example. Whether we're talking about child care or foster care, how are we doing with our utilization rates? Unit costs, things like key indicators of services and initiatives in services and more appropriate and better ways to do things that drive better outcomes — we're looking to improve those.

The second component is the hugely important area of client outcomes. In there we're talking about: are children safe? What are the experiences of children and youth in care? Do they stay in one place? Do they move around? What impact does that have on their well-being?

Educational attainment. We all want our children to have the best education possible. How are our children doing in school? And what happens to them after they graduate from care, for example? Those are some examples from the child welfare area, but we're interested in client outcomes right across our six service lines.

The public report that we're speaking about. We have done two of those public reports. The first was released in April, the second in October. They're both on the ministry's website. We've tried to make it more of a reference document, because it is rather large. It's kicking on 90 pages.

As Mark said, what we've tried to do here is take a comprehensive approach to this. We know that it is not comprehensive yet. We're taking a comprehensive approach, which means we're moving towards having a full set of operational and outcome indicators across our six service lines.

In some areas we're doing rather well on that — child welfare, for example. Because it's a residential service, we have lots of rich data. In other areas, where we don't have the data that we can draw upon, we need to do some development work. That said, we recognize that we will probably be adding indicators over the next couple of years to this report — key indicators that tell us the right information across our six service lines — so that the report will become more fulsome and will be comprehensive within a couple of years or so.

When we compare ourselves to other jurisdictions, that's something that's always important. One of the things that people ask us all the time with child welfare…. You're looking at a child welfare outcome, for example. How does that compare? How do we contextualize that?

We know that our children are not doing as well in school as, say, their general pediatric counterparts. But how does that compare against other children in other jurisdictions? When doing this kind of work, we're al-
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ways interested in what happens elsewhere. And in this field, it's developed. It has come a long way over the last ten years.

Some of the leading jurisdictions, I think, are in the U.S. There's a report to Congress that some of you may have seen. The U.S. has seven national outcomes, comprising 24 different measures — predominantly child protection. And one or two of the states go a little bit further and provide information around education and so forth. California is a case in point, and Oregon and Washington.

The U.K. is another leading jurisdiction. They've been publicly reporting for three years now. They predominantly do safety education and are looking at things like substance abuse.

Within Canada there's not a huge amount. It's better than it was. There is some public reporting, mostly confined to annual reports, mostly around caseloads, some around adoptions and culturally appropriate adoptions for aboriginal children, for example. But there's no report like ours that we can easily point to. Nothing gets published, anyway — nothing that's public.

Ontario produces some reports, but generally they're specific about a particular issue. Saskatchewan, I think, is the one that's perhaps a little bit further ahead than most. They have a quarterly update to their website on some key indicators, but even then they're only looking, I think, at about five.

In British Columbia we do look elsewhere to see what other people are doing. We do try to compare ourselves with other jurisdictions as a yardstick to see how our children are doing. The challenge with that is that, of course, people do things in different ways and you don't get direct comparability between two indicators. That said, you can see…. Changes over time are really important. We can gauge our performance improvement vis-à-vis other jurisdictions.

In summary, then, on the interjurisdictional side there isn't anywhere else in Canada that is doing anything as comprehensive as us. And I believe that because of the nature of the ministry, where we have six service lines, it'd be fair to say that I don't think we're behind anybody in this field.

I promise I won't spend too much time on each of these slides and test your patience.

We'll talk a little bit of some areas where we think we're doing pretty good work here in B.C. — not, again, that we can't do better work. One is in the area of adoptions for First Nations aboriginal kids. This historically has been an extremely divisive issue, and rightfully so, given the history of child welfare in First Nations communities. It is antithetical in the modern notion of child welfare for First Nations kids to be moved out of communities.

This is very sensitive work, but where we're seeing some of the promise is in fact working with our First Nations communities to move towards permanency planning and adoption within those communities. While there is a rather remarkable statistic there about adoptions having doubled, we're talking really small numbers.

I can't remember what the numbers are, Martin, but I think we're talking about 15 to 30 or 20 to 40 or something like that.

M. Sieben: So this work has a lot of promise, but it's going to proceed slowly, given everything that really needs to be considered. The focus is really on permanency for the kids who are in care, in conjunction with their needs to have extremely strong attachment to their home communities. Dawn and Cory and I can talk a little more about that later, should you wish.

The youth custody figure we've talked about before. B.C. really is a leader in terms of youth justice across Canada.

A couple of quick slides more on our child welfare side. We have seen great progress in reducing the overall number of children in care over the course of the last ten or 15 years or so. Our family development response model is a component of the reason why we've been able to successfully reduce risk in circumstances of concern for a child without necessitating a full child welfare investigation. We're able to move in, do some form of assessment and then provide support services rather than bring the full brunt of the Child, Family and Community Service Act into play.

The bottom statistic is also significant in that it speaks to our ability for a group of our kids in care to offer them increasing amounts of stability. I will note here, though, that this is one of a series of stability measures that we track, and not all of them are this good.

We have some kids, too many kids, that when they move, they move a lot. That is a problem. We have seen some increase in being able to find stability for kids who…. If we can find the right place for them, they don't tend to move anymore, which is good news for everyone. However, particularly in the adolescent years, if placements begin to turn quickly, then those kids tend to move a lot, and we do need to do more there in order to serve their interests.

Lastly, before we wind up this section of our presentation, I'll just note a couple of areas that, again, we need to focus on more concretely. As I noted, we've had a great amount of success in reducing our overall child-in-care caseload. However, it's been pretty much limited to the non-aboriginal caseload. There are real reasons for that.

Most of what we were able to instigate as policy and practice measures to mitigate risk while not having to
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remove and bring into the director's care are initiatives that we haven't been able to introduce with any degree of consistency on reserve. A large part of this has been accredited to the federal funding Directive 20-1, which is the primary means by which child welfare is funded on reserve and delegated agencies. In order to get funded, you necessarily need to have kids in care — again, somewhat antithetical to the modern notion of how to practise child welfare.

The ministry's view and the minister's view is that what we did on the non-aboriginal side we necessarily need to find ways to work with our First Nations communities and partners to introduce on the First Nations side as well. Whether that's some form of FDR, which is increasing in those communities already, or increasing amounts of family group conferencing or traditional forms of dispute resolution at a community level — all of which, I am extremely confident, can be successful within this context. We just have to find the means by which to do it, and it's this focus that we need to bring to our work and our energy.

With that, perhaps, Chair, I'll take your cue and will stand down and, if you like, have a quick break and then entertain questions on this section of our presentation.

We have another presentation forthcoming, which Cory will lead, which will speak to our engagement with the representative's office in the course of the work that the representative's office does in producing the reports that come to this table and then the work that MCFD does in response to those reports.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you very much. I think what we'll do is entertain questions about this section now.

D. Plecas: Thank you, Mark, for your presentation, and thank you, all of you, for the good work you do.

For me, the best part of your presentation was hearing about what you've got in store on the measuring front. It seems to me that kind of thing should have been something we all should have been thinking about two decades ago. Certainly, people were calling for that. I guess what I would hope to see is that that exercise on moving us towards performance measures…. For me, it can't happen fast enough. We need that yesterday.

We're spending $1.3 billion. We ought to be knowing every nuance of why we're spending what we're spending. I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know. But when I heard Martin say that it's going to be rolled out over the next couple of years, for me, that just doesn't work. We need to get on this, and we need to get on this in a fashion which allows us to, as Martin said, be able to make comparisons — comparisons over time in a very detailed way. I know that it is possible to do that.

I guess my question would be…. I wonder what the budget is for that. How many people are committed? Does Martin need a bigger budget?

D. Plecas: I'm really dead serious about this. I also think, in terms of the other word that didn't come out, which needs to be there…. It's transparency. I mean, I can't emphasize enough, at least from my perspective, the urgency on this. You know through your cross-ministry initiatives and what you're trying to do. It is extremely difficult to know what needs are in other ministries and what specific contributions are without each ministry being very, very comprehensive about what's going on.

I guess you get the message. I'm saying I would like to know that there is a full-blown, immediate, all-out drive to make this happen yesterday.

M. Sieben: Martin's the expert here, so I'll get him to speak to what the challenges are associated with the work. We agree that more, quicker is obviously better. The only caveat I would attach to that is….

Historically, MCFD has the tendency to set dates and expectations for getting work done without really understanding everything that's going to go into it, and then we miss those dates. I'm not really forgiving on that at this point.

If we're going to do something, I want to make sure that we're going to be able to do it when we said we'd do it. I'm willing to take slightly longer dates as long as I can make sure that the commitment is real. I would offer you a trade-off, I suppose, Member. When we say we're going to have something done, I want to make sure it gets done.

The two reports that Martin noted — Mary Ellen often reminds us that they're late. They're each, like, six to eight months later than they said they were going to be out. Part of it is integrity of data. Part of it is availability of data, where we don't have it, historically, in some of our areas. In some of our program areas — for example, the service that we provide through community agencies — we do not have a great capacity to access that data.

With that, perhaps, quickly, Martin — not too much time — you might talk to it.

M. Wright: Very quickly…. It's a great pleasure to do this work. Yes, there's a lot we can do. Part of the challenge, really, is centred around the quality of the information that we can provide. Theoretically, while we may be able to map it out, and we have done that across our six service lines, we are challenged in some areas on the quality of the information we can provide.

We are very mindful that this information, while it's there, is used for transparency and for accountability, and people will manage by that. We're driving performance by that. Before we release it, it has to be very evidence-
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based. The data quality needs to be good. We need to understand the fluctuations in the data. Sometimes, if we're dealing with small numbers, that can be problematic. What about the fluctuations? Are we really improving? Are we really being challenged by this?

We need to develop and test the indicators before the release. We also have to consult with stakeholders, because the indicators themselves need to be accepted. We're very mindful that if we just simply produce information and put it in a report, in and of itself that has limited value.

We have to build momentum and support for this. I think when I say over two years, incrementally we'll add the indicators as we go. But it'll probably take that long, realistically, before we have a quality product that we can stand behind for the entire ministry.

M. Wright: On this particular project, we've got ten people really involved in this. This isn't all they do, but we do have about ten people there. They're economists and research analysts, so high-calibre people.

We also make information available internally through our corporate data warehouse, etc. So it's not simply…. Our staff aren't just relying on our external report. We're providing other products as well, internally, related to this, so that we can build momentum internally.

M. Karagianis: I've got a few questions. Maybe what I'll do is just go through them and let you answer when I'm finished.

First of all, I'd like to ask through you, Mark…. Previously at this committee and for a number of years the ministry was undertaking kind of a big, transformative change. That was a thematic strategy that was pervasive. I know that you had come to this committee and were very supportive of that process.

There were two streams of that. There was a timeline for the ministry. There was also a separate transformative theme and timeline for First Nations communities. We heard yesterday from Mary Ellen that there was then a move to the nation-to-nation kind of strategy around First Nations services. I asked her then if that was part of the transformative change strategy, moving into this nation to nation.

I haven't heard you discuss this in any way here today, so I'd like to know what has happened with that whole process. In fact, also, I understand now, recently the nation-to-nation concept may have also changed and been dropped. I'd like you to address that.

I've got a few direct questions here to do with the areas of my critic portfolios. First, on your early-years strategy, and I have canvassed these questions with the minister in estimates. I'd like more details around your capital investments in child care — if you have some kind of plan for what the timeline is, if you have an idea what kind of investments those will be.

I know in discussing child care resources with the minister in estimates in July, it looked like the investments at that time still were very, very far from meeting the needs of communities and of families who need child care. I'd like to hear a bit more detail on that.

Moving into, then, the second piece here, which is the domestic violence three-year plan and office. Now, I note that the ministry is in charge of the office, but I think a direct quote here was that you're not directly responsible for many of the services that are provided in domestic violence, that you're more of an influencer to other ministries. I don't know how that actually works, being an influencer. How do you actually make things happen in other ministries?

Three particular areas that concern me are: what is the timeline for the plan? When I canvassed this with the minister in July, really it was just all about setting the office up. I understand from the presentation here today that a lot of energy and resources have gone into training personnel, and that's fine, but what is the timeline for the actual plan?

If there is a huge focus on aboriginal women…. I think there should be. No question whatsoever, coming out of the Oppal report and just the experience we've all had around domestic violence and violence against women and aboriginal women, that there should be a focus on that. What is that focus? How does that play out? What does that actually look like in real terms on the ground?

If the domestic violence team…. As you mentioned, there are only four in the province. How does that fit with a focus on protecting aboriginal women in particular? Are those four teams in areas where they're likely to do the most significant help and support for aboriginal women? Or are they in Victoria, where I understand the team is not functioning fully, due to a lack of resources? I'd like to know how the domestic violence units fit in with the focus on aboriginal women.

Lastly, just going back to my point about being able to influence other ministries, part of your presentation identified transportation for women in remote areas. Well, you know, services for women in remote areas have been cut recently. The government hasn't taken strong action to try and replace some of those services on the Highway of Tears, Highway 16. I'd be interested to know how your three-year plan is actually going to ensure that there is action from other ministries as well.

I note there was a discussion around housing issues and other issues, poverty issues, that obviously have influence on these issues of domestic violence and violence against women. I'd like to know how sort of tangible any of the plan is, when it's going to be rolled out and what it might look like in real, hard terms for communities.
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In response to your first question: as I noted right off the top, we very much look forward — once we complete our work with John and Mary Ellen and the folks at the representative's office, in conjunction with both of the reports that she tabled with you yesterday — to coming and speaking with you more in detail regarding what that work on the MCFD side will look like. However, MCFD and government accepted that report and the nature of the recommendations that are associated with it.

Minister Cadieux was pretty upfront in saying that MCFD's focus is going to be on services — services to children and families in communities — and not on governance. That's not to say that questions pertaining to governance…. By governance, what I'm referring to is everything from treaty to some form of movement of responsibility for delivery of services from the ministry to a body outside the ministry, a First Nations aboriginal body outside the ministry. We will not lead that.

There's been a decade of such initiatives, and they are chronicled in a summary fashion in the report Mary Ellen tabled yesterday. We're not going to follow that path. This somewhat gets into simplify, clarify and prioritize, I suppose. But more important than that, we're going to focus MCFD business on services to First Nations — aboriginal children and families and aboriginal people in urban settings.

There necessarily needs to be a place in government for those with questions regarding governance and self-determination that need to have a door in. We are working inside government right now to identify how best to respond to those legitimate questions, and I am hopeful, through the work we have with the rep's office and inside government, that we can come back and tell you about that.

That's probably about as much as I can say. What I can say is that, as I noted earlier, as a deputy and as an executive, you inherit some of the work of your predecessors, but then it's your responsibility to deal with the here and now. The here and now for me is summed up in that report, and that's what we're going to move forward with.

On the capital in child care side, the quick summary of it is that the information that we might have available isn't any different than what the minister was able to share with the member when she canvassed the question with her in estimates. I don't think I'll run through the numbers off the top of my head again, but we're pleased to give those to you.

On the question regarding the DVU, that's a great question. What exactly is the role of an office for domestic violence if, in fact, it isn't providing service? Believe me, we've had discussions with our cross-ministry partners on that very issue a number of times.

Much of the work that Bev described and which Cory instigated when she created the office is in keeping track of and making sure that all the moving parts move towards a common end. Where people might be willing to do less, we suggest and find the ways to help them do more.

Rather than it being, in the Ministry of Health, a specific set of services for a narrow agenda and, in Justice, services directed towards victims of violence and, in MARR, their initiatives pertaining to working with First Nations leaders on violence to aboriginal women and children, we can tie it together and present it as a package as the province's response to domestic violence, so it is one of advocacy within government. Mary Ellen has made a point of asking us to do more of that, I think.

More importantly, though, frankly, from my experience in government, what works just as well, if not more so at times, is influence management and working with your colleagues towards a common end and effectively using resources to get the best out of them. That is the role of this office — to keep track of that, to keep pushing and to be able to articulate what the province's commitment is towards addressing domestic violence.

The timeline for the plan. The most I'm able to share with you is soon, certainly by the end of this fiscal. Again, this is cross-ministry work, so it means that it's not only our minister who has a role in identifying what can be done. It means that we're working with a series of ministers regarding what can be said and when we're able to say it.

It's later than we would like, but we look forward to that coming out certainly sooner than the fiscal year. I would hope it would be a lot sooner than that, but at the end of the day, it's the minister's and her colleagues' call as to when that might happen.

Your question regarding the aboriginal focus. Again, I'm going to have to defer. I'm at risk of sort of scooping our own plan, to a certain extent, I suppose. There is an intention to be responsive to the MACAW report and find ways by which to solidify the province's need to be specifically responsive to the First Nations women and children.

We are hopeful that people will see that in there. That's certainly our intent, and that is inclusive of the transportation and housing issues. Again, it is a cross-ministry initiative.

This ministry has the capacity and the ability and the responsibility, then, to work with other ministries who may see something as a line item or a discrete area of business in a specific community as something that in fact is attached to a provincial strategy and needs to be balanced, then, accordingly to a corporate priority and, even more important, a service that is necessary for a social reason in a community. That's the role of the office.

M. Stilwell: I have lots of questions, but I'll confine mine to comments around stability.
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We've talked about this before, Mark, you and I, just in terms of how, when people age out of care, really there is a statistic and a proportion that you probably remember that goes pretty much directly into the MSD case file which is an important understanding and measure of our real success and outcome in MCFD in terms of how many kids can live independently, reach milestones — all the kind of data that you're collecting.

Stability, I think intuitively, would seem really, really key to this, so measuring it…. I see that you've given us data for one year. I don't know if it's available, but it would be great to see the data broken out by age group over time. I assume that the whole point of that is to try to…. People in the field must know intuitively, and based on this data, how to find the group that are most likely not to have stability in their care arrangements and how to interact proactively earlier.

I'm interested in hearing how that works, or should we be putting more of our attention into the people we know that are going to be very high risk? Then that comes to my question. I have noticed in other provinces that there is a move to extend the length of care into the 19-to-21 years. I assume I'm not the only mother here who did not see my child leave home to independence between 19 and 21. It's much more difficult than other generations.

Has there been any cost-benefit analysis overall, or just specific groups where there would clearly be a benefit not just to them as individuals but to the state in terms of ongoing support to do that?

M. Sieben: That's a great area for discussion. As a broader topic it, too, might be something that the ministry comes and speaks with the committee about as a topic of concern and interest for our work in pushing it forward — and I'm sure, as MLAs, for all of you.

Currently a little over 40 percent of kids that age out of the child welfare system go directly towards income assistance. There are a couple of different sides to that, I suppose. A number of the U.S. jurisdictions are leading the call to increasing the age limit for foster care, or there are jurisdictions where there is less of a social services system than exists here in B.C. For example, there may not be something like an income assistance system that is in place in order to sustain that.

Kids who come out of care qualify for income assistance immediately as long as they meet the income threshold, which most of them do. That speaks to some of the numbers. Part of the challenge for us is that that trend has been rising. It's not one that has been stable. It has been going up over the course of the last ten or 15 years.

Part of the solution, in our view, is, in fact, pretty much as you're suggesting. Is there a way that we might be able to access that money that's available in the income assistance system and target it for an earlier purpose? Is there a way that we can cluster some of the services — the employment services, perhaps the addiction services and some housing services — in advance of the child coming out in order to make that transition more successful? And then can we stay engaged or involved for a longer period of time?

In fact, we're developing a pilot here in Vancouver with the YWCA that looks to build on the services that are already available for young adults but targeting them specifically for kids who are coming out of care, with the idea that we'll learn enough through this experience to perhaps be able to extend it to a broader application.

M. Stilwell: Can I just quickly…? The other thing is we often don't talk about the kids who are at high risk to succeed. The new tuition waiver for kids in care to go into post-secondary obviously is a great initial start. At the same time, most parents know that the cost of going to post-secondary school…. Tuition is not the big issue. It's living costs. Many 19- to 21-year-olds need parental support to get through, especially, the first two years of university.

To set people up for success…. You know, there's no point in doing A if you're not setting these students up for success. I'm interested in how we're going to make sure that it turns into success for the kids who can do that.

M. Sieben: A couple of points there. One is that we currently have mechanisms in place that would allow the ministry to provide the financial and living support necessary for that through either the YEAF program — the youth education assistance fund — or, and often in combination with, the agreements with young adults. Beyond that, though — and in conjunction with the work, really, that the rep's office has assisted greatly in, associated with the tuition waivers — if we've got a young person who's 19, who is a continuing custody youth who is going to make use of that opportunity, we'll find a way.

With that, though, the other work that, again, the rep's office is proceeding with is looking for ways by which we can create sort of a momentum within the system in conjunction with some of the work that you've led on, on repurposing some of the children's education fund. It's early days. We'll have to see what we can make of that yet, but we're hopeful that we can make that into something that is sustainable over time for kids who might use that opportunity.

The last thing that I will note of that is that's an option for children that we anticipate, in both offices, to be of limited uptake for the short to intermediate term. Our intent, as Martin is saying, is to track those outcomes and do better. For many of the kids in care as they get older, as much as we would like to approach post-secondary, a more basic measure is bums in seats at school. It's stability.

M. Stilwell: For sure. I appreciate that it's a small num-
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ber of students.

M. Bernier: Not knowing a lot about how the system works…. I know that we all have, I think, good intentions. It's about the children. Listening to your bios, for a lot of you, you'd probably agree with my comment that…. You know, we can have great expectations, great goals, great outcomes, but it's really the people on the ground, I think, that are the face, the ones that are dealing with the youth, that have the positive and, unfortunately, sometimes even negative impacts with cases.

Where I'm going with that is, as things change in society…. So you look at the diagnosis around autism and the growth that you mentioned. Are we graduating the workers with the right training to actually be able to make effective change in the vocation that they've chosen? We need to be recognizing the issues early when we're dealing with children and children at risk. Is there…? I've seen this.

What are our steps, I guess, for making sure that we have the proper training in place? I know it's a cross-ministry thing again, but I think this is where we'd come in, making sure that misdiagnosis doesn't take place as often as maybe we're hearing it does, and making sure that when we're setting these targets and these goals we're not setting ourselves up for failure, that the tools are actually in place for the people on the ground to be able to jump over the bar that we're trying to set. Maybe you can make a few comments on that, if you don't mind.

M. Sieben: Sure. Traditionally, in the area of children and youth with special needs, in particular, the Ministry of Health has borne the responsibility for assessment and diagnosis, MCFD has the responsibility to provide services to kids who go up to the school age, and then the Ministry of Education often sort of takes up to the age of majority. Sometimes the MCFD services overlap with Education.

Historically, those three streams were planned sort of almost separate and apart from one another so that the Ministry of Health guys would identify a need for a greater amount of diagnostic services, which was great until people hit us, and then we didn't have the resources needed in order to respond to the caseload.

A bunch of work that Randi, in conjunction with colleagues across the Ministry of Health, particularly Dr. Maureen O'Donnell, put together was a cross-ministry framework by which we…. Well, there was a lot there, to put it in a nutshell. We all kind of promised that one wouldn't do something without the other — simple principle — but it took a whole lot of work in order to get there. If we can hold on to that premise, then that's how we can continue to try to do better.

On the autism side, Randi can speak to this better than I. The diagnostic side happens on Health, and then MCFD responds to the needs of families once that diagnosis is received.

R. Mjolsness: B.C. is one of the few jurisdictions in Canada that actually has standards for diagnosing children with autism spectrum disorder. When the program started — you're absolutely right — I think there wasn't a channel for best practices and evidence-based diagnosis that would come in and look at a child. It was often a pediatrician or a doctor that imposed the label. It's often the case that when you build a program for a certain diagnosis, then the children will come.

The prevalence rate of children with autism across the world has just skyrocketed. When we started in 1998 with the program, we had about 400 kids, and as Mark said, now we're upwards of 9,000. The prevalence rate was one in 10,000 and is now one in 85.

What's causing it? What are the kinds of things that you can look at? The new DSM-5 is just out, replacing the DSM-IV, and they have brought in a new category for communication disorders, which we know has a great impact on kids with autism. As autism spectrum disorder is a spectrum, you have children who are profoundly impacted and other children that have social or communication needs. Every single one of these kids is unique, so it's difficult.

We have some work we're doing right now with the Ministry of Health about refining the standards for diagnosis and assessment. As Mark said, it's very much a cross-ministry initiative.

M. Bernier: One last thing I have. On slide 14 you were talking about your highlights and your strengths, and one of them was around the custody rate in British Columbia. I don't want to sound cynical at all, because as much as I love graphs and I love statistics, sometimes they can be looked at in so many different ways.

My concern is when it says that we have three, is that three per thousand — in custody? I'm trying to remember.

M. Bernier: Okay. So when I look at that, I'd love to say it's because we're doing such a great job, but I also look at it and say: is it because our legal system is too relaxed, or are there issues around some of the cases that we actually have? I've lived this one quite closely, and I've found that sometimes the system has failed when we could have maybe had children helped out in a different way.

M. Sieben: One of the representative's reports that MCFD uncharacteristically likes to wave in front proudly is a report that was done a couple of years ago on the youth justice system here in B.C. — not just the custodial part but all the work that happens up in front.
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B.C. switched its focus to diversion activities earlier and more focused and more effectively than most other jurisdictions. There may also be some demographic factors at play, I suppose, too. The work is real there. It's, in our view, sort of less associated with any problems in the justice system and more a result of the focus that we've put on youth justice initiatives. The member down a couple of seats from you probably is more vested in the knowledge in that area than myself.

M. Bernier: I appreciate hearing that, then. That's why I wanted to ask that, because if there is the positive, then we should be waving those and learning from them as well.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I have Carole, Doug and then Darryl, and then I'll have a comment, and then we can take a break.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Maybe I'll run through all of my questions as well and then leave them to you to respond to. There are a couple of themes that I'd like to touch on through your presentation and, I think, through the history of MCFD and some of the challenges that it's faced. One of those is stability. I think others have talked about that and the importance of that. The other is accountability.

On the stability end, I appreciate the emphasis that you made through your presentation on the importance of focusing on performance measures, on focusing on the core work of the ministry — that that's the work that needs to be done. I appreciate that, and I'm an optimist, so I'm going to look for that over the next while.

I do think it's part of the challenge that you have as a ministry, with front-line staff in particular who have seen change for change's sake and who have seen change come and go for so many years that it's completely understandable that there is a resistance to taking on one more directive coming down from the ministry — not because they don't believe in doing good work, not because they don't believe in dealing with it, but because of the challenges of so many things that have happened that they have had to take on and then change direction six, eight, nine months, a year later down the road.

Overarching, it's a real challenge that all of you have, from the ministry, to be able to show that this is lasting change, that it's focused on the child, that it's focused on their good practice and their good work in the field. I think that's going to be one of the biggest difficulties you're going to face. Part of that is being clear about who's accountable, for one, and being consistent about everyone having to follow directives or follow direction together in good practice. I think that's going to be a real challenge.

Some of my questions relate to who's responsible for what, because I think that clarity is going to be important. Just a couple of those, so I'm clear. Who's responsible for the 13 service delivery areas? Who do they report to? Who's responsible for the service delivery staff contracts? I'm guessing it's the local service areas, but I'd be interested in that. Who's responsible for the aboriginal delegated agencies? Who's responsible for young adults and transition services within the structure? Those are just kind of some basic questions.

You mentioned cooperative gains and the real challenge in finding cooperative gains, and I couldn't agree more. I think it's a real difficulty — and I raised this with the minister — to try and pull resources out of an already stretched ministry that doesn't have enough supports. To expect contract agencies to pick it up is, I believe, unrealistic and going to impact services.

But I wondered if you have a total for those dollars. How much is coming out of the ministry in cooperative gains? I know it's not the ministry itself. I know it's the contract agencies. But what's the dollar figure for this next year?

On residential redesign, you mentioned the caregiver support networks. I wondered how that fits with the hub model that you've talked about in the ministry before. Again, I'm a bit worried about this sounding like a whole bunch of different change. How does it impact direct services?

I've been told that the caregiver support network may mean that existing experienced foster care parents may be moved into these support roles and not be fostering anymore. I think it's a great idea to use their resources, but I worry about taking experienced foster parents out of the system when we're already stretched and when we're already facing some difficulty. I'd be interested in your comments on that piece.

ICM. You mentioned coming to the final phase. Sorry, but there had to be a question on ICM. I know it's not anything anybody wants to talk about particularly.

Will there be additional resources with this final phase? There were additional resources that had to be put in, in the previous phase, to try and cover off the pressures around training. I know those resources continue to be within the ministry. Will there be additional resources in this final phase?

Then on performance measures and performance management reporting, I guess I emphasize the point made earlier about the need to get it done, to move along on it. I also I take the point around needing good data and that that may take some time, but I would encourage you to take a look at putting the performance measures out there for discussion anyway, even before the data is gathered, before you're able to look at the data.

Even just have a discussion and talk to the public and to front-line workers and to foster parents and to the education system about the fact that "we will be counting
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how many children graduate who are in care. We will be measuring that piece. Maybe we don't have the data right now, maybe it's not in place, maybe we don't have it ready, but this is something we are going to start counting in MCFD. This is something we're going to start reporting out on, and we want you to start getting ready for that."

I would really encourage you, even without good data and without that in place, to start putting those measures in place and to start talking about them and to start putting them down as: "This is what we're going to be reporting on in this next year, and we're going to be developing it." I think that's a huge concern that I hear out there — that nobody feels that the basics of good child welfare or the basics of caring for kids in care are being measured and reported out on. I think that would make a huge difference if that was there.

I've just got two more quick pieces. Just to touch on the education piece…. I congratulate the rep's office for being the one to push the issue of support for post-secondary education for children in care. One of the areas that we, and I, certainly have pushed the government on — and we haven't heard anything, so I'd be curious from the ministry — is the new RESP program coming in, which the government is bringing in next year, and whether that's going to apply to children in care.

We haven't had any response from the government, and I just wondered if the ministry has a position or whether they've looked at it. Again, those are dollars that are going to be put aside for every child, and I don't see why they wouldn't be put aside for children in care. There's also a question around grandparents and relatives raising kids, so that would be another question I have.

Then my last question is just around the support for aboriginal children in care. You mentioned the directive, and I couldn't agree more that there's a real problem with that directive. Hopefully, the court case will bring something forward on that at the federal level, but I don't hold my breath for that resulting in the kind of support that is needed for delegated agencies and for the ministry to be able to provide those supports.

People have talked about contracts that have been put in place with the federal government with other provinces and not in British Columbia. I'd be interested in why not, and where the discussion is around those additional resources for B.C.

M. Sieben: The first question pertained to stability and accountability. I'm going to note that communication within the ministry and with outsiders is a big component of that.

When I was appointed deputy for MCFD — it's kind of a surreal experience, frankly, for a guy like me who had spent so much time there — I came back into the building, into the fourth floor, for those that I might have visited there, to where the deputy's office is — but which I've actually moved out of now.

I, naturally, met with the ADMs that were on hand, and all of them were — as they would be, I suppose. We brought them in and closed the door, and I noted for them that I had asked my secretary to contact all of their secretaries in order to clear off the next three days so we could work up a new strategic plan for the ministry. Then I let that hang there for that and told them, no, that we weren't going to do that. We need to do what we're doing, better. We don't need more change right now. I made a commitment to these guys and to staff in the field that we wouldn't change for at least a year.

You might have picked up I'm not a big fan of the SDA model. I'm not necessarily sure that it's going to work as well as what we used to have before, in terms of five regions, but I'm not going to change it right now.

We don't need that type of internal churn. It's so much effort that goes into creating that sort of structure and moving lines of accountability around. Charts and accounts end up being different budget allocations and stuff. We're not going to do that. We're going to use what's in front of us. At the end of the day, whatever is there, we necessarily can make it work if we've got the right people in place.

A part of that, in my view, is a refocus on communication and engagement within the ministry, particularly from my office and the provincial office directly to the field, particularly the team leaders, who really control the culture of how work gets done. In many communities they are MCFD. It's not me. They're the person who sort of wears the colours.

It's important for me to give them not only the what-to-do but the why-it-is, so they feel some opportunity to convey what they are seeing and what the challenges are, to our team and myself in addition to their direct supervisor. That's easier said than done, but it's a particular focus of mine. So yeah, our intent is to simplify, clarify, prioritize. Within that is the sense of stability. We'll change when we think it's going to make an effective time-focused difference for families or for staff. Otherwise, I don't want to bring it.

In terms of who's responsible for running the service delivery areas, that's Allison Bond. In terms of who is responsible at a local level for contracting, that is the
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community service manager. Anne Sandbu, who is the ministry's management services ADM and EFO, is responsible for procurement and approaches to streamlining our contracting services generally. But at the end of the day, the responsibility rests with the relationship between the local CSM and the local service provider.

The responsibility for DAAs rests with Dawn and also to some extent, I suppose, with Cory and myself but primarily Dawn. Our job is to support her in that role as the designated director under the CF&CSA.

In terms of providing services to young adults, the executive directors of service in each of the SDAs — they're kind of like the boss of each of the SDAs. They're responsible for the actual provision of services. It's Randi, at the end of the day, who is responsible for the policy directive to them. The type of initiative that I spoke about that we're doing with the Y is something that Bev has a role in as ADM of strategic initiatives.

Cooperative gains. I do not have a number for you now, but I will the next time you ask, in the spring. We're anticipating that there'll be a need to clarify exactly where that is at.

The caregiver support networks and hub model. Yeah, they are one and the same. However, the caregiver support network — I'm hopeful; I'm, let's say, expecting — is going to be a clear, scaled-down version of what was talked about last spring. I think, as the member noted, there is promise in having a resource network for foster parents that really pivots around the experience of a senior practitioner foster parent. But that foster parent then needs support, and I take your cue that bringing them out of the caregiving mode, then, has its limitations.

While we're doing that, again what I've made my guys focus on is…. I don't mind us going in that way if we can find the right communities, as long as we're not doing it all over the place all at once and the EDSs, as the feet on the ground, are the ones that get to say when it's going to happen and where, in conjunction with the community partners.

It had better come down to recruitment and retention of foster parents at the end of day. How do we know how many we need where? And where we are going to find them? We've got to get back to that residential redesign stuff.

ICM. The capital budget is fixed. There will not be a need to draw on any additional reserves for that. Again, that was a choice that we, as an executive, made that I somewhat pushed through. MCFD initially was looking at doing a whole lot of stuff in ICM, and change is hard. We can't pull it. Even if we were completely confident in the implementation of the system from a change dynamic, I don't think ICM is ready.

Our focus is on child welfare. We're going to do child welfare well, and we will use the resources available for us to focus on that.

Performance measures. I think part of what Martin referenced was that there is a need to engage with stakeholders to make sure they are part of our discussion. I think that was the intent — to meet you exactly where the member is suggesting. We're not looking to do them ourselves amongst his crew of ten.

In fact, if we're looking at something like developing further outcomes for educational attainment for kids in care, we're doing that in conjunction with our colleagues the Ministry of Education, as well as our line staff working with schools in their communities. We're looking to get that buy-in — that they're their outcomes as much as they are ours.

The RESP program is exactly what I was referencing — some version of it, in any event. We want to make sure that there is opportunity for the director's children — if anything, that there is, in our view, and I think we share this interest with the representative's office, greater opportunity for the kids who at present beat all odds and are able to make themselves available. That is our intent.

M. Sieben: Oh, federal, yeah. There are a couple of provincial jurisdictions on the western side that have prevention funding in play. There have been a set of discussions that have been going on in B.C. Chief Kelly probably knows as much about that as we do.

In my view — and the member beside you, perhaps, referenced some of this when she was asking a question regarding the transformative accord — if we are really clear on the B.C. side on what we're going to do with the money and who we're going to do it with, partner-wise, we are in a much stronger position to go and meet with our federal counterparts and speak with them about what the real needs are and put the dollars and cents behind that. That is my strategy. I see the representative's report as being of assistance to us in knocking on that door.

D. Donaldson: Thanks, all of you, for coming. It's an impressive history you bring to the table. I find it interesting that a number of you were at the representative's office and then back into the MCFD. That's something I didn't know before. It sheds a little insight into the communication abilities, anyway, between the two offices. I look forward to you coming back to the committee.

I have a lot of questions, and I'm sure they'll persist after today as well. I've got five question areas that I'll run through as quickly as I can.

First, on the performance management reporting on the client outcomes, placement stability was one of the examples given. There was a comment made that in child welfare there is rich data, and yet not in these current reports in front of us from the representative. Earlier re-
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ports pointed out that beyond a year it was difficult for the representative to know how often a child was moved between caregivers.

I don't know how you reconcile the fact that you felt that there was rich child welfare data — perhaps that's not the right term — yet the representative pointed out that there's not, beyond a year. She wasn't able to find out from the ministry how often a child in care was moved.

Post-majority independence. I think that's the indicator around how well a child does once they leave care and transfer into adulthood. I'd be interested in knowing if there's a comparison between aboriginal children under MCFD care and how well they fare in adulthood in comparison to aboriginal children under DAA or IA care and how well they are doing in adulthood. I think that would be an interesting comparison based on the different influences that DAA and IA approaches bring to the table.

I'll continue. On other performance highlights you mentioned — this is slide 15 — regarding children in care, that when they do move, there's a lot more to do there. I think your words were: "You have to do more to serve their interests." What are you exactly talking about there around "more to serve their interests"? What are your thoughts on that?

On the next slide, you mentioned trying to close that gap — or do what has been done with non-aboriginal children and youth in care as what was done with aboriginal children and youth in care — in the performance highlights there. Reducing the number of children — I think that chart is showing — receiving protection services. You said there are many means by which to do it. You mentioned a couple, but I think you alluded to more, so I'd be interested in knowing what those are. What are the more?

On the Lean projects. I'm curious to know if…. I think you mentioned the Lean projects maybe have been three-year Lean-focused now, or that kind of strategy or project. If it takes more resources to achieve the goals, is that part of the Lean approach?

For instance, under "Child and youth mental health intake process," is the ability to have the conclusion and forward that to, I suppose, cabinet Treasury Board…? It would take more resources to achieve the goals under that bullet point. Is that within the mandate of a Lean-strategy focus — that it takes more resources, more financial resources to actually achieve the goals?

In relation to that, when you talked about indigenizing the MCFD policies, have the DAA and IA been part of a Lean focus in the last few years? I know these are the 2013-14 Lean projects. Have DAA and IA been part of a Lean focus in previous years?

Finally, the end of my easy questions for you, and this is just a softball I'm going to lob to you.

Under the domestic violence action and three-year provincial plan, Beverly mentioned transportation services under point 4 under the three-year provincial plan around direct services. You know, we've had the recent Missing Women's Inquiry where transportation along the Highway of Tears was one of the two top priorities mentioned by Mr. Oppal, and then we had the 2006 report on the Highway of Tears Symposium that highlighted a public transportation system along Highway 16 to address safety concerns.

What's the MCFD position on those recommendations? Is the MCFD position that they should be implemented as soon as possible, or are you taking the position that this can be part of a three-year provincial plan and we can wait three years for that kind of service?

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Yes, we are done. We'll get Darryl and myself to ask in the next section, but you do get a break right after you've answered Doug.

M. Sieben: Okay. Your first question pertained to the limitations in being able to only look at stability placement over a year.

The richness of the data is one of the benefits of having a long-in-the-tooth legacy system. We've got basically decades of information from our MIS system. Because it is so old, though, it only does some things. Other things you can't make it do, even though it makes common sense. We have been unable, using MIS, to figure out how to look at placement ranges outside of a year.

Again, Martin knows more about that stuff, but we're going to get better at it as a result of ICM.

M. Wright: Yes, we'll get better at it as a result of ICM. But we've also managed to track every single move that a child in care has. That information is available to social workers for their charges. Within the performance management report we look at children who move within their first year of care, simply because most moves occur within that first year. And because we're interested in the key data for change, that's why we include that in there, as opposed to writing much more about this.

We also do other pieces of information around moves. We have a more analytical piece around that for our staff that looks at moves in more detail. That really doesn't have any place within the performance management report, but I can tell you that we do track moves. ICM will give us better data to do a better job of that in the future, as Mark said.

M. Sieben: I think it's all we'll be able to do, whether two years, three years, five years. But right now we can't, just because of MIS.

That's a really interesting question regarding whether
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or not we have any comparability rates or other information about outcomes for kids transitioning from the system or from delegated agencies. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to say no, we don't.

There may be some limited academic work that's been done, but frankly, I haven't seen it. I agree that it would be really useful, but I don't recall seeing anything that really speaks to the experience of children in care in B.C. over time, other than in other parts of the adult government system. Most of that work is available to us as a result of data matching through the rep's office. They're the ones who have the entitlement revision that can pull all that data together.

Stability for kids that move. What I referenced there, what the outcome measure that we've got framed up in the slide stack is that we've gotten better when kids come into care, particularly when they're younger and they're going to be with us for awhile, at finding the place where they're going to be for a long term and making sure the supports are there in order to make that feel like as much of a home as possible.

There are two sides to that, I suppose. One is we're looking for ways by which, if that's going to happen, we can make sure that the family and the community connection is as strong as possible, because that's a component of what makes stability work. It's not just the foster home. It's the child being anchored in his or her home community and cultural tradition and feeling as much a part of that as anything else.

Where we continue to have problems — and it's not just B.C. but many places — is if children come into care when they are older, particularly during the adolescent, teen years. If we are unable to find that right placement right away or, frankly, if they are not in a place where they can receive a placement that might be stable, they move around a lot.

Those kids are risky. They keep social workers up at night. It is difficult to find the right balance. It is difficult to find the right combination of resources because it is beyond the scope of any individual foster home to deal with that. That's what I was looking to reference there.

Our intention for aboriginal caseload reductions. Dawn is going to speak to what we intend on indigenizing our approach overall, so she might comment on this part too.

We learned a lot during the late 1990s, early 2000s regarding how to mitigate risk, support families, about where that line is where you necessarily need to still focus on the protection issue — utilizing initiatives such as the family development response, which I referenced and which is an assessment, as opposed to a full investigation — and then support that route with some form of family support services, with family conferencing.

It can be used at any stage of a case. The earlier, the better, but it can be used in advance of any order that might be sought, whether it's an interim or temporary or continuing custody order or a plan that would achieve some sense of permanency for a young person. It is a key means by which we can link the community and the family — an extended version of family, really — into planning for a child's needs.

The way that model works is that the social worker's responsibility is to come and identify what the risks and issues are. The extended family gets all the information, and then their responsibility is to put the plan together.

The social worker leads their process. They produce the plan — a huge amount of buy-in with that plan — and then they bring the plan back, and the social worker is able to identify whether in fact that meets the safety needs for the child. Everywhere it's used, including in B.C., it has been highly successful.

This is an area that has been embedded in practice in B.C., but again, it's an area, in our view, that has lost a little bit of impetus over the course of the last couple of years, and we want to bring it back. It has huge promise in First Nations aboriginal application, because it's their process, not ours. It's under our act, but at the end of the day, it's their dispute-resolution-making process.

My view is that if we can find ways by which we can introduce services that aren't paid for through 20-1 and should be paid for by the federal government but aren't, the sooner we're able to do that with our delegated agencies or with ministries, the more often we're going to be able to support community-based plans to look after kids in their home communities, in First Nations communities, without having to bring them into care. I'll invite Dawn to comment on that, too, if she likes.

On Lean, does Lean allow us to identify that more money is needed at the end of the day? No. It's limited in its purpose. What we have, particularly with child and youth mental health — and why Lean is a particularly good mechanism by which to review what we're doing at the upfront intake side — is a lack of consistency in approach across the province from our offices. They don't all do it the same way, and they don't all do it the way we want them to either. Part of it is adopting a set of standards that they'll all follow.

Why I am a big Lean fan is Lean isn't my tool. It is theirs. It is staff's. The Lean process isn't run by any of us or by policy managers. It's run by the team leaders, and child, youth and mental health staff provide the service. They get to identify what the standard approach should be for intake to bring us some sense of consistency.

If they can develop the model, then it's our job to find ways to implement it. If there is a cost issue there, then, yeah, I suppose that's something we'd have to bite off, but it would be something that would be the responsibility of MCFD to respond to. I wouldn't see it going big enough to actually require a submission to Treasury Board.

Similarly, Lean wouldn't have application, I don't think
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— at least, I haven't thought of it yet, perhaps not creatively enough — in terms of indigenizing the approach to MCFD work in delegated agencies. I'm going to park that question for a moment, because I'm going to come back and ask Dawn to speak on it. She'd do a much better job on that question than I can.

In terms of the DVU and what MCFD might say in regard to ministry recommendations going to the Ministry of Justice. Again, our role is to find ways to bring linkages between what our corporate priority area is, ensuring an improved and improvingly consistent approach to domestic violence in B.C. to corporate priorities that might exist in other ministries, such as those very recommendations.

I would not make a specific statement or take a position on a recommendation that another deputy was grappling with on their turf, and I would hope they wouldn't do that with me. The work would be to make those linkages and make sure that we're there looking to inform the response to those recommendations, that the needs of women who receive services or need to receive services or need to receive preventative services to prevent domestic violence are kept in mind while responding to those recommendations.

With that, and just before we conclude, Chair, I'll ask Dawn to talk just a little bit more about really what we're meaning regarding this sense of indigenizing our approach to work within MCFD on the First Nations aboriginal caseload side.

D. Thomas-Wightman: As Mark had previously stated, one of the key initiatives is aboriginal services improvement. Although my shop is the lead, what I appreciate from executive and from Mark is that we all own aboriginal services improvement. A big reason for that is, like Mark said, 60 percent of the kids in ministry care are aboriginal, and 47 percent are with the delegated agencies.

Some of the major things that we're doing to indigenize the organization. A big piece of work is a cultural competency training plan that we have for a three-year period that will look at three different pieces of work that include a comprehensive on-line training, an experiential piece and a mentorship piece.

All ministry staff will go through those three tiers of cultural competency training. Executive was the first ring. We've had 100 staff go through, and I think we have a goal of 500 by the end of fiscal. We'll move on to caregivers and service providers as well, so everybody receiving that cultural competency training. That's going to be a significant piece of work that we undertake.

Another piece is the aboriginal practice framework. I notice that was mentioned yesterday with Mary Ellen, and the report talks about it as well. We've got a great deal of work that's been done over the last few years around AOPSI redesign. From the community consultations, we've received a lot of information, and that's going to build this aboriginal framework that will go across all six service lines, starting with child protection.

We're working collaboratively with our aboriginal delegated agency partners, some IA partners in urban communities to build what that framework will look like. There'll be one set of standards for aboriginal children across the ministry and DAA, as the children move back and forth often. I think this will be easier — that there's one set of standards — for social workers and for the children involved.

Another piece that we can say is working towards indigenizing the organization is strengthening our partnerships. I noted yesterday that Mary Ellen talked about the partnership forum. In the past that has had some negative feedback or connotation, or it could be seen as a dysfunctional relationship, I guess. We've moved to a new partnership forum where we meet every six weeks with the executive from the First Nations directors, from the delegated agencies.

We're finding that partnership is much…. We engage better, and it's more solution-focused. Our directors are very happy with that increased access to us, and we're able to solve problems sooner rather than every four months, which we were meeting previous to that in the partnership. So we're strengthening that relationship.

The other significant, I guess, piece of work is really supporting the delegated agencies. The 23 agencies that we have now are doing a workplan, joint with our federal partners and with the agencies, and looking at where the agencies are, where they want to go, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are and how we support them with their audit scores, with permanency planning, with care planning. That'll be a huge piece of work that we go forward with as well.

There are a few other initiatives, but I think that pretty much answers the question.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you, Mark, and your group. I know we went overboard, but it was good to get the main questions dealt with, with your presentation.

So we'll carry on. Five minutes break — that will be a short one because we have lunch coming up soon. Come back in about five minutes, and then we can resume with your next presentation.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Cory has her presentation with regards to the representative — the rest of the slides. Apparently, it's not that long.

What we'll do is do that, and then…. We noticed when we were out there for our coffee that lunch is ac-
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tually coming in. So why don't we do the presentation that you have and then, after lunch, come back and deal with the questions that we obviously will have generated from your presentation, plus the two that are outstanding from before.

M. Sieben: A quick setup from me before we turn Cory loose. Coming back into MCFD, I'd recognize the substantive amount of work that goes on just in terms of coordinating our communication and our response to requests for assistance and for information and, then, in response to the reports themselves from the representative's office.

We'd created a small little unit by which to manage that back when I was there in early 2008, I think it was. We have six lines of business, not seven — the seventh being response to the representative's office. But it kind of feels like that, frankly, sometimes — but in a good way. On the whole, the point that this reflects is that Cory and her staff are in touch with John or Bill or others in the representative's office daily, usually more than daily.

We thought it would be useful for the committee to give a sense of what the structure was behind it, because it's not just a set of loose phone calls.

In fact, there is a methodology. There has to be, given the nature and the responsibility of the rep's office. Necessarily, they ask us a lot of questions, and we need a way to track them and make sure that we respond as fulsomely as possible and then that we do the best back with what they give us.

Cory will inform you what that looks like on the structure side and how we manage it within MCFD.

I think probably the best place to start is with the actual team that Mark mentioned in his opening comments. We have a team in our office called the MCFD interface team. That team does a number of things, but I can say quite confidently that most of the work the team does is working and coordinating our work with the representative's office.

Just to give you some idea of what that team does, we provide information and data requests. We organize training requests and systems access for RCY staff. Many times staff at the RCY, depending on what function they're in — whether it's doing investigations or reviews or advocacy work — request to take part in our training programs, which is entirely appropriate, so we help facilitate those types of requests.

We coordinate the pre- and post-report activities, which I'm going to spend some time talking to you about in the next slide. We facilitate the development of MCFD action plans in response to the findings and the recommendations that are in the representative's reports.

We coordinate any of the information briefings with the representative's office on any of the deliverables that are in our action plans. Our office is also responsible for tracking and monitoring implementation of the action plans, and we prepare reports to share with the representative on the completion of the action plans. So that gives you some idea of the primary responsibilities of that office.

As Mark mentioned as well, we do quite a bit of work that's daily work around briefings. We get phone calls: "Can you help us with access to this information?" Or we may have various questions. I do also want to say that not all of the work rests within the MCFD interface team.

There's also an advocacy function of the representative's office, and we have a protocol — MCFD and the Representative for Children and Youth — on how that process will work. What that actually is, is on case-specific circumstances, the representative may be involved in providing advocacy, and we have a process outlining what that looks like. Basically, what that is, is a process where there's contact between social workers, team leaders and other staff out in the region. So we don't become specifically involved in the day-to-day work that's done.

There's also a large component of work that's done with a records management team in our ministry, and that would be requests for any type of case-specific circumstances, so requests for family service files or child service files where the representative's office is actually reviewing them or is investigating them in terms of conducting a review or an investigation. That's a fair bit of work that's done on the other side. That just gives you some idea of the approach we take to this work.

C. Heavener: As far as the request goes, that's a difficult one to answer, Mark, because it is daily.

What I can tell you is when the representative notifies us that there will be an investigation, they've actually received all of the actual records requests at that point related to the circumstance that they're looking at. We would then have the responsibility of providing any additional information. There may be questions around statistics, performance management, quality assurance reports. We would provide all of that type of information.

We would also help to set up and notify folks in our ministry that are going to be part of the investigation process. Then we would work really closely with the representative's office around any other work that needed to be done as part of that.

What I can tell you as far as workload goes is that we have two staff that at this time are assigned full-time to managing this work in our shop alone. That's the interface team. But throughout our daily activities, we bring many different folks from across the ministry into that work, depending on what other service lines might be involved in that information.
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The next slide talks a little bit about how we respond to the RCY recommendations and what our process is and how we approach that. This is a process that we agreed to with the representative's office back in 2011. It's probably fair to say that since the representative's office came into force back in April of 2007, this type of process has evolved, and it's continually evolving.

Just to give some idea of the process that's in place, once we know that a report is actually going to be released, we break that down into a pre-release period as well as a post-release period. Usually the pre-release period is anywhere from one to two weeks before the report is likely to be released. The representative's office will initiate a meeting with us to discuss the upcoming report and, potentially, any ideas or thoughts they may have around recommendations or areas that need to be improved.

We would also, at that point, receive what they call an embargoed copy of the report. That report does not contain recommendations, but it comes to us for a limited period of time for admin fairness, so that we have time as an organization to look through the report and specifically look at the facts in the report to ensure that they're accurate and factual from our perspective.

We go through a process where we work across our ministry to gather that information, and we provide it back to the representative's office for their consideration. That timeline is usually about two weeks.

I probably should say that prior to the report coming out and a couple of days in advance, there are a series of briefings that we would be involved in as well. Once the report is released, our minister responds to the report, and our approach is usually that we accept the nature and intent of the recommendations. We know that there's been a lot of work that's gone into the reports and into the analysis to get to the recommendations.

Our deputy then appoints leads across the ministry so that we're all held accountable. What that means is that a report may come to us and there are five recommendations. We would sit down and talk about that as an executive, and each of us, depending on which service area that the recommendation is directed to, would be assigned and have an accountability around responding to that recommendation.

We would then respond to the representative in writing — it's either myself or the deputy minister — saying that we accept the findings in their report and we look forward to meeting with them to discuss that further.

Then from there — usually it's about three to five weeks — we have our first meeting with the representative's office, where we have a discussion about the assumptions, the findings of the report and our assumptions around the actual recommendations.

We want to ensure that we have a clear understanding around what the nature and intent of those recommendations are, and we also want to have the opportunity to further share with the representative's office some of the strategic priorities we have and the work we're doing around the operational and strategic plan and how that would fit in or links with the recommendations.

That sum gives you sort of a highlight. I do want to emphasize, though, that there's still a lot of work that goes on. There are continual discussions with the representative's office as we work through the recommendations to ensure that we're on track. Many of those are informal. So we've had our initial meeting, but we want to ensure what we're thinking is actually working.

Then we go away, as the ministry, and there is substantive work done across all of our service lines, depending on which recommendation is directed to who, and sometimes there are linkages. Sometimes they're outside of our ministry, and so we have to work and develop those linkages with our cross-government partners. Many times there are project plans put into place.

There's substantive work done, actually looking at the recommendation and determining how we're going to approach it and how we're going to respond and then ensuring that we have thorough implementation plans put in place to move those recommendations forward.

That work gets done over a series of sometimes weeks, depending on the nature of the recommendation. Sometimes it takes months, because it is quite complex and comprehensive and may be across many ministries.

We then go back to the representative's office, as we did last week, and we will give them a verbal update. At those meetings we'll bring the leads who have accountability for each of those recommendations, along with any of the staff that are really driving that work in the various program areas. We'll walk through, recommendation by recommendation, exactly what we're intending to do, and we will follow that up by a written action plan that we will provide to them.

On to the next slide. The process, as I mentioned, has evolved over time. The current process that we're working from now was agreed to in 2011 between our office and the representative's office. We've worked really hard since that time to not only follow the established process but also to ensure that the recommendations that are coming to us fit into our operational and strategic plan.

We look across all six of our service lines, and many times they do line up with work that we have underway, as I mentioned, or work that we do agree is a priority for our ministry. We want to ensure right from the beginning that we're building it into those plans.

We are now at a place where the most recent process has been in place for a couple of years, and this is an opportunity now for us to look at how that is working. Are there areas that are working well, and are there areas where we'd like to strengthen that relationship between
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the representative's office and our office? That's the conversation that we're just beginning to have.

We also, at the ministry, are committed to clarifying our planning, tracking and reporting back to the representative. We are doing some work in that area. We're merging our current process with our own internal tracking system so that we are consistently and regularly tracking our implementation of the recommendations in light of our bigger plan within the ministry — that we always have a pulse on the work that's being done and that we are able to monitor it.

From our perspective, this will support consistent and predictable planning and reporting. And then we want to talk to the representative about how we can work with them to ensure that we're giving them accurate, timely information on the recommendations in a way that would be beneficial for them.

The next slide will just give you some idea about the volume of the work. I can't stress enough that this is really high-level. These are big numbers, and as Mark has mentioned before, we don't mind coming back, if that's what you'd like, to talk more about this. But this will give you some extent about the volume of the work.

Since 2007 and up until now, currently, there have been 24 reports. In those reports there have been a total of 125 recommendations. As I mentioned, not all recommendations come to our ministry. As you can see, 102 recommendations have been directed to the Ministry of Children and Families, so it's probably fair to say that many of them do come to our ministry. Along with those recommendations, there are a number of details.

I don't want to just count the details. I know it says up there that with those 102 recommendations, there are over 400 details. The details are very important to us, and we analyze those carefully because they really help guide us around what the intent of the recommendation is and how we can look at those details to develop our responses to the action plans and take them into consideration.

The following row shows the actual number of reports and where they stand from our perspective at this point. I do want to note that when you add nine, seven and seven, that does not make 24. That is 23. One of the reports had no recommendations directed to our ministry — one to Justice — but it is a report that we actually do follow and monitor because it was based on an MCFD situation.

From our perspective at the ministry, currently we would say we have completed seven of those reports. What that means is that we've completed the actual response to the recommendations, and the implementation, in those reports. We have nine reports and a number of recommendations in those reports that we've sent over to the representative's office, and we'll be having further discussion with them on the current status.

Then we have seven active reports where the recommendations…. We are in the post-release process, where we're developing action plans. For example, the recent aboriginal services review report and the Out of Sight report that were mentioned yesterday by the representative would be two reports that would fall within the active category. Within those 23 reports would, then, be the 102 recommendations.

Just to give you, as I wrap up here, a little rundown on where those recommendations are, our analysis is that, of the 102 recommendations, we have closed 25 of those recommendations, and we've completed the necessary work.

As I mentioned, there were a few reports with the representative's office where we are waiting to talk to them further about the implementation of our action plans. That accounts for 53 of the recommendations. Then we have 24 recommendations that would be in progress. Included in those recommendations would be the reports that were mentioned yesterday.

That provides you with a high-level overview of the ministry's status with the recommendations.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): No, I have you on the list. You're No. 1, but I'm actually before you are, because I didn't get my question even started.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): What we're going to do now is ask the two remaining questions from the last session and then go around the group, because I'm sure there are a lot of people who are going to have questions about your last presentation, Cory.

Then we'll keep on going, and then we have, actually, another agenda item after, so we'll take a break and resume that after you're done.

D. Plecas: I just want to emphasize again: we all know that we have so much reason to be proud of the good work that you do. You have a long history of doing more and doing it better. But looking ahead, the question I have is: what are your expectations for the need for services down the road?

I say that because as much as you do, we're always
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hearing that it's never enough. Like, we're spending $90 million plus on mental health for children and youth, and that's not enough. I guess the question is: how much more do you think there needs to be done? What percentage of the need are you filling — maybe that's the best way to ask the question — right now?

Again, what are we doing now, and where are you expecting to go? My thinking is that for many of these services, we should expect to see a greater need in the future.

M. Sieben: That's an extremely difficult question. The span of the ministry doesn't lend itself well to generalizing regarding what the overall quantum would be. You end up having to look at it sort of service line by service line. Even within the service lines there are parts that would stay relatively stable, while for some the demand would likely increase.

For example, on the child welfare front, our intakes…. The number of requests for service or reports of child welfare concern that we received has remained relatively stable over the course of the last even 15, 20 years. We're not anticipating that we would see great swings in that. How we address that quantum of business, though, has shifted dramatically. We've spoken a little bit about that.

In the mid-1990s, after Gove and after the introduction of the Child, Family and Community Service Act and after the implementation of a relatively rigid and robust risk assessment model, there was a lot of sort of fairly focused child protection activity that led to increases in children in care. We've managed to a slightly different place there, so that's an example of how the quantum of business overall has probably remained more or less the same. We've just responded to it differently.

That's compared to what we described on the autism side, where that is a demand-driven, non-capped program that simply grows. There are options for any government to consider. You could consider income testing, because we don't income-test that. You could consider capping to a certain extent, because we don't do that. So there are policy options that are available. Otherwise, would a caseload continue to grow at that — what was it? — 4.5 percent? Probably.

Child care subsidy, on the other hand, has been really difficult to predict. Part of it likely comes to…. One of the members was referencing regarding the need to find spaces and that if there were more spaces, perhaps we would see a significant shift in use of child care subsidy. But you can move the subsidy threshold up and down. Over the course of the last 25 years or so, government and the ministry have done that — where they've shifted it from lower to higher.

Generally, we anticipate it on the social services side. The public's expectations and the families' expectations tend to grow. How government chooses to respond to it and the direction it gives ministries about how to manage that is what makes it difficult to respond to with a simple answer to your question.

My probably-too-trite response is that as a deputy from a social services ministry, I could use more. That would help. But our responsibility is to manage with what is allocated for us as effectively as possible and get the best outcomes for families given what we have.

What I find in discussions in government, either with my colleagues or when we get into Treasury Board — in fact, I think this is fair and should be expected of us as leaders in government — is that simply asking for more doesn't cut it.

It's difficult for me to ask for simply more social workers. When I went to MSD for an income assistance program, part of the question was: "How many employment assistance workers do you need?" I could always use more.

"What do you need in terms of the overall model of it — child protection social workers, child and youth mental health clinicians, probation officers? If we're doing less of the probation officer work, can you move some of those salary dollars over to do other things?"

I would want to make some effort to quantify exactly what it is for a specific outcome before I would dare to approach any government with the "more" question at this point.

That's great to hear. Of course, there is no more money, so that's out of the question. I wasn't meaning that.

On the mental health side, for example, for every 100 requests that you get, what percentage of the time are you able to deliver on that, and in a timely way? I'm told there are huge wait times for mental health services for children. Maybe I'm misreading that. There just don't seem to be enough services provided.

On the child and youth mental health side, there are significant pressures in certain parts of the province, in certain communities, and less so in other places. Part of our frustration and part of the challenge and, frankly, the responsibility on me and my team here is that there is this inconsistency in approach between the offices in terms of how they're managing the front door and the lack of a consistent data collection on what that looks like.

There is an information system that's in place there called KRAs. Staff don't like it all that much, or some staff don't like it, so they've been choosing not to use it. It takes a little bit of conviction on the part of management to say: "Thou shalt."

Part of a boss's responsibility is, where necessary, inserting some sense of mandatoriness when you need it,
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as long as it doesn't cause great consternation in the system. That's part of the reason why the Lean initiative is important to me. We've got to move. I feel strongly that we need to move to a greater sense of consistency and standardization in our approach amongst those teams, because then they can tell us what is real.

I have no doubt that the pressures that exist in some communities are real. I just struggle with being able to quantify them and then articulate them in a way that is compelling for response.

On the FASD side, I think it's different. There's a broader policy issue there for government and society, frankly. It exists not only with autism but with developmental disability and a few other places where a diagnosis leads to services and funding.

Other areas of disability that are significant not only for the individual but for their families, diagnosis does not lead to services and funding, at least not to the same extent. There is inequity in terms of the need, notwithstanding that the presenting behaviours by the individual are fairly consistent.

Would it be appropriate to sort of share the richness of approach that's available in the autism program to also apply to FASD? That's not a decision for a ministry to make. That's a decision for us to implement one way or the other, but it has significant consequences whether you're talking about what supports the families in the autism program have, if your intent is to cap it, or if, in fact, the intent is to create another program, like the autism, for families with FASD. It's very difficult to manage.

D. Plecas: Again, I'm not sure that fully answers my question. I continually hear from constituents and I hear from stakeholders that the level of services provided is not enough to meet demand. If you're saying, "That's not something we need to worry about…."

D. Plecas: It's just that it seems so significant. I don't know if others on the committee hear the same thing, but it seems to me there's a huge gap between availability of services and need for services. Again, I'm not talking about more money. It's obviously a need to jig things if there's going to be greater delivery.

M. Sieben: Frankly, I'd like that question going to Mary Ellen more than me. We do not have a means by which, from caseload to caseload, we can accurately quantify what the need is. I wish that we did, but we don't. Again, my experience is that government and Treasury Board are more okay with a number that you could stand by rather than just a "more." That would help us. That does drive us in terms of trying to find better information that we can respond to the member's question.

Would MCFD benefit from having a greater amount of child and youth mental health response? Yes. Will we be able to get some of that from the look at the intake process and doing some standardization in terms of practice? Yes. Will it close the gap completely? No. Will it continue to be varied from one community to the other? Yes. And I'm hopeful that, on a go-forward basis, we're better to articulate what that need is going to be, because we don't have it yet.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): First of all, thank you very much for your offer of coming back. I think that's great. That's part of the discussion we're going to have after the next session. I think that would be really fruitful for us so that you're not getting bombarded with a whole bunch of general questions, but on a more regular basis, we can keep more on top of things.

It would also help to have us more informed as to the relationship that you obviously do have with the representative's office that isn't necessarily communicated to us or to the public. It's really helpful for us to know that you have a daily communication with the representative's office and that you have a process that helps you resolve the issues that come up with the reports as well as the recommendations. I really appreciated that, and I think particularly the newer members of the committee probably really benefited from that.

My question is kind of the same one that I asked the rep yesterday. One of the things that comes up, and it seems to come up all the time, is related to — and perhaps I've got the wrong word — the professionalism of the social workers. I really appreciated you giving us an overview of your bios, because now I know I'm asking the right people the right questions.

When you have a difference of…. Like, the risk management or the risk aversion — you've got that sort of goal versus so-called professionalism and each individual social worker assessing a situation individually. Those decisions…. Depending on whether or not the leadership is coming from the top telling which direction to go — because you're afraid that if you don't remove a child, then something could happen — does that affect the so-called professionalism of the social worker?

They've got an individual relationship with a family or a child, and they make the decision personally whether to remove the child or not, or get counselling or not, or whatever the follow-up is.

I'm wondering how that relates to the individual social worker on the ground as far as the direction coming from above and where we can jig that with regards to the individual child's needs.
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M. Sieben: I'll get Cory to respond to this in a little bit more detail, given that she's the one who ends up being responsible for the delegation of social workers who perform the functions under the CFCSA.

I'll make an overarching remark, though. Whether we're talking about this group in front of me now with the colleagues that are listed on the org chart there, or whether we're talking about a district office, the strength in this ministry resides in teams. A part of mitigating that risk, because it is a real one, is making sure that we lessen the opportunity for an individual set of eyes on sets of circumstances at key points.

Workers do have primary responsibility for their cases at the end of the day, but particularly on the upfront side, on the intake side, there are policy requirements that have a social worker check in with their supervisor or a senior peer to touch base, to make sure of what they're seeing. Often the model that teams use is to share their case experiences at some form of a team meeting. So the practice dictates it, but the policy actually requires it. Perhaps I'll ask Cory to speak more about that.

C. Heavener: I'll maybe start right at the beginning and give you sort of a continuum of what it looks like. When we're hiring social workers to perform child protection functions under the Child, Family and Community Service Act, there's a set of competencies right from the beginning that we look for in workers that we're hiring.

There's actually a set of degree requirements that we look at as well. We have relationships with post-secondary institutions where some folks that are doing their undergraduate degrees go through a child welfare specialization type of program. But there are a set of core competencies that we are looking for when we do hire workers.

When workers come to us, then we also look at what the training requirements are. What are — I'll just use this term — the core training requirements that all new social workers require? There's various training, and we do assessments of workers at that stage, and then throughout their career as a social worker we would look at ongoing professional development.

As we know, in child welfare practice many times the dynamics, the complexities of the work are shifting, and we want to ensure that workers have up-to-date training. For example, one of that would be the domestic violence training that's going on right now in the ministry. Right from the beginning we are looking at the competency of the social workers.

We also, as Mark mentioned earlier, look at what the competencies are for team leaders in this province — the team leaders that actually supervise the social workers in the field. As Mark feels, I feel really strongly that we need to ensure that those workers at that level have the tools and the supports and the systems in place so that they can provide effective and responsive case practice consultation as well as case supervision to social workers, because that's really where the work happens.

What is my role as the provincial director? My role is more of an oversight role and a quality assurance role, so I want to make sure that workers coming to the ministry meet the right competencies — in fact, that we've established the right competencies — and that we have effective training.

We also need to make sure that the tools and supports are in place to help them with the work they do, because they do come to us with clinical backgrounds and case practice experience, and they were trained in that area in their field. How we do that is through policies that are established through the ministry, through practice directives that may be issued out of our office and through other types of systems that we put in place to support them with their day-to-day work.

On the day-to-day piece of the work in the field, social workers are guided through their policies. As Mark mentioned, there are points where they check in with their supervisor. There are a number of tools that we've put in place. I won't go through them all, but we have structured decision-making tools. We have specific responses. So they do have those policies and standards, and they check in regularly with their supervisors.

At other times there are situations that are more complex, and that's a time when you may need to get the community services manager or the executive director in the region involved in providing support and consultation on those case matters. We do have policy in place for what that look likes and when those folks do become involved.

At some level there's a need for myself and for staff in the provincial director's office to become involved, and we do provide consultation and support on complex case matters. I wouldn't say that we're involved in a lot of cases, but we do have policy and a process that guides when we would become involved, and many times we will go back out and ask: how can we support?

In the regions…. I think it's really important for you to know we do have directors of practice. There are 13 directors of practice in each of the service delivery areas that we mentioned earlier. Those directors of practice now report through to the provincial director of child welfare, and their key role is to lead practice support and consultation in the actual service delivery areas and the local service area, in the office.

Reporting through to those directors of practice are also what we call consultants. So you may have child protection consultants, adoption consultants, guardianship consultants. Those are actually staff that will work with social workers on some of those complex cases or in some areas where there are difficulties or they need further support or specialization around some of the assessment and case planning they're doing. We're really working right now at enhancing and strengthening that
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relationship with our office, with the directors of practice, in ensuring that that support is in place in the various regions.

The other piece, which is more the back end and the responsibility of the provincial director of child welfare, is quality assurance. I know we haven't spoken much about quality assurance today, and there's a lot to cover in that area. But our role is also to ensure that when situations come to our attention, whether it's a critical injury, a death or a serious incident for a child and family, we have a process in place for how we review those. So we do have a process in place.

At times some of those circumstances go on where we look at actually doing a file review or more of a comprehensive review where we talk to social workers, because we always want to learn. We want to be able to look at the circumstances and see where we did do a good job and where we can do better. Also, systemically, what are some of the issues that we may need to address? We try to look at that. It is a provincial level as well.

We also routinely conduct audits of our practice areas to see where we're at, see where practice is strong and see where we may need to do some enhancing or strengthening and then try to look behind that. So that's more of the back end of the work that's done.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): What would be the educational level, then, of the social workers? Obviously, you've got some that are working for the delegated aboriginal agencies as well. Are the education levels the same? I mean, obviously the pro-D and the extra…. Like, domestic violence is different. But when they are initially hired, do they have the same education?

C. Heavener: I can speak to the ministry social workers when they're hired, and I'll let Dawn speak to the delegated agencies, and you'll see where we're going with this.

When we look at folks to do child welfare work in this province and, specifically, delegated under the Child, Family and Community Service Act to provide child protection services, the requirements right now are a bachelor in social work or a bachelor's of child and youth care. Then there are a couple of master's degrees — education psychology and another one that I've just forgotten.

C. Heavener: Master's in counselling — those four degrees. Basically, how those were arrived at is that there was some work done around what the core competencies are to do child protection work. Then there was an analysis done with respect to those various degrees, and that's where they landed.

There's work being done on the delegated aboriginal agency front, and I'll just pass that over to Dawn to speak to.

D. Thomas-Wightman: Sure. Generally speaking, it's the same educational background, the four degrees.

As Cory talked about a child welfare specialization at the universities, there's also an indigenous child welfare specialization for students who want to work with a delegated agency. The major difference with the delegated agencies and the delegation is training. So there's, well, not more comprehensive but a longer period of training to include a cultural component, and not just the cultural component around what it's like to work in community but what it is like to implement the child protection tools in doing child protection in that community context. So that's a big piece of the training.

Under AOPSI, which was the aboriginal operational and practice standards, there is one caveat, I guess. Because of some of the difficulty to recruit and retain in some of the remote aboriginal agencies, there's a 25 percent rule. So 25 percent of the social workers are able to be non-degree, but they have to have a diploma.

They go through the exact same training and exact same delegation process as their degree partners, but they can come to the table with a diploma and a certain amount of experience and background, maybe in the community where they're well known.

That exception would come to my office, and I would look at it, as the designated director, and decide whether it made sense for an exception to be made in those cases. That's the one difference.

M. Stilwell: I want to go back to talk about child and youth mental health services.
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Certainly anecdotally, I hear that parents with children whose behaviour is both troubled and troubling have difficulty accessing care. I'm interested in the intersection between MCFD and Ministry of Health around where you share these issues and what that process of consultation is and where needed action is.

For example, did you have staff that participated in consultation before the recent announcement by the Minister of Health around the mental health plan? How does that work for child and youth mental health services?

M. Sieben: No, I get it, but are we talking about the ten-year mental health plan from a few years ago or the most recent announcement regarding Vancouver or…?

M. Stilwell: There was a ten-year health plan, but more recently I think it was focused on the Vancouver issues. However, before you are adults with mental illness, you may well have been a youth or at risk. So I'm just interested in how that partnership works for child and youth mental health services.

M. Sieben: Sure. Well, if you don't mind, Bev…. I'll probably ask Bev to speak, draw upon her experience of running a service delivery agency and what it looks like on the ground.

The interface points. Apart from the transition issues, the front door in for many child and youth mental health services is the family physician. They end up making referral over to the MCFD, given that we've got the child and youth mental health services through us. But the front door is on the medical side. Where the mandates overlap — if not the services, the extent to which they exist or don't — is on the transition side. I'll get Bev to speak to the actual operational part.

In regards to the Minister of Health's most recent announcement and other, let's say, opportunities at this stage, it is with some degree of opportunity and hope that…. I think that it is really useful to have a Deputy Minister of Health who's the former Deputy Minister of MCFD.

M. Stilwell: Can I just finesse it, Bev? What prompted the question also was your statement or feeling that there are plentiful regions where there is not stress or big waiting lists versus kind of what we hear on the ground. So how do you know, or how do you feel comfortable in your assessment, or how do you count, and so on?

B. Dicks: What Mark's asking me to speak to is a bit of my history, having been the ADM for service delivery. Basically, the focus of our child and youth mental health offices out in our service delivery areas is on community mental health. Certainly, as you would know, the acute care piece of that care is provided by the health system. We don't have the whole continuum, as you can imagine.

When you think about services out in the communities, there is a real strength of working with our partnerships in the health authority at that community level. There are really strong relationships there at that level around working with and having integrated case planning meetings around that process.

We do have transition protocols in place, but as you know, you have all kinds of different health authorities, so it's not a blanket protocol. We have varying protocols that we work with in each of our communities so that when we're working with a young person and their family that's experiencing issues around their mental health, we have transition protocols both for how they would transition into acute care but also how they transition back out, which is sometimes some of the major concerns that we have.

With regards to wait-lists for our community care for our community services, what tends to be the focus there — and this is the part that Mark was talking about that we're trying to standardize — is how our offices actually triage around those wait-lists.

Now, the direction and the policy approach that we have there is that if there is a critical care need, like a child is having suicidal thoughts or so on, those are prioritized. So young people that are triaged with an acute issue around their community response are not placed on a wait-list.

The wait-list tends to be…. We have triaging around levels of services that are required and levels of need, so it's at the end of the continuum that sometimes does get wait-listed. We have a range of wait-lists, I would agree with you, across the province. It's not that in some communities there are not wait-lists and in others there are wait-lists.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I have a couple of questions around responding to the representative's recommendations, the last part of the presentation, but I just want to touch for a moment on the last two questions from my colleagues who've raised the issue of service needs.

I think it's more of a statement than a question, because I don't think it's appropriate for the deputy or anybody else to make a comment about more resources or less resources. That's the political sphere and the job of the political sphere to have that conversation.

I would certainly agree that it's about good practice. It's not only about additional resources, but it is also about additional resources. I guess I feel it important to put that on the table. It isn't simply about more money. I would agree with that statement. I think there is an awful lot that has to happen around practice, around stability and around accountability and consistency, but I also believe strongly that it is about making sure that children and families are a priority and that the resources are there for services that are needed.

Will there ever be enough resources? Will there always be a demand? Of course, always there will be demand for more services, but I also believe strongly that it has not been enough of a priority over the last ten years to be able to provide the services and supports.

That brings me to the representative's recommendations, because I think this is where often the conflict occurs. I think you've laid out a very clear process, and I don't think there has ever been a challenge around the recommendations being received, around the recommendations being agreed to. The challenge comes in the implementation of those recommendations. That's where we get differences of opinion. That's where we get stuck. That's where things don't seem to go forward.

I wondered if you could tell me a little bit more under your go-forward approach that you put in slide 20, where you talked about "clarifying MCFD process to plan, track and report out on progress." I think that will assist in some of that where it appears that recommendations have disappeared. They were agreed upon, and then nothing happens. I think that process will assist.

I also think it's important to state that a lot of that
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also has to do with additional resources. Many of these recommendations need to be implemented, need to be followed through on, and it cannot be expected that the ministry can squeeze the existing programs and services to provide for some of these recommendations that need additional resources. That's everything from youth mental health, as we've just talked about, to transition, to residential care, to specialized care.

Some of these recommendations will need additional resources. I think it's just important to state that it's not the deputy or the staff's job. That's our job as elected representatives on all sides of this Legislature, to speak up about a priority for children and youth in this province. So just a question around clarifying the direction.

M. Sieben: I'll get Cory to outline what our go-forward intent is as a result of our current and our ongoing engagement with the representative's office in order to do the best by what they give us.

I note a couple of things just off the top, though. First is: every now and again we get a recommendation where we simply don't agree. That's fair enough, I suppose. In fact, John, in particular, often is encouraging us and saying: "You know, if you don't agree, just say you don't agree." We usually don't have too many of those. Often we have recommendations where we've come to an agreement and where actually we think that we've done them, and the representative's office is sort of less generous in their appraisal, let's say.

Our intent where we can is to link the recommendations that come with various case-specific reports to work that as already underway in the ministry. At times, that can be a challenge.

This is probably a debate that the rep's office and our staff can have. There are limits to what case-specific reports and recommendations can provide when extrapolated to a broader child welfare–serving system. A system that was based on a chronology of recommendations in and of itself probably isn't much of a system. Our primary responsibility has to be running the six lines of business that we explained to you and then inserting those recommendations as best we can within that, rather than building the six service lines upon those recommendations. That's my view, in any event.

C. Heavener: Just to add on the go-forward process that…. I probably don't have a lot to say at this point, but I can tell you that we've had informal discussions with the representative's office about: what does the go-forward process look like? What we've committed to internally is we're going to enhance how we track and report, and we monitor back. What we want to ensure is that we're giving the representative's office the information they need to be able to do a thorough assessment of the recommendation.

I think, at times, we've done a really good job of that, and other times we may not have done such a great job. We really want to streamline with them: "What would help you to further this assessment and the work that you're doing?" We're hoping to continue that conversation in the next couple months and really get to a place that….

As you can imagine, going through these processes, there's lots of paperwork, and sometimes there's policy-developed training. We're sharing 50, 60 pages on training or policy, and that's really difficult to get all of that together, to get it over to the rep's. Then they're sifting through it all. We want to make sure that we're being thoughtful on what we're putting forward and that it's actually describing to them how we are moving forward on the recommendation and in fact implementing it.

Where we really want to strengthen our process on that side is working with the representative's office on the status of the implementation of the recommendations. We put together good action plans, and we're doing the work. But we need to ensure that they know what we're doing and that we're reporting back to them on where things are at. That's part of the work that I see moving forward in the next couple of months.

M. Sieben: May I add something in conjunction with what I said previously regarding the case-specific reports? There is another body of work that comes from the representative's office which, in my view, is outstanding: the data-matching work that was done looking at educational outcomes and health in the Growing Up in B.C. report and the monitoring reports that have been done that are less case-specific and more looking at the aggregate.

The rep's office can pull that stuff together unlike anybody else, given the breadth of their information entitlement provision and the resources that they're able to cobble together with researchers and staff in their office who can actually take the time to look at all that stuff together. There's a richness in there that, in my mind, can very much inform improvements in a system. Every time we get one of those, I look forward to it coming.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Just one quick comment. I would agree that you need to be focusing on your service lines. That is the job of the ministry. The job isn't to build a system based on recommendations, because that isn't a system.

I also believe that if the implementation, and the work around the implementation, is outlined, I think it will give a greater certainty to this committee, greater certainty to the representative's office, that the work is being followed up on with the hope that, ideally, a report will come out with recommendations that say: "Isn't it great? The ministry has implemented this direction. We've looked at this. This is already part of the six service lines. It's already being done."
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My hope would be that that's the ultimate direction and the ultimate report that would be received — to say that this is already integrated as part of the ministry work within the six service lines and it's already getting addressed. To me, that would be the place to get to from recommendations that come forward.

There will always be fatality reports, there will always be reports on critical incidents, but I would hope the ideal would be that within the six service lines, that kind of work will be happening, and the recommendations will simply be reinforcement of good work that's going on.

D. Donaldson: I have a couple of questions on the recommendations section, but one quick one before we go there. It was in response to the Chair's question, and just very specific.

The 13 directors of practice you mentioned…. Is that their sole responsibility? Or are they responsible for areas other than the focus of director of practice? And are all those 13 positions filled?

C. Heavener: The directors of practice are responsible for providing practice consultation and support across all six service delivery lines, across all of those areas, and working with our consultants to provide that. My understanding is that they are all filled, and I can confirm that. We treat these positions very seriously, and we do succession planning. Where we know that folks may be retiring or, potentially, moving on, we're working to ensure that we're getting folks behind them in as soon as possible and, preferably, with an overlap.

D. Donaldson: Thanks. My question's on the second presentation. It has been about three weeks since the release of When Talk Trumped Service. I'm not going to ask a specific question on that, but I'd like to know if you could tell us whether step 2 has happened, whether there has been an MCFD lead appointed, and who that person is.

Then generally, I'm curious as to the process — this, again, is on slide 19, the post-release — between steps 1 and 3. Perhaps you can shed a little light on how the communication, how the decision-making, happens regarding the acceptance or rejection of recommendations. Is that something that you, as deputy minister, bring to the minister and that ultimately the minister makes the decision on — accepting or rejecting the recommendations from the representative's office?

M. Sieben: In response to the first question, it's a pretty big report, so right now it's me. I'm the lead. Each of the recommendations requires individual consideration, and there are big parts of it that will be Dawn's to manage, with support from Cory and myself. But in terms of the overall response to the report right now, I signed the letter. Sometimes it's Cory that signs; sometimes it's me. I signed a letter to Mary Ellen on Monday saying we received her report, we reviewed it, and generally we agree and look forward to being able to discuss it within the process that Cory noted.

In response to the second question, usually the representative and her senior staff provide the minister an opportunity for a briefing with the final report in advance of its release. Based on what we've been able to garner through the process Cory referenced — where we get the embargoed copy without the recommendations for a couple of weeks, and the discussion that happens between the office — we come to some sense of position around how we want to respond to the report.

Cory and myself — and perhaps Dawn if it's First Nations aboriginal–based, or whoever another appropriate ADM might be, if there is one — go and discuss that with the minister. Then sometimes there is more work for the minister to do, given that some of the reports have cross-ministry implications. Sometimes they're discrete at MCFD. On the whole, that's the process.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I have just a follow-up question, then. Is there any way, when you're doing that process, that you could let the committee know?

M. Sieben: Well, you know, it's more…. We’re pretty careful about what we do in that process because, frankly, it's the representative's report. The report comes to us on an embargoed basis, and I'd….

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): With regard to your updates that you have and your response to the representative's report, is there any way that we, the committee, could know where you're at?

How about, Cory, if we look to discuss that with the representative's office and see if there's a means by which we could make that happen for you? I don't think there's much doubt as to whether we can. It's probably more of a question of who's most appropriate at what point.

C. James (Deputy Chair): For the directors of practice in each of the 13 service delivery areas, are they accessible by the delegated agencies? Do they also support the delegated agencies?
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D. Thomas-Wightman: They are accessible by the delegated agencies, but what we have at my shop is practice analyst, which is like a practice consultant or a director of practice. We also have a deputy director of practice. So most of the practice support comes through my shop.

We're trying to develop stronger partnerships with the SDA, because the aboriginal children move back and forth and sometimes our staff move back and forth. So for a more consistent approach we're developing those working relationships with the directors of practice, but mostly for my shop and our practice consultants.

Thank you very much. I think this has been quite fruitful for everyone, and we very much appreciate everybody coming over and presenting.

Unless there are any other comments from the committee members, on behalf of the committee I would very much appreciate seeing you more often. We'll help to arrange that. Thank you very much for your presentation as well as your fruitful input in answer to all of our questions. It was very much appreciated.

Maybe what we'll do, Kate, is take a ten-minute recess, and then the committee will come back and deal with the final item on the agenda.

Follow-up Process for Ministry of
Children and Family Development
Response to Recommendations

The next item shouldn't take longer than about half an hour. What we wanted to talk about amongst ourselves were the options for follow-up re the ministry responses to the rep's recommendations. We got a pretty good overview of what's actually going on right now, as well as an appreciation that they are moving forward.

Hopefully, we will get a more regular communication going with regards to where they're at with particular reports, just based on the response to the question that I asked Mark a few moments ago.

I thought I'd throw it out to everybody with regards to more general ideas as to how you think we should respond, specifically to reports.

But before that, I wanted to give Kate a brief opportunity to give us kind of what's going on with other committees and how it fits in to our committee, because our committee is different from other committees.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Good afternoon, Members. As the Chair has noted, the concept of a follow-up process with respect to the work of a parliamentary committee is a model that we have undertaken with other parliamentary committees, particularly another oversight committee, the Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts. There are some similarities between the work of that committee and your committee. There are also some significant differences that I can give you a high-level overview of.

As you probably know, the Public Accounts Committee is referred, by the House, all of the reports of another independent officer, the Auditor General. In the process that the Auditor General undertakes with his work, the work of a particular ministry or a government agency will be examined. It's quite different, of course, from the singular focus, primarily, of the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth. In the course of the audit office's work, any government ministry or Crown agency could be audited and be involved in that audit process.

The other thing to keep in mind with the audit process is that the audited agency will have an opportunity to provide a written response to audit recommendations, which will appear in the audit report. As we just heard from the Ministry of Children and Family Development, the process that the representative and the ministry have developed really has the Ministry of Children and Family Development preparing a written response, post-report release. So the timing of that is somewhat different.

The Public Accounts Committee will receive an audit report from the Auditor General on a regular and ongoing basis and, in the context of that meeting, will have representatives from the audited organization present in the room at that time. So the first time that the committee will receive a report which contains the written response, it will also have an opportunity then and there to question ministry representatives and ask them about their response to particular recommendations.

About six months or so from that point in time, about a year after the audit process begins, the Auditor General will, on behalf of the Public Accounts Committee, send a survey to the audited organization and ask them to complete, basically, a self-assessment as to where they see themselves with the implementation of the recommendations that they had already responded to in front of the committee. In the fullness of time the auditors will then present to the committee, yet again, a written summary of where the implementation process is with the audited organizations.

I should note that the Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts has recently just begun its work in the new parliament. One of the things that they have on their minds is to try and look at their own follow-up process to try and assess how effectively it is working for them and if there are any changes they might like to make.

One of the areas under consideration by Public
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Accounts is: when the follow-up report is produced and this written self-assessment, which is basically an unedited assessment of an audited organization's response to recommendations, comes to the committee, what is the level of audit assurance? What comfort or what confidence can the members of the committee have with that?

It's basically a response to a survey. The ministry isn't present in the room, and the auditors haven't provided any audit-level of assurance. They haven't re-audited those programs. They've basically facilitated the committee's receipt of a written update.

So that is a question that is right now before the Public Accounts Committee. I just used it as an example — essentially, to provide you with some options.

It seems to me that the main areas for your consideration this afternoon are two things. There's the timing of how you might want to receive information from the ministry with respect to their implementation of recommendations — the timing of the frequency of that.

Also, there's which format you would like to receive them in — if you would like the ministry to prepare a written and regular report to you on a variety of recommendations, if you would like to highlight specific ones where you've identified a mutual interest or a high level of risk that you'd like to follow up and if you would like to have the ministry here more regularly, perhaps on an ongoing basis, to be able to update you on their results and to answer questions that you have.

That's sort of a high-level overview. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. But as you know, Byron has also prepared a bit of a short summary piece here that's in front of all of you. If you have any questions, we'd be happy to answer them.

M. Karagianis: I think this is a terrific step for us to take. I know that historically on this committee there was sometimes a bit of tension about this committee meeting with the ministry, because the committee had been created very specifically to be the conduit for the Representative for Children and Youth. This was the only opportunity she had to basically engage with the Legislature. There seemed to always be a little bit of a barrier between us and the ministry.

So I actually appreciated the fact that Mark Sieben said that they had only met with the committee less than half the number of times that the children's representative had. So I took that to be an offer of an opportunity for them to meet with us more often, which I welcome completely.

I think it should be something a bit more scheduled. I'm a bit loath to say they should be doing a lot of written material for us, only because of the workload that puts onto their staff. We already heard how many tasks they've all undertaken. They don't need to go hire more people so they can write a report to this committee a couple of times a year, I don't think.

The other thing is that I'm not sure we need to hear from them after every single report from the representative. I mean, some are more specific to them. Some of her reports have to do with the Health Ministry, the Education Ministry. I think of the variety of reports we've had that covered a lot of other ministries.

I would like to see us meet on a regular basis with the ministry, often enough that they can then address whatever reports have occurred since the last time we met with them, providing they've had time to undertake a response. I understand the reports that we received yesterday, which we were all quite eager to have discussed, they haven't had a chance to really think about or put together a response or a timeline on what they might do or say or plan, coming out of those reports.

I'd like us to meet on a regular, scheduled basis, and I'd like it to be a reasonable reflection of the reports that we've received from the Children and Youth Representative.

C. James (Deputy Chair): We heard at the end of the presentation, when the ministry was talking about responding to the representative's reports, that they are looking at doing a more formal structure around implementation and how that's occurring. It certainly appeared to me that they were looking at putting that down in writing for the representative, because they haven't been doing a good enough job of that kind of work either.

To me, if that work is being done and the work's being done for the representative, there's no reason why it can't be the same report that comes to this committee — not an additional report, not an additional amount of work but an update in the same kind of way that the ministry is reporting to the representative. That report could come to us, perhaps twice a year, because then you're managing the representative reports. You're giving enough time for that to occur.

I think we can impress upon the ministry that we're not looking at additional work. We're not looking at adding to their burden. They already have a structure in place that they're looking at. Could they just build the committee in as part of that regular reporting on the implementation of the recommendations that they're doing?

I think there is…. Kate raised it when she talked about the Public Accounts Committee. There is some accountability there. I think all of us around this table would feel comfortable having some accountability on those recommendations that we hear from the representative — that she doesn't feel they're followed up on, and then we don't have a chance to ask those questions. I think we should ask those questions. I think that is part of our job — to hold the ministry accountable for those recommendations.

I think twice a year, as a start. Look at how those reports are coming in to the representative. I think that
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would be sufficient for us and would give us an opportunity to be able to ask those questions.

D. Barnett: I'm going to agree with both my colleagues across the floor. I agree with what Carole just said. But I also think that to have them come here so that we can have some dialogue…. I think it's great to get another report, but there are lots of questions that always come around those reports that aren't in the report and that, I think, we need the answers for. So I would like to have more dialogue with the ministry staff from time to time.

M. Stilwell: I certainly always am open, and I welcome information. The vocabulary and people's viewpoints and getting interaction with the ministry and the rep and being able to ask questions to clarify things are all very important.

I want to just ask Kate, though: can you refresh me? Does the committee mandate…? It positions us between the rep and the ministry. That's not my impression, perhaps wrong, of what we're here to do. In other words, it's not…. I don't think there is that public accountability in this room. I'm not suggesting there isn't or shouldn't be, but that is not my impression of what the committee is supposed to be doing.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Well, the committee provides a public forum for discussion, of course, of issues related to child welfare. The committee's terms of reference, as members have noted, really highlight a relationship that Ted Hughes had envisioned with the Representative for Children and Youth. So that is its primary focus.

But in the context of its terms of reference, it does also have the ability to foster "greater awareness and understanding" amongst both legislators and the public of the B.C. child welfare system. Consequently, the discussion yesterday on the special report fits with that part of the mandate.

With respect to ministry accountability, I would see this committee fulfilling the same kind of oversight function that the Public Accounts Committee would be with providing a forum for an independent officer of the Legislature to come and to raise issues within the statutory mandate of that office, to keep members of the House informed as to the findings of that work and to create an avenue, an opportunity for public accountability.

The ministry, of course, is accountable to their minister, and the minister will provide accountability to the Legislature, but the ministry can also be accountable before your committee in a very public process.

As representatives of your respective communities, I think you have a very important role to play in asking questions of the ministry. I think the report of this committee, as you know, will in the fullness of time be one that summarizes all of your activities and any recommendations or considerations that you as a whole will bring. That will, of course, be presented to the Legislature in the fullness of time, but I see it as sort of at a higher level, I guess, in terms of creating a public forum for accountability.

M. Stilwell: I just wanted to close the loop by saying…. First of all, thank you for that clarification. Obviously, it's very helpful to have people from the ministry to actually explain the business, how it works, how it works on the ground so that we can match what we are hearing from our stakeholders, constituents to try and get, you know, a really informed understanding for ourselves, our constituents, the public and so on.

I guess the accountability does come through the minister, so I guess staying within the parameters and not asking the ministry staff to account for, as Carole said, things that should be discussed in the Legislature.

I think it's important. I think it's worthwhile. I think it's just managing it so that it is doing what we're supposed to be doing. That would just be my comment.

D. Donaldson: That's great. I mean, I concur. I think we did a pretty good job today of trying to be respectful of staff and keeping the boundaries that we all seem to agree on. My only comment is that I feel there's a role to understand where the recommendations that we review from the representative go and how they're being implemented. Yet I don't want that to be an onerous process on them or on us.

I agree that following the release of the report, the ministry has also reached a written agreement with RCY whereby the office is briefed on progress and can provide feedback. If they're already providing a report to RCY, I think that would help me understand the implementation of their recommendations. So it seems like it's work they're already doing. It's just that it has not been brought to the committee in the past, or this is a new agreement. I'd like to see that material.

The second bullet point, under point No. 2, it also seems that that would only be in connection to MCFD. Again, I don't want it to be too onerous, but I'd be interested in knowing the recommendations that the representative has that apply to other ministries. Especially in light of the last report, there's going to be a lot in Justice that looks at that. I'd like to hear from other ministries, as well, about how they're implementing it.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I've got a question, then, to Kate. Our committee is totally related to the Ministry of Children and Family Development, not Justice. Or can we…?
[ Page 151 ]

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): No, Madam Chair. The committee is actually referred all reports of the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth. As we know, some of them will reach into the work of the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Justice. From time to time this committee has had individuals from those other ministries appear before it. But I think one of the changes being contemplated today is how to perhaps regularize that process of engagement with ministry representatives.

In terms of your next steps, if the committee was to decide to have an ongoing schedule whereby there would be an opportunity to engage with government officials, I would presume, as part of that, the Chair, the Deputy Chair and all members would identify which reports they wanted to focus on at a given meeting. From there, we would determine who the best witnesses would be to provide you with the information that you need.

What I'm hearing, then, is that we're in general agreement. The fact that Mark has offered…. I think the numbers he said is that the rep has been before the committee 27 times and the Ministry of Children and Family Development has been under ten. He was commenting that even, of course, just doubling that, which would be 20, would be still less than what Mary Ellen has done.

The suggestion that came by is…. We've already seen him once, maybe twice, a year. This is what I'm hearing. I don't think that would be too onerous for them. We don't have to ask them for any reports, because if they're already doing it with the rep, we would just be party to that

We've already confirmed that yes, in fact, they could do that. So it would just be one other opportunity, in addition to what we've done today, within the next year to have another time to talk to him, and then perhaps between myself and the vice-Chair we can figure out, more streamlined, what topics we want or if we want to pinpoint specific reports and recommendations that have come up along the way.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Could I just add a note of clarification? It's my recollection and Byron's that when the ministry did appear, amongst those ten times a good number of them weren't necessarily to provide the committee with an update on the status of implementation of recommendations.

In fact, it was more often to give an orientation similar to what occurred today or when the committee had, in the last year, undertaken a statutory review of the Representative for Children and Youth Act. There was another opportunity provided to the ministry to provide, basically, a submission on behalf of government with respect to that process.

I do think that the work that you're contemplating today is a significant change of practice, and it will lead to a more effective process.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I was just going to add to that. I don't think it precludes the ministry coming more than twice a year if that's what they want to do — if there are changes, if there's something major that's come up, if there's a piece that they feel the need to come to the committee or the committee feels the need. I don't think that precludes it.

I think what this does, as Kate has said, is put in place a regular process where the ministry knows that they need to come back to us in our duty to the representative's recommendations and report to us on how those recommendations are going and how the implementation is going, because I think it's very tough for us as a committee to know whether those are being implemented if we don't hear directly from the ministry whose job it is to implement them.

I think this is saying to the ministry: "We've got a very specific recommendation. You're putting a report together around what you're doing on the recommendations. We want you to come to the committee twice a year and report on that report to us." Then there may be other opportunities. But I think it's a very specific mandate related, as the member said across, directly to the representative's recommendations and reports as per the committee's requirements.

J. Martin: I'm just wondering what it would look like. About 2½ hours was an overview of what the ministry does, which we wouldn't, obviously, have happen again. Would we go right into a question-answer format? It obviously wouldn't kick off the same way it did today.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I think what we alluded to is that perhaps the Chair and the vice-Chair, me getting fruitful input from you and Carole getting it from her folks…. Then we can decide how we want to do it. It might be different. Who's to say what's going to come up in the next six months?

We might want to talk about something in a lot more detail than we think we know now. I'm pretty open. I like the idea of being flexible. I like the idea that we're not asking the ministry to do any more work except for "come and visit us," say, once or twice a year.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Yeah. After they've already written the report, anyways, to the rep.

Okay. Well, it looks like we're all one great big happy family now.
[ Page 152 ]

That's good. As far as next meetings, the next meeting, I guess, wouldn't be until after springtime or something. We're kind of caught up, but didn't the rep…?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes, the committee has now considered all of the reports.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): We heard that, yeah. So we'll talk in the new year and get a date.

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Chair:	* Jane Thornthwaite (North Vancouver–Seymour BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	* Carole James (Victoria–Beacon Hill NDP)
Members:	* Donna Barnett (Cariboo-Chilcotin BC Liberal)
	* Mike Bernier (Peace River South BC Liberal)
	* Doug Donaldson (Stikine NDP)
	* Maurine Karagianis (Esquimalt–Royal Roads NDP)
	* John Martin (Chilliwack BC Liberal)
	* Darryl Plecas (Abbotsford South BC Liberal)
	* Jennifer Rice (North Coast NDP)
	* Dr. Moira Stilwell (Vancouver-Langara BC Liberal)
	* denotes member present
Clerk:	Kate Ryan-Lloyd
Committee Staff:	Byron Plant (Committee Research Analyst)

Witnesses:	Beverly Dicks (Ministry of Children and Family Development)
	Cory Heavener (Ministry of Children and Family Development)
	Randi Mjolsness (Ministry of Children and Family Development)
	Mark Sieben (Deputy Minister, Ministry of Children and Family Development)
	Dawn Thomas-Wightman (Ministry of Children and Family Development)
	Martin Wright (Ministry of Children and Family Development)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
CHILDREN AND YOUTH