Children and Youth — Issue No. 7 — Wednesday, March 26, 2014 (HTML)

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

2. The Representative for Children and Youth provided the Committee with an update on the work of the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth and answered questions from Committee Members.

4. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions regarding the report entitled Investigative Report — Lost in the Shadows: How a Lack of Help Meant a Loss of Hope for One First Nations Girl — February 2014

• Bill Naughton, Chief Investigator/Associate Deputy Representative, Critical Injuries and Death Reviews and Investigations

5. The Committee discussed its upcoming special project and received a copy of its draft report to the House.

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
Office of the Representative for Children and Youth: Update	175
M. Turpel-Lafond
Representative for Children and Youth Report: Lost in the Shadows: How a Lack of Help Meant a Loss of Hope for One First Nations Girl	187
M. Turpel-Lafond
Youth Mental Health Project: Update	201
Other Business	203

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Welcome, everyone. We're at the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. Today the agenda items are to get an update from the representative, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and then to move into the investigative report Lost in the Shadows. Then we are going to take a brief break and talk amongst the committee members about our special project on youth mental health. We hope to be finished just before noon.

Without further ado, unless anybody has any problems with those agenda items today, we'll start off with introduction to Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. She can begin her presentation on the update on the work of the representative.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Thank you, Madam Chair, and good morning to members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here.

I think this is the 28th time that I've appeared before the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. I always keep track of these things. It's important. On the one hand, it isn't all that big of a number, but on the other hand, it shows the commitment and dedication of Members of the Legislative Assembly to work together on issues for vulnerable children. That's an extremely positive thing.

I'm joined today by my staff. I'm pretty sure you've all met them before. To my left, your right, is John Greschner, Deputy Representative for Children and Youth. To my right, your left, is Bill Naughton, who is the chief investigator and associate deputy representative for investigations and also is overseeing the monitoring, evaluation and audit function in the representative's office.

I also wanted to just note how much I appreciate that in attendance in the gallery today is the Chief from the community where the case arose and the report we will discuss later this morning came from. I'm very appreciative of the fact that he's here. I'm not going to identify his name. We're going to take particular efforts to protect the privacy of the child's family, because there are siblings and other family members. But having said that, I want to just recognize how much I appreciate this Chief's attendance. He's here specifically for this purpose.

When we launched that investigation and that report we'll speak about later, the Chief was extremely supportive of an independent investigation in his community. He also knew that we would be dealing with some very difficult subjects, and he ensured that we had a free and independent investigation and produced an objective report about the circumstances.

I'm really delighted that he's here, and I hope that when we have a break, those of you who haven't had a chance to be introduced will make sure you have a moment to speak with him, because he is also very committed to seeing that the recommendations in the report get implemented. Particularly in the First Nations community, that type of leadership is so important for us to see some progress.

I'll talk more about that report later, but it's just extremely important for us to recognize that and for me to personally thank him for attending and also for the commitment to see that the system for children in his community is improved and to work with everyone affected, including the provincial government, the federal government and families.

We'll have a chance to speak about that more, but I just wanted to flag that to make sure everyone does have a moment during the break, in particular, to speak to him. Make sure that you make that contact. I'm sure, as we look at this report into the future, it touches upon issues that are emblematic across the province, and leadership by those who are elected and serving in the role of chief is very important. So I appreciate that.

I'm delighted to be here, and I'm glad we're going to have a chance to speak about that report, Lost in the Shadows. Before that, though, I wanted to give you just a bit of an update on a couple of items, not a lot, and have a chance for questions. First of all, I wanted to speak briefly about the issue of domestic violence.

I particularly wanted to speak about it because, sadly, it would appear that this legislative House has been affected by an incident of domestic violence. It's unknown what the legal status is at this time, but there was a domestic violence homicide recently, and it may well be that a person employed in the Legislative Assembly may have been connected to that. It's a very sad reminder of the fact that domestic violence and domestic violence homicides affect many, many families in British Columbia.

Domestic violence is a serious issue. I wanted to just remind the committee that the estimate in British Columbia is that approximately 3,000 children every year are exposed to domestic violence. Those are incidents that have come to the attention of authorities. Obviously, it's a very under-reported area. That's police reporting. In terms of the work of the child welfare system, about 34 percent of substantiated child maltreatment investigations identify exposure to domestic violence as a key issue. Exposure to family violence is the second most common form of substantiated child maltreatment in Canada.

Domestic violence charges in the criminal justice system include things like common assault, uttering threats,
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criminal harassment, forceful confinement, sometimes homicide, as well, and murders. In many cases, of course, particularly at the lower end of those offences against the person, there are often no charges or conviction.

Many cases are dealt with by a peace bond or recognizance under section 810 of the Criminal Code. This is of course what we saw in the Schoenborn case. The last report we had around statistics on intimate partner violence is that there were approximately 16,259 victims of intimate partner violence that came to the attention of B.C. police. Those are the last-known reported, and many were not reported.

I give you a bit of background on domestic violence because in February 2014 the government of British Columbia launched a three-year domestic violence plan. As you know, in my other appearances before the committee I've been calling upon that domestic violence plan to be launched and was concerned that it had taken a great period of time. I wanted to update the committee just to say that it was launched.

Although I was pressed quite heavily for comment at the time, I didn't make a public comment on the domestic violence plan, because I wanted to have an opportunity to look at it more closely. First of all, I'm very pleased to see that there is some action. The plan, of course, came more than a year after the deadline when I was hoping to see it. Nevertheless, I'm pleased to see it.

A couple of concerns I want to note, because obviously this so profoundly affects families in British Columbia. One is the $5.5 million in new funds pledged in this plan. The new funding will not begin until fiscal year 2015-2016. There was a plan, but there was no new funding connected to the plan.

Of the new funding, approximately $2 million will be used for development and delivery of programs specifically for aboriginal women, men and children affected by domestic violence, including victims and perpetrators. That's a positive development. So $1.5 million will support women and children in rural remote communities, and $1 million will help with startup and implementation of additional domestic violence units. Those are the integrated units where police, social workers and others are working together.

We still have the same number of domestic violence units that we've had in British Columbia for a number of years. We didn't see an expansion with this plan, which I regret, because these are very successful. And $1 million will be used to provide services for perpetrators of domestic violence. It's sort of unknown what this will involve.

In any event, besides being short on funding to address this critical need, the plan is short on detail. The plan does not have clear outcomes or concrete time frames or measurements at this point. A few areas where we would have liked to have seen more focus, particularly in light of our report on Christian Lee's homicide, are in immigrant and refugee communities, although we note that the federal government has been active in terms of funding in that area.

The plan doesn't, at this point, have the context of a big picture, and it would appear to the representative's office that the B.C. plan comes up short in terms of being a whole government plan. There's a need to do significantly more work.

Plans to tackle the issue of domestic violence in Ontario and Alberta, I would have to say, are considerably ahead of the B.C. plan. Alberta's domestic violence plan was released in November 2013 with specific actions and a clear role for each identified sector.

Examples of actions in the Alberta plan, just in contrast: require a governmentwide commitment in that province to work in partnership with aboriginal communities to develop customized and community-led aboriginal family violence prevention and intervention plans — very detailed work on the Alberta side; support a more strategic and coordinated approach to healthy relationships for youth — actually training and supporting youth to identify what's a healthy and unhealthy relationship; more improved access and availability of counselling services for adults experiencing family violence as well as children exposed to or experiencing family violence.

In Ontario they had a plan that was launched in 2004 and that was updated in 2012. The Ontario plan takes a more multi-layered approach to domestic violence and looks at the need to address social issues in relation to domestic violence. For instance, it has high-risk committees that have been established in court jurisdictions. In fact, every court jurisdiction and police agency works together.

Also, the Ontario coroner's office has had a domestic violence death review committee. It's been conducting annual reviews of domestic violence homicides for ten years. Its objective is to develop a comprehensive understanding of why domestic homicides occur and how they might be prevented.

The committee there develops recommendations that aren't legally binding, but organizations and agencies do respond back every year. The panel gives an update on the status and implementation of recommendations every year.

In the example of the Ontario domestic violence reviews, in 2012 their report identified a number of key areas, including a provincewide review of the treatment at bail hearings of cases deemed to be high risk and training for justices of the peace around risk assessment and risk management related to domestic violence.

In Ontario the panel has recommended that all medical schools and departments of psychiatry in Ontario ensure that domestic violence, as well as assessment, safety planning and risk management, is a mandated part of
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their training programs and certification process.

The process in Ontario is led by an individual who is an expert in children exposed to domestic violence and so has a very strong lens on children's well-being. In Ontario all police services implement a directive to activate victim services as a point of entry for victims at the time of the offence, regardless of whether it's a DV — domestic violence — verbal incident or whether criminal charges are laid. So there's an automatic connection with victim services.

While they deal with their resourcing issues on occasion, because they're under-resourced, they certainly are more generously resourced than in British Columbia and able to deal with those victim services requests more immediately and more comprehensively and in a more integrated way.

I just say, by way of contrast, that when I looked at the plan — as I say, it's a good start — I'm encouraged. But it has a long, long way to go and certainly doesn't measure up to what's been done elsewhere. On the whole, I'd say I'm very disappointed by the justice system component of the response. I think the Ministry of Children and Families component is actually quite positive, but it indicates to me that there has not been governmentwide commitment, and there isn't sufficient justice system ownership of the issue.

The plan calls for, for instance, considering domestic violence courts that have been in place in other jurisdictions for years and years and been reviewed. We're still at the consideration stage.

I have had a chance to meet with the Chief Judge of the Provincial Court to say that I'm very disappointed. He has identified to me that it is not because there's an unwillingness on the part of the court system. It's making it happen and having the justice leadership and resources.

It isn't, in my opinion, much of plan at this point. It's a bit of an empty shell. That's a disappointment after the Schoenborn report and the Christian Lee report.

I bring that back to the committee just to say that the work of this committee will be very important to make sure that the perspective on how children and families are affected by domestic violence needs to be kept at the forefront. There need to be clear accountabilities, and obviously, the funding issues are significant.

As an example in British Columbia, we had one domestic violence coroner panel — a single one — that reported in May 2010. I have advocated year in and year out for six years that that panel happen on a regular basis, looking at all domestic violence homicides, children and adult, and report regularly with good multidisciplinary leadership across the sector. It has not met again, and lack of funding has been cited as the reason for this. I feel that's quite disappointing.

I think we must do better in British Columbia by learning what we can about the issues in our province and developing a comprehensive approach. And hence the three-year plan — while, as I say, positive, I don't think it will lead to the type of change, the type of sea change, that's required in British Columbia. I can't emphasize enough how important this is to child welfare and responding to instances where there is persistent domestic violence and how to have appropriate response.

It then, in turn, places everything on the child welfare system. The child welfare system gets loaded up, and two things happen. One is that children remain in situations where there is ongoing, persistent domestic violence. As you know, the Ministry of Children and Families is committed to preserving families. Therefore, it tolerates a level of conflict that is not conducive to good child development. Or, on the other hand, it leads to the removal of children, really because of the default, because we can't effectively intervene.

This continues to be a major presenting issue. We'll talk about it in the individual suicide case later, but in any event, it is a major issue.

My report back to the committee on looking at the plan is that I'm encouraged, I'm glad there is something there, but I'm deeply, deeply disappointed. It is very short on specifics. It is very short on justice leadership, and it has no measurable outcomes or commitments that will demonstrate to us that we can make inroads. I will be continuing to advocate strongly that we see an improvement to that.

We will, unfortunately, I think, continue to be looking at the impact of domestic violence in the lives of children and possibly talking about the same problems for a considerable period of time unless we see more meaningful change.

The second issue I wanted to provide an update on is the issue of residential care and residential services. In February 2013 I tabled the report Who Protected Him? How B.C.'s Child Welfare System Failed One of Its Most Vulnerable Children. You'll recall that was the case involving the young boy that had been tasered by the police. While my report didn't look at the police conduct issues, I did say that was probably among the least of the difficulties that the young boy had faced in his life of chaos.

One of the recommendations, a very basic recommendation, I made, and it was accepted at the time, was that MCFD develop a continuum of residential services for children and youth in B.C. with complex needs that cannot be met in traditional foster home or group home settings. It's those intensive needs, whether that is a behavioural issue, whether there are some chronic mental health issues. That had to be in place. I asked that a comprehensive plan be completed by April 2013 and that implementation begin in April 2014.

Well, today, a week short of April 2014, I'm reporting to the committee that there is no plan for a comprehensive system with a full continuum of options. It did not happen within the terms of my recommendations. Nor,
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for that matter, is the youth who was the subject of that report living in an appropriate setting or receiving the treatment he requires.

As we speak, we have one facility in British Columbia — the Maples Adolescent Treatment Centre in Burnaby. In total, it has 22 beds. The best estimate I could get from MCFD was that $12.5 million was spent on the Maples in 2012-2013.

By way of comparison, two programs in the city of Calgary alone, with roughly one-quarter of the population of British Columbia, spend approximately $56 million on 140 beds and a range of community-based programming. That's one side. We are woefully under-resourced, and we are not making the commitment to children.

There are significant problems at the Maples, as some of you may be aware of from recent issues that have come forward around worker safety. We know, from Maples incident reports and WorkSafe B.C. inspections, that 13 workers have reported injuries since January 2013 at the Maples Crossroads program. WorkSafe concluded that Maples failed to implement appropriate controls, panic alarms and adequate security for staff.

Of course, as Representative for Children and Youth, while I'm very concerned about the safety of staff because worker safety and child safety are connected, I am also deeply concerned about what is happening with the young people with respect to those programs and services. Forty percent of the staff have not met non-violent crisis intervention training requirements, and there's no regular assessment of this competence with respect to that staff.

Only one of the multiple Maples incident reports have I been able to match up to a reportable to my office, which means that multiple instances where there have been assaults or issues with kids are not being reported to my office also. This is a major issue to me.

The Maples buildings are at the end of their lifespan, if you like, and government intends to sell the property. Certainly, a request for proposals was placed on B.C. Bid. It could be that the property is sold — perhaps leased and retained by the government for a period of time — but the facility is done. The government intends to divest itself of that facility, yet there is no plan to replace it. There may be planning, but there's no plan.

I put that before the committee to say that not only do we have an inadequate facility and an inadequate program in British Columbia, but we will probably see that facility sold. I have no idea what the next proposal will be or when it will come forward. I'm flagging this. It's too early in the process to know what a replacement could look like, but one would expect that the representative's office would be fully briefed and have been presented with a complete, comprehensive plan, especially in light of the fact that I tabled a report specifically addressing those issues.

What's more clear to the representative's office, though, is that to meet the needs of B.C. youth, we need to do much better than simply replace Maples or address the worker safety emergencies — which are important nonetheless, I appreciate, but there are deeper issues.

Maples serves youth from 12 to 17 with psychiatric and behavioural difficulties, and youth in the justice system or those found not criminally responsible by reason of mental disability or those unfit to stand trial. Those categories of young people have increased in recent years, and I anticipate that that will continue. That population will need to find a safe and supported environment in which, in some instances, to live.

The programs at the Maples have a number of dimensions to them. Some of them haven't been reviewed for many years and need to be looked at. How a child or youth in British Columbia comes into the Maples program is, I have to say as Representative for Children and Youth, unknown. I cannot figure the pathway in, and whether there's a logical and rational way in which young people come into this program, how the demand comes forward, and whether the children who need it the most get it.

I certainly know there's not enough of what there is there. But it is unknown to me, whether it's a child in Williams Lake or Nanaimo or it's a child that's living in Prince Rupert, how they will come into this. All I can say is that it seems to be an emergency, last-gasp initiative, yet they run programs that are extremely valuable and important.

There's the Dala program, which is six beds for internalizing disorders like severe anxiety and mood disorders. There's the response program, which is eight beds for severe behavioural problems. There's the Crossroads program, which is eight beds for severe conduct disturbance. There's the Bifrost community-based intervention program, the Connect parenting program and some other structured programs. There isn't an official program for those who have been found unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible, but they're also occupying those beds. I'm not sure under what ages they're doing that.

The bottom line is that there's no comprehensive continuum of integrated services and specialized multiservice systems of care with adequate step-up and step-down programs. So we're still dealing with a very serious gap. Now, while there are perhaps meetings and plans to do some additional programs or to add a bungalow here or something there, this is precisely what I'm concerned about: that we do not have a proper system.

We don't have the accountabilities in that system, the trained and qualified staff and the commitment to families and communities, because children may take a short time in this program, return and have a severe conduct
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issue in the community, and that might lead to incidents of violence — for instance, in a family setting, in the community setting, in a school setting. So we're not doing the work as well as we could.

I know that there are some plans. For instance, it's targeted to be open at the end of next month, April 30 — the six new complex care beds for three-month stays. Primarily, those beds are for children and youth with concurrent developmental disabilities and mental health issues.

I reserve this issue as to whether or not I'll do a special report on that, whether that does meet the standard — whether or not that facility in fact is up to standard. I have toured it personally. I've seen it. I am not of the view that there is clarity around who will get into that six-complex-bed facility, and I think it's of concern.

There have been two rounds of hiring to try and hire staff. The first round didn't produce people with the competencies and qualifications, and there's been no additional budget allocation for staffing, so I'm not even sure who the staff will be and whether they'll be appropriately qualified, whether the range of remuneration is appropriate, whether they will be supervised. But without a proper context for how we're going to offer these services, I can't see it working very effectively.

MCFD is also committed to have a geographically based system of care and intervention for children in care, with a common clinical approach across the array of services. The plan was to establish five four-bed resources across the province, so another 20 beds. These are what you'd call intermediate transition beds to support youth transitioning from acute and tertiary, that high-level care, back into the community. I haven't seen a full manifestation of that.

MCFD had also planned to expand their complex care initiative. The complex care initiative was first started in the Interior with a lot of promise. There is a coach attached to each complex-care team who looks throughout the province to see about the assessment, intervention and clinical needs. There are about 43 complex care cases in level 3 contracted homes — that's a particularly high level of contracted homes — in the Interior, so there was an initiative in the Interior.

That actually produced enough of a volume to fill up all of the provincially mandated resources, so I'm not sure if it was so successful that if we actually did it in all the other regions, we'd be overwhelmed. But some valuable information came through that process, suggesting that the demand on the system is very high and that the ability of the system to respond to the needs is not there.

MCFD has spoken about creating a caregiver support network for foster parents, a kind of hub home in a community so that you can assist when there are serious behavioural issues to see if you in fact need to have someone transferred to a higher level or into a specialized or provincially mandated resource. That hasn't happened.

Again, I welcome all of these initiatives, but it's important for me as representative to come to the committee and say what is piece of paper and a plan in a meeting in an office in Victoria, and what is on the ground. We always have to consider what is on the ground and what is happening with public resources and whether or not they're going to the services that have been identified to give an assurance to the members of the Legislative Assembly that they're there.

Today I have to tell you that after that report and the acceptance of the recommendations coming to the expiry of that timeline for recommendations, what we have today falls very short of meeting my recommendation for a continuum of residential services.

My staff has visited several multiservice agencies with extensive clinical infrastructure in Ontario and Alberta. I encouraged the Ministry of Children and Families to visit some of those facilities in Alberta, and they did. I was grateful for that. They have noted the extreme difference between the depth and capacity there and here, and they note that the services in other provinces have a broader spectrum of specialized and integrated services and that youth are more easily able to flow from one service to another and transition back into the community.

The secure residential treatment is needed. Emergency stabilization is needed. Early intervention is needed — shelter resources and back into after-care and, ideally, back into a family setting. These are well established elsewhere. They are not established in British Columbia. We have to do a lot better.

A comprehensive plan with significant funding is required. I appreciate that we're in very difficult budgetary circumstances. The recent budget didn't include any special allocation for this, so I'm not sure how this is going to develop. But I do know that I must report to this committee regularly, and I will do so.

I would also note that there was, related to these issues, a civil claim brought in British Columbia by the Public Guardian and Trustee. It was filed on February 7, 2014. The Public Guardian and Trustee filed a civil claim against the province, the provincial director of child welfare, foster parents and a specific social worker regarding a child who was a subject of the report Who Protected Him?

The Public Guardian and Trustee is seeking damages for the child with respect to what the child experienced, including physical and emotional abuse; social isolation and emotional injury; deprivation of education; education, speech and language disabilities as a result of the poor standard of care; psychological impairment; severely impaired social, emotional and physical development; malnourishment.

The notice of claim, again, is before the courts. I don't know what will happen with these things. There are many of these filed every year. In any event, it does look
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at compensation for future loss of earnings, homemaking needed, pain and suffering, and other things. We have to always think of the longer view with respect to what the outcomes are for these children.

Of concern in that statement of claim, which of course I have no involvement in…. I just see it filed like anyone else. The Public Guardian and Trustee has a duty to protect the civil rights of children whose guardianship is with the state. Among the issues in that statement of claim is that British Columbia is providing an inappropriate standard of residential services to children — to this child.

Whether that applies more widely is a serious issue. Certainly from my perspective…. I'm not going to comment on issues of liability; as I say, they're before the court. My issue is that we need to get these services there so we can do the right thing for children and youth who need these services today. We have a dramatic service gap in this field.

It's my obligation to come back and report to you on whether or not the progress is being made. Today on this difficult issue I'm coming back to say that the progress has not been made. I regret that I seem to be the sort of Dr. Kevorkian of the Legislative Assembly that comes with the bad news. In any event, I'm coming back to tell you the bad news is…. The work of this committee is extremely important. That's the good part. The bad news is: we didn't make progress.

We have not made progress on this key area, and I am concerned, particularly at a time when we're worried about the public treasury, about what the longer-term costs of that will be and whether or not there has been a sufficient analysis of the costs and benefits. Are we just deferring the cost to another generation of British Columbians because we won't be providing services and some people will be profoundly harmed?

I've seen this in other jurisdictions, and sadly, it is not the way to go. I've taken that very strong position as representative to say to those who are responsible — in the health care system, in the child welfare and MCFD system and policing and elsewhere. We have to do the right thing. We shouldn't do the wrong thing and pay for it later, because it will not help.

A couple of final points, and I'm happy to answer any questions or engage on these important issues. Just an update on interprovincial cases. The committee members know I released a report called Out of Sight, about an aboriginal child transferred to the province of Saskatchewan, where she was abused. I just wanted to give a quick touchdown.

First of all, with respect to that child, because it's always important that we keep a focus on how children are doing. The child now has an adoption plan. I'm glad to see that there's been some progress around dealing with permanency for that child. Some of that child's family still lives in British Columbia, so it's important that we follow this and make sure that, although there's an adoption plan, the child will know who their family is.

Following that special report, MCFD determined that there were other children who were transferred to other provinces, still under their guardianship, that they had lost contact with, including for quite some period of time. Although these children were lost to the system…. And I wasn't surprised they were, because that one province, Saskatchewan, where we actually drilled down and looked…. We haven't really drilled down and looked at all of the other provinces, probably because the work's too significant.

Nevertheless, MCFD, to their full credit — the provincial director's office — sent staff to see the children, to reconnect with them. They're now youth. Of course, the young people were surprised to find out that they were still actually wards of the province of British Columbia, because they had returned to living with their inappropriate caregiver, particularly their parent who was involved in extensive criminal activity.

In any event, I think it that it was still a pleasant visit to find out that they were wards of British Columbia and that there was someone at least paying attention and checking in on them at least ten years after the fact that they'd been transferred without any follow-up.

I just make note of that to say I give full credit to the provincial director's office at the Ministry for Children and Families for coming to grips with it. But more importantly, the provincial director of child welfare for B.C. and the provincial director of child welfare for Saskatchewan have looked very seriously at this issue of interprovincial transfers. I'm hoping that they will have a new protocol that will be a national protocol.

I plan to meet with the provincial and territorial directors of child welfare to follow up on my recommendation and to look at the protocol and encourage them to come forward with it, particularly as it pertains to British Columbia children, and I also will encourage my colleagues, the advocates from other provinces, to take a strong interest. They don't all have a strong child welfare mandate, but I am encouraging them to take a very strong interest in this. So that's a positive thing.

The final item is that in late spring I plan to release a report that will provide members of the Legislature and the public with an analysis of the recommendations I have made in reports that were released from 2008 to the end of 2013. I will also report on where I feel the government is in response to those recommendations. So I will prepare what I call a recommendations report.

It will address the types of services that have flowed from these reports and these recommendations, the themes of the recommendations and the types of actions that have occurred, the responses, and so forth. This will be important to inform the public and inform future consideration of recommendations, and I'm hoping it will be
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helpful to the committee to track and follow recommendations. It's also important because we don't want to be repeating the same recommendations.

I'm driven to this because, as you know, the report I gave just this morning on domestic violence…. I anticipate that until we have an effective plan on domestic violence, I probably will continue to make the same recommendation. How many protective orders? Are they effectively serving children and families? Are there prosecutions for breaches of those orders? How many of them? Are they improving? Are they working? Are they effective? Some of those basic issues we will continue to come back to. So the recommendations report will help you and the public track them.

Now, in many ways, the work of observing and overseeing services to vulnerable citizens requires us to make recommendations, track them, and sometimes it does take a long time. I think I have said to this committee before that those who research change in social service institutions…. There are many theories, but those who have effectively researched it, like the Casey Family foundation and others, find that it often takes between five, six years to see effective and meaningful change on the ground when it comes to social policy. It doesn't happen easily, and that's a difficult thing, but we have to see it happening. It can't be glacial, where we're seeing it 14, 15 years later.

Certainly, some of the recommendations I'll report to you on are areas where, for instance, I've asked the government to collect and report public information, such as: are there the required three or four face contacts, in-face, in-person contacts, with the child in care by the guardianship social worker every year? I've asked for that for six years. It's inexcusable, after six years, that they can't report on that, but it may not be inexcusable that they haven't been able to meet all of the needs of those children in various domains where they're working with the school system and others.

Some of those recommendations are easily achieved. Some of them are more difficult. And ones that require addressing the drift in the foster care system, appropriate residential services and other things around collaboration with the education and justice system…. These do take time. So no one should be under any illusion that it's easy. Some of them are easier than others, and that's important for members of this committee to understand and assess.

So that recommendations report will be provided to you, really, in the spirit of being able to put that forward and say: "Here's the body of work. Here are the recommendations. Here's where we are."

Not surprisingly, I'm sure the ministries will have their own views of where they are with them, and quite often they forget them. I'm not individually attributing anything, but not too long ago I had a meeting with government representatives on how the complaints process is going — when members of the public have a complaint, whether they are caregivers or children, and the complaints process in the Ministry for Children and Families. They seem to have forgotten that the Ombudsman's office and my office did a report specifically on that issue, so it was valuable to remind them of that and remind them of the recommendations.

These are areas where we have to keep them at the forefront of planning, because the culture of organizations that have been under oversight and scrutiny — it's a difficult environment to work in. I respect the Ministry of Children and Families. I want to support them to be successful. I am not in an opposition role to the Ministry of Children and Families. We want them to do their work, but part of it requires being open and transparent, addressing deep issues, looking at accountabilities for that and bringing them out in the public. That can be a difficult process.

Cultures of some organizations, when faced with that kind of oversight, will just keep doing what they've been doing for a long time and just keep their heads down. They have to put the head up. They have to face the issues and do something differently.

Certainly, I can say that as I prepare that recommendation report, I have a lot of confidence in the individuals who are providing leadership in the Ministry of Children and Families, that we are talking about the same issues, that we are talking about the same themes. There is strength there.

I'm not in the position that I've been in before to say I'm not confident that the issues are being identified. They are being identified, but the work has to happen. Progress has to be seen, and progress is not having a meeting discussing the problem. Progress is meeting the needs of children and families. My focus is particularly on the children and the youth.

As I said, with respect to some of the WorkSafe issues, worker safety and child safety are connected, but what about the children? That will be my primary concern.

I'll end it there in terms of the update. You will see that recommendations report coming forward. You will see a few other items that I've talked to you about before.

A report on transitioning out of care will be coming out, looking at the services and others for those who transition out of care. We will have a review of MCFD's adoptions program coming out. That will allow us to look at this entire service area around adoption. We've had a very good collaboration with the ministry on that. We have an investigation of a critical injury of a child that will be coming out in the context of parental addictions, which will look at many of the issues around addictions.

I'll pause there and entertain any questions that you might have about the general work of the office.

M. Karagianis: Mary Ellen, I was in discussion with
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the minister in estimates about the domestic violence program. One of my concerns was that the office of domestic violence rests with the Ministry of Children and Families, but all of the services are distributed among various ministries from Justice to Health to wherever.

It seemed to me to be a very cumbersome model, that the office and staff and resources rested with MCFD but in fact the oversight, accountability and responsibility were distributed elsewhere.

Do you have any views on that? I don't understand why that model was constructed that way, and I'd be interested in your views on it, especially given your observations here around domestic violence programs and how this might roll out over the next few years.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, first of all, I know the office was created as a result of the report into the deaths of the Schoenborn children. I was very appreciative that the office was created. Again, it's a small office with a small budget. The idea was to develop a more detailed plan with more significant resources, focus and accountabilities across government.

I give full credit to those who have worked in that office, I think quite tirelessly. They've done a good job at mapping. In fact, they've shared with me extensively and briefed me monthly on mapping services. In many instances the briefing binders around the mapping show completely empty gaps. They've worked really hard to do that and see what's there on the ground and provide that illumination across the system. I'm grateful for that.

I think it's important that we have an office of domestic violence and that we promote an effective plan. Where is it located? I want it to be a cross-ministry office that has the type of accountability and authority to be able to report. I wanted an office like that to report, for instance, every year on what's happening. They have put out some reports, but the reports are more progress on planning.

Very basic issues like: what is the wait-list in terms of transition housing? What is the wait-list around shelters? How many shelters are there in First Nations communities, for instance?

There are 204 First Nations Communities. How many exist? Where do the women, primarily, from those communities go? What are the numbers? I just want the basics, someone to take the leadership to do that.

I think that that office has not been able to produce that yet. I'm just saying "yet." I wouldn't like to see that office shut down. I think it's important.

When I look at Ontario, where they've had this work from 2004 to 2012, they have actually done pretty impressive work. I've participated in their meetings. I've seen where they bring all the chiefs of police, the leads of their domestic violence units together with their court officials, with their social workers, with their emergency room health care providers.

They have located their domestic violence work in their Ontario Women's Directorate, because they've had a stable women's ministry. I know we haven't always had a women's ministry in British Columbia. This is a source of debate. Should we have one? Should we not have one?

I think that locating that office of domestic violence in the Ministry of Children and Families was the smart thing to do around the Schoenborn report, to keep a good lens on children. I think the Ministry of Children and Families did some very good work. They have improved their policies. They have improved their legislation, but I think you're entirely correct in your analysis, which is that the broader justice response — meaning prosecutions, policing, victim services and, to some extent, housing and others — hasn't been as strong.

Even on a level of coordination, there have been multiple positive announcements where the federal government has come into British Columbia and funded victim support programs, particularly in the immigrant-refugee area. Good, important work has been done, but it's not integrated and coordinated, and that concerns me.

On the Justice side, I haven't got the answers. I expect to see something, but the model is still fractured. It's an office that has been somewhat isolated from the justice system, and the justice accountabilities are not strong enough.

Certainly, to have in the plan…. The plan says: "We will consider establishing domestic violence courts." Excuse me — consider it? It's in every other jurisdiction, where they've had success. The idea that you're only considering it all of these multiple years later strikes me as rather odd. What are we going to do instead? Just let people go, and then withdraw their charges because there's no appropriate control over the alleged perpetrator or support for the victim? These are very serious issues.

I will continue to advocate with the Justice Minister and others, but I think that office needs more strength and profile. I think it needs some more resources as well — resources into these services.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Mary Ellen, for the update. I want to speak as well about residential services and ask a couple of questions but also express my frustration.

I have just finished estimates, as my colleague said, and these were questions we asked in July of the ministry. We then followed up again this past week around the beds that have been promised and committed to. They were committed to by the ministry back in July — additional beds at Maples, additional regional beds, as you pointed out, Mary Ellen.

I think there are a couple of key points there: that the beds haven't happened and that there's been no timeline. I think just as importantly, from my perspective…. This is where I have a question, around the resources.

The minister admitted there were zero resources —
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zero resources for additional beds at Maples, zero resources for additional residential beds that the ministry claims will be in place in the fall. The argument from the minister and the ministry was that they will save resources by moving people from specialized beds or from an expensive facility like Maples into regional beds that will be more cost-effective.

I think to your point around when good programs are put in place those beds become full because there's a lack of services and a lack of supports out there already, we will not end up with empty beds or closed beds. We will end up with a bigger demand and people who are on wait-lists hopefully getting into programs and services. It's certainly the way I see it. I'd be interested in your thoughts around resources and whether you've had any discussion with the ministry about where these resources are coming from.

The other piece is the foster home hub that you mentioned. Again, I think it's an interesting proposal. I think it's an interesting idea, but I have a huge concern that the approach from the ministry seems to be pulling specialized foster parents, very experienced foster parents, out of the foster care system to be mentors.

A great approach to ensure that you have mentors but, again, if you take those specialized and experienced foster parents out of the system, you're then causing a shortage when it comes to beds and to people who have experience as foster parents at a time when we have difficulty recruiting foster parents and specialized foster parents. That's another piece that I'm very concerned about.

Then just the last piece to touch on. The other area that the ministry has estimated over this next number of years is a drop in the number of children in care. That is one of their assumptions in the budget: that there will be a drop in the number of children in care. And I question that. I question that number. I question where those statistics are coming from.

Certainly, the difficult economic times…. The complexity of the children coming into care seems to be higher. The minister admitted that. It seems to me that would raise the number of children and raise the cost of residential care — not dropping and not seeing a gap there. I'd be interested in your comments around that as well.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, first of all, thank you for the question. I'll address the hub issue.

The ministry got interested in the foster care hub model because the federation of social serving agencies really brought it forward. Those who provide residential services really wanted something stronger. Often foster parents, who are treated as independent contractors and not allowed to talk to each other…. There are all kinds of other issues where they had been quite concerned about their lack of ability to cooperate, collaborate and speak about what they're facing.

I have to say that there are different issues here. There's protecting the privacy of young people and children. That's very important. There's an obvious need for foster parents, when they're having a child with significant behavioural issues or trauma, to be able to collaborate with someone else who's in their shoes, who can give them resources and expertise. But also, that's not a substitute for a real assessment and treatment and appropriate planning for a child. There are multiple layers here.

The hub model came out of Washington State, which is the hub and spoke model. Washington State went through a dramatic investment in improvement in its child welfare system as a result of settling a class action, the Braam settlement. They recently exited the Braam settlement after being under court supervision for approximately seven years. Part of the supervision required them to appropriately invest in residential services and create a model.

Unfortunately, we're probably 20 years behind them. You can't go to something like Washington State and say, "We like their hub model; we'll bring it to British Columbia," but you didn't do everything else that's with it.

Yes, we will have some foster parents — that are mature and experienced and have a magical ability, sometimes, and just incredible commitment to children and are able to see them through major issues — that can coordinate with each other. But that's not a system of care. It is a good thing, but it's not a system of care, and you have to look at the whole thing.

When you look at the Braam settlement… I mean, even the caseload — it's 18. The caseloads are 18. A guardianship worker has even a smaller caseload if it's in intensive needs. They may only have ten on their caseload. The whole issue is mandated to have some requirements built in that had to be reported on all the time. We are not there in British Columbia.

The hub model is not a bad model. It's just that I am always concerned about pushing onto foster parents, for instance, the responsibility for these issues. Even the foster parents, very experienced foster parents who provide leadership and may even be running small group homes…. It's not uncommon for them to be in touch with our office and say: "How do we get Johnny into Children's Hospital?" or "How do we get Johnny into the Maples?"

We do have these provincially mandated resources. Children's Hospital has some unique beds, psychiatric beds in particular, when there are major conduct issues. The Maples is there. But they don't know how to get them in. The MCFD doesn't seem to have a pathway in. The health care system doesn't have a pathway in. The school system doesn't have a pathway in. How is the pathway in? There is no pathway. That's the problem.

You can have a hub model, but you're still going to have the experienced person in the hub saying: "I don't know how to get…. I don't want this child to go out on
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the street and then be drifting through the foster care system. I want them to be stabilized and supported, but I don't know how to work the system."

The system problems will not be repaired until we deal with these multiple issues. Absolutely, there have to be resources. At this point, I appreciate, the government says it doesn't have any resources. But without resources, we won't fix the issue. So we are in a bit of a powder keg. We continue to be in a bit of a powder keg, but we don't have to look too far to see what happens when you don't fix them. Things will find a way of coming back and costing you. That's my theme.

On the other issue, about the declining number of children in care, I saw that projection with respect to the service planning and budget for the Ministry of Children and Families. The ministry counts on the number of children in care aging out, in particular.

How stable is that? First of all, our demographic boom is picking up again. We had a decline. We have a boom, maybe not on south Vancouver Island, where there's a different demographic, but in the province.

The idea of how sustainable that is…. I remain skeptical about those numbers for two reasons: No. 1, you can't predict with a lot of stability what will happen, and No. 2, broader social trends. You have to look at the broader social trends.

First of all, we experienced a significant economic downturn, particularly around 2008-2009, and we didn't have an increase in support for Ministry of Children and Families. I think we've pioneered some new child welfare approaches. I'm not sure they're all working. I have to assess those. I don't accept them at face value until I assess them.

We have differential response, which is that we're going to work with families. And we should work with families. But the office that gets the phone call from the kid saying: "My mom's an active addict. The boyfriend is here every week and beating her up. I want out of this house. The ministry won't remove me…."

So I'm also seeing it from another perspective, which is the children saying: "We can't live in this situation." I see it from a slightly different perspective, and then when I see those sort of policies of family preservation at all costs…. Yes, the CICs might go down, but is it the right thing to do? We have to look at these new approaches in child welfare.

Of course, a child should only be removed as a last resort. But I think that we are probably fooling ourselves if we think, particularly with some of our issues around these big issues….

Parental addictions. If we're going to have greater access, for instance, to alcohol, I think we're probably going to have greater access to family dysfunction. For those who have problematic drinking, if they're going to have freer access to alcohol in British Columbia, we can probably count on the fact there are going to be more reports to the Ministry of Children and Families.

I don't think the Ministry of Children and Families provided any brief on the idea of liberalizing access to alcohol. They certainly didn't. I've asked for it, and they didn't have anything. If they did, I doubt they would recommend it, because parental addictions is a big area, as is parental mental health, as is domestic violence. I don't see any of those issues coming down.

On the CICs, I'd like to think we can safely place people with relatives, but then we need to invest in a better kinship program. The money has to go somewhere.

The budget projection. It's their financial projection. Whether or not it actually reflects the need, I'm not sure. I really look at levels of maltreatment, reported incidents of maltreatment and how the ministry responds to that maltreatment.

D. Plecas: Mary Ellen, thank you again for another heart-wrenching report. Your reports always give us reason for serious thought and action.

One of the things that you called attention to was the differences in our responses to domestic violence in B.C. versus other jurisdictions. Do you know to what extent any other jurisdiction has been able to be more successful in reducing the incidence of domestic violence than we have in B.C.? Remembering that it doesn't appear as though we have in B.C., but has anybody done better?

M. Turpel-Lafond: From what I have seen in the evaluation, and I will have the opportunity…. I know that you're chairing a panel on looking at violence in British Columbia, and I welcome that…. I've been following the work of the panel that you've been engaged in and touring the province, and I will have a chance to speak specifically to that issue, I think, with the panel, because this is the key concern of mine.

I've looked at, for instance, initiatives that have been piloted and operated for a period of time in other provinces, such as domestic violence, specialized courts with strong victim service involvement.

What we see as a hallmark of improvement is retention of the participation of the victim, reduction in the recurrence of violence in that family. In terms of working with low-risk perpetrators — there's not a lot of programming for high-risk perpetrators — we see some real success there.

We don't really have a program in British Columbia to work with perpetrators of violence. They're very minor and small — and I'm sure your committee will look at that — compared to, for instance, other provinces that have pretty extensive collaborative programs. Also, we don't have a very strong aboriginal component to our programs.

I'm not saying…. Because of the intergenerational issues for aboriginal communities and families, both on
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and off reserve, these are major concerns, and there are big service gaps.

Other provinces like — I flagged Alberta — Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario are more active with respect to that in terms of having justice committees, police committees, family violence initiatives, but also court-affiliated.

The evaluation of those has demonstrated some success, and certainly, that did inform the recommendations that I made in the Schoenborn report and in the Christian Lee report. I did share all of that evidence and information with the government to encourage them. When Mr. Cowper did his review of the justice system in B.C., amongst his recommendations he made was to work more effectively on the domestic violence issue in terms of regular reduction of violence.

I think that the evidence is quite strong. British Columbia can do better. The problem is that you have to actually do something to make that happen, and the type of collaboration that's required means not just getting it out of the system but actually having the court system, police, prosecutions, victim services work more closely together.

Keeping the victim involved in the process is crucial — even if at the end there's a stay of proceedings, maintain the participation of the victim. We continue to have a problem in British Columbia where victims walk away, and that's not safety. We can't say: "Oh, there really wasn't a crime. There wasn't an offence." There was violence. It's just they walk away because they can't get in, be treated well, and we can't resolve these things effectively.

We will deal with what we put a priority on dealing with. If we put a priority on road safety, we will deal with road safety. If we put a priority on violence in familial and interpersonal relationships, we will deal with it.

I'll speak more about it when I get a chance to speak to the panel, but this is a critical area around the maltreatment of children. It's really one of the most important things that we can do across government and in the justice system. We want to prevent tragedies, but we also remember those tragedies are the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it is the daily dose of aggression and violence, where we're not getting in and resolving it.

D. Plecas: Mary Ellen, a second question I had related to your noting of the importance of thinking of action that we might take as an investment. Just wondering if you were aware of any particular studies that show exactly how much money we would save by taking action on the kinds of things you're talking about.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I've seen some particular economic models that have been developed with respect to certain types of individuals, if you like. For instance, there has been some good modelling by the Public Health Agency of Canada around children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders — how we can model serving them effectively versus allowing them to go through the criminal justice, foster care system. I've seen models around social-serving issues and agencies and different types of individuals who are vulnerable and have high needs.

I think the challenge with respect to the area that we're working in, in terms of services to children, is that we have a very expensive response already which is called the child welfare system. It's needed; it's important for safety. But when we see the same presenting issues with families, we have to have a different approach.

I think some of the economic modelling is important. But I do have a serious concern, which is that if we don't adequately address some of the service gaps and meet the duty of care that we have, the issues around liability for that. There is liability. So not understanding and managing your risk….

Government has to understand and manage its risk. There's needed fiscal prudence around this risk. I appreciate that's not necessarily the Ministry of Children and Families, but I'm not necessarily confident that the Ministry of Children and Families identifies it — so in finance they can see the risk that they're facing. I would suggest it's a bit of an abyss when we look at what's happened in, say, ten states in the U.S., because the financial risk has been significant.

My view is: let's have healthy, productive, supported citizens, not an outcome which is otherwise and have that type of civil liability.

These are sensitive issues. There will always be civil liability, because any institution may involve mistakes and rogue people that work in them.

We saw that not too long ago in British Columbia when we saw that someone with a significant criminal record from another jurisdiction was employed as a child care provider for a child in a resource in British Columbia. The child wasn't harmed, to my knowledge, and I was pleased about that, but how did that person become employed? These are issues where you have to have safety, but things can happen. Even in the best systems, things can happen. But when you know things are happening more routinely and you're not meeting that standard of care, that is where the risk assessment has to be done.

It's not my bailiwick as representative, but I do certainly bring it forward to say: please be mindful of the fact that there is a cost of not doing something. If you decide you won't provide intensive support beds for those who have serious behavioural challenges, either because there are mental health issues, there's been trauma, there's been abuse and they're in a community, someone will be harmed, including…. If you're putting them in a plywood room, they're probably going to be harmed.

Perhaps someone has done a fiscal analysis and said: "Well, that's still cheaper for us than the other way." I hope
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not, because that would be extremely distasteful — to look at things that way — but I haven't seen that.

D. Barnett: I think you've answered my question, but one of the ways that I think we can, hopefully, accomplish some of the goals that you have just discussed is in working with the Blue Ribbon Panel. I've had the opportunity of having the Blue Ribbon Panel in my community, in our First Nations communities, and there's been a lot of great work done through that committee to date, I really believe. I really hope that there's ongoing collaboration with you and with the Blue Ribbon Panel, and I would look forward to seeing that report.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I would just say that I'm in full agreement with that. I know we're probably going to take a break. I'll discuss the report today, because that really does reveal many of the criminal justice issues as well about safety and needing to have safety understood from a community perspective so that children, if they disclose abuse, can be safe. I think that that's crucial, so I look forward to the work of the panel.

Of course, people who can innovate and effect important change, looking at the big issues for children…. As I say, I continually come back to the committee to say that services have to reflect the fact that we have needs. They're not manufactured. They're real, and you have to have real services on the ground. We have to be confident that the people who are mandated and funded to provide services, whether they're in government or in community agencies, are actually there doing the work, which means we need regular evaluation and accountability.

This is another crucial, crucial issue. Again, sometimes the perspective is: "Well, we'll send money out to a community agency to do…." We have got to make sure that their doors are open, and they're doing the work and that the people are coordinated and trained and supported and that we keep that….

I know that much good work does happen, but unfortunately, sometimes in my work I find areas where services do not occur. That is also a financial concern to me. Why are we sending money out if services aren't there? Let's make sure there is. That child has that right to get that service. If we have to rethink how we deliver services to make it more individualized around the needs of children and families, fine. I'm all for that. But we have to make sure that it goes there.

I'm not saying there's rampant waste in the system. I'm just saying we have to have that regular accountability. The Ministry of Children and Families has to speak with confidence regularly to the public, and to myself as the oversight, about what it's accomplishing for that expenditure in response to these specific issues. The pressure of oversight on the Ministry of Children and Families is still needed today, and we have to keep that going. We're not there yet. Although I'm confident that there's some very strong leadership there, we have to get the work done.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I have a question before…. Perhaps we'll take a little break before we move into the other topic.

My question is with regards to your comment on the upcoming report on the recommendations of previous reports and the status. Many of the report recommendations indicate that responsibilities must occur outside MCFD. I'm just wondering if, when this report becomes public, there is a recognition that not everything that is recommended in these reports is the responsibility of MCFD. And it's not just MCFD and the provincial government — obviously, there's Justice and Health, etc. — but there are other governments. There's the federal government. There are First Nations responsibilities. There are other provinces.

I know that when we get the ministry reporting back to us on the status of recommendations, they pretty much accept all of the recommendations, but they don't have control over all of the recommendation implementation. I'm wondering if you're going to make sure that the public understands that.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I absolutely will. That's a very significant issue, and particularly on the federal-provincial side it's important. What I can measure and what I can look at, and often my recommendations are framed like this, is: how robust has the province been in engaging the federal government, for instance, in addressing the issues?

Is it simply that the minister writes a letter once a year, the same letter every single year, saying: "Oh, by the way, I'm very concerned about all the terrible things you're doing in the federal government"? Or are senior officials in the ministry actually sitting down with their counterparts and really working on the issues and rolling up their sleeves?

Yes, there are other governments, but like anything, the obligation of leadership is actually to collaborate, work together.

I did a particularly difficult report, I know, in November, When Talk Trumped Service, about the failure of aboriginal governance in British Columbia. I think people are still digesting that report at the federal level and the provincial level, and we will be talking about that much more. But it certainly spoke to what wasn't happening. What wasn't happening was a real transparent process around improving child welfare for aboriginal children.

Just on that point alone, I can say that the ministry, after that report, did its part and stopped funding, if you
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like — or ended, grandfathered, sunsetted — many of these agreements that they had, some of which had no contract basis at all. They put out a procurement process. I understand they got about 52 responses to the procurement process that they're doing. I'll be following that very closely.

I mean, first of all, it's not even about if they can collaborate with other governments, and I'll be looking at whether they can even run a procurement process. Are people interfering in a procurement process? Are there people calling them everyday saying, "Where's my money; where's my money," including other ministers or senior bureaucrats? Or are they running a fair process? These are things that will have to be looked at.

Yes, there are other governments, there are other things, but it's the culture and perspective of the Ministry of Children and Families and the government of British Columbia that are crucial around this. When issues do cut across multiple ministries, you have to be able to show that ability to get things done.

I think it was Premier Campbell, when he was Premier of British Columbia, who would frequently say: "If there are two people responsible, there is no single accountability." If it's going to be child and youth mental health, tell me who's responsible, and that person has to take it forward.

Yes, I will look at that, but I think that the practicality around public administration is that someone has to step forward and take responsibility. It can't be: "Oh, it's not me. It's this other ministry." We all know that we have fractured and divided responsibilities, so how are we going to work around that? I think that's the creative dynamic that's needed to address some of these issues.

We saw this over the years with the Community Living B.C. file, where it would just be constantly punted from one ministry to the other. It has started, I think, to stabilize. I can report that we've done some very good work, and I've seen some real improvement there. But it certainly was indicative of an approach which is to just keep moving it around, and no one ever sort of understands who's responsible. Then you have to finally pin it down and get working.

I will be able to assess some of that, but you're right. It's bigger than just the Ministry of Children and Families, but they have to know how to work with others as well.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you very much, Mary Ellen. Do you want to take a brief break, or do you want to just motor on?

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): A little break. Can we take five minutes? Then we'll come back and start with the report.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Okay, everyone. Thank you very much for your attention and coming back quickly. We're resuming our reports from the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth. Mary Ellen will begin her item on the investigative report Lost in the Shadows: How a Lack of Help Meant a Loss of Hope for One First Nations Girl.

Representative for Children
and Youth Report:
Lost in the Shadows: How a Lack of Help
Meant a Loss of Hope for
One First Nations Girl

M. Turpel-Lafond: Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thank you for that break.

This report was released in February, and I'm very grateful for the fact that we're discussing it in March. I think I said at the last committee hearing that we're not only caught up — credit to you, Chair, and Deputy Chair — on business, but we're getting closer to being able to release the reports and, literally within a month, bring them forward. That's extremely positive. Thank you so much for making yourself available during a busy session for us to be able to do this.

A couple of things, with respect to the report, just to flag as I go through it. The timeline for what happened to this child appears on pages 16 and 17 of the report. As I am presenting, if you want to turn to that if you have it in front of you, it's probably helpful. I know you've all had a chance to read it, but it is very important that we have a chance to go through it on the record.

This is a difficult case, as are many cases affecting children who require support. It's often very hard to learn about the degree of difficulty and suffering that a child has experienced, and this young girl in particular had multiple challenges in her life.

I think the first thing I want to say is that she showed a lot of resilience despite what she went through — up until a certain point. I think we really need to think and reflect upon that — what we can learn from it. There's a lot to learn.

As I said before, I was really delighted that the Chief of this young girl's community is here, and they were also very supportive during this.

Recognize that while this is one case, it does speak to some issues that are more systemic, and it does speak to some issues that might, in fact, be provincewide around how the child welfare system does its work or doesn't do its work, how the justice system and how the school system work.
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More importantly, the lens I'd really like to bring to this and I'd like you to think about it from is the perspective of: what was the child's life like? What was the child living with? What was she experiencing? What was in front of her?

We always have to have a perspective around the best interests of the child. And what do we think in British Columbia about what should happen for a child when there are concerns, when there's a parent with mental illness, if there is sex abuse, if there is violence in the family? We always have to think: what is it that we would like to do to be effective to support that child?

I think British Columbians are quite united that we want to make sure that we're there to support children to have their best possible opportunities to grow and develop and that there's no part of British Columbia where we think that because someone is of this background or that background or lives in this region they should have a different standard. So just that lens of the child's life is a really important lens.

The girl that's the focus of this report was 14 years old when she hung herself in her grandparents' front yard on the reserve. The community is a rural reserve. It isn't a remote reserve. It's a rural reserve. It's quite likely that her younger sister witnessed her hanging herself, and certainly witnessed when the grandparents returned home and found her and others attended and removed her.

There's no question that the family, the sibling and the community have suffered greatly. The grandparents have suffered greatly as well. Certainly, though, no one suffered as much as the girl did herself prior to taking her own life, and I think this has to be emphasized.

We certainly have to ask ourselves when we look at these cases: what did British Columbia lose by this child's decision? What might have happened in the life of this child to make things different, and what might have contributed to her decision on that fateful day, at 14 years old, to hang herself? What can we learn to prevent this again? It's very important, when we look at deaths and individual cases, that we do put them in a context.

Certainly, even in the very best of systems it is not possible to prevent suicide. When we talk about suicides in particular, it's a unique area. Even in the best systems with strong mental health supports and strong child welfare systems, tragedies can occur. However, we always need to look at those to say: "Is this one of those cases where despite the best efforts, this happened? Despite a strong system, this happened?" Or is this a case where something could have been done differently?

Clearly, you will see from reading this report that this was a case where something — many things — could have been done differently. It isn't one of those cases of an otherwise strong system and something happened out of character, sudden and without expectation.

With all of our investigative reports, and this one in particular, the goal was to determine what might have been happening in this girl's life with her family and her community and what happened to meet her needs and to look more widely at the services that might have been there on the ground. I frequently like to speak about the concept of a footprint of services. I like that expression "footprint" because of the idea of what's really there in the community.

As we were speaking about before the break, sometimes in the world of officialdom and public administration, people think that there are these services — a health care system and a child welfare system — and that all of these things are about systems. I'm talking about just the footprint of what is on the ground in the life of a child that plays a positive role to help them when they struggle. Obviously, family is the front line, school, the health care system, the child welfare system.

This child had a lot of benefits. She was being raised in a close-knit community, a First Nations community. Being raised by grandparents, particularly in the First Nations and in the Chilcotin tradition…. It's a very respected thing to be raised by grandparents and to be supported. There's a lot of strength for her in her community and in her environment.

However, we're also dealing with a family that is dealing with the fallout from residential school and is feeling very protective in terms of discussing and revealing what might be happening in their family, not wanting to talk about issues in the family.

Just as, for instance, in the residential school process, it has taken many, many years for those who were the graduates of the residential school system to speak publicly about the emotional, physical and sexual abuse they experienced in the system, it is still taking many years for them to talk about what's happening in their families as a result.

We have to be mindful of the fact that there are currents at play that both provide strengths and provide challenges — "provide challenges" meaning families and grandparents are going to need support. We know that parents and grandparents who have experienced residential school isolation, poverty and abuse will need support and that we have to be there to support them. So that's a known.

Could other children be impacted by what we learned from this child? I think it's fair to say other children are impacted by what we've learned from this child's life and her untimely and sad death at her own hand. Our recommendations really are directed and informed in that way.

I have received clear correspondence from MCFD that they've accepted all the recommendations in this report, and I'm very encouraged by that. But apropos our earlier discussion, accepting a recommendation and addressing it is another matter. We will be focusing very closely on that. But full credit that they accept that.

A couple of issues, though. I'm very grateful, and I'm
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certainly not saying this from any sour perspective but just point of fact for the committee. This child's death was never reviewed by the Ministry of Children and Families because it was found not to meet the requirement to review: namely, there was probably not much to learn from it. That's a concern to me. We have to make sure. How could one possibly let this pass without reviewing it?

Secondly, the services provided by the coroner's office were a concern to me, and I've related those concerns to the coroner. It took a full year to receive a report from the coroner, and the report included no recommendations. It's hard to understand how someone on the ground could look at what this child went through and not have a single recommendation, including to the health professionals who were engaged with her and her mother. I was very concerned about the fact that it took a full year with nothing recommended. I have shared those concerns with the chief coroner.

I'm also very grateful, in preparing this report, for the support of the Chief, to make his community open and make sure that we could get in and do a completely independent and thorough investigation. The Chief, like others, did not influence this report in any way. He was presented with the report, given it, briefed on it and allowed to identify if there were any errors or omissions, as is the case. But he was given it, and he didn't know what was going to be said in the report.

To his credit, he is here. He was very strong, when I briefed him on the report, to say that while there were many fingers to point about the experience of the child, he felt — although he was not the Chief at the time — great responsibility that this community had failed the child, that they could have done better.

But he also is dealing with a community where there are serious problems with running social services because there are significant structural deficits and an operation that wasn't able to provide many of the services. We'll come back to some of those issues.

In terms of those who are responsible for the child welfare system in this region, there was a delegated aboriginal agency for a period of time. There are some very serious issues — I didn't go into all of the details in this report — with that agency, including that six years of records are gone. They have no record of six years of their operation.

They were delegated by the federal aboriginal affairs ministry, then DIAND, and they were delegated by the provincial Ministry of Children and Families to do delegated work in the child welfare system, yet they don't have a single record and no person who can speak to what they did.

They received an annual budget. They were doing something, and I'm sure they were probably doing something good. But in this instance, there is not a single record.

That agency has recently been redelegated, but actually, we found out that for a number of years they were still delegated. The Ministry of Children of Families still had them as doing delegated work, as did aboriginal affairs, yet they were negotiating a new delegation agreement because they didn't even realize they were delegated.

Now, this is unacceptable. This is such a low level of compliance with the CF and CSA that it is beyond unconscionable that you would not even know. They had an unlimited delegation agreement that didn't expire at any time.

In the context of this investigation, as you can imagine, we had many bureaucratic tussles about: "Well, but you are delegated." "No, we're not delegated." "Yes, you are." "Point of fact: you are." "Point of fact: you're not." Until finally everybody realized, yes, in fact, they were delegated for a period of time because their agreement never expired.

This goes back to a broader issue I raised in the November report about the 24 delegated aboriginal agencies — their existence, their work. It's very important work. They're dealing with the most vulnerable populations.

A delegated agency exists because the First Nations in that region have come together and they've passed down council resolutions and have created an entity. They've met operational requirements. They are supposed to have regular audits and reviews. There is a process, but clearly the process can be abridged and ignored, and it doesn't help the children in the end if this happens.

The reason why I raise this is to say…. This is one case. It was not easy to do this investigation. Full credit to the team of investigators that is able to carry this work out, because it's quite complex and important. The system on the ground of who is responsible to deliver the system of safety to children is, by far, not clear.

Furthermore, those who were responsible for the child protection intake piece, the Ministry of Children and Families office in this location, were working under conditions that were extremely difficult, to say the least.

I've put a chart, a kind of graphic, in the report on page 71. You can see that it's just basically a picture of an office table. Of course, I don't even like to depict an office table, because I like people to be out meeting with families. I just did it pictographically to show you that there was supposed to be a complement of staff working.

There were supposed to be seven fully delegated…. "Delegated" meaning they could be delegated because they had the training required, and I'll speak a bit to the training issues. I'm sure you've seen some of the recent debates around whether a social worker is a social worker or what have you.

They were supposed to have seven fully delegated child protection workers. In 2008 they had 3.9. In 2011 they had 1.2. What happens when you don't actually have delegated staff working?
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Now, to determine this in the investigative process requires us to really look at information. Who's doing the work? Why is it that we have the one person and not the seven? Where is everyone else?

That is, in and of itself, an investigative lens that we require, and I can speak to that in detail. The high-level summary, for your benefit, is poor management of the workload in this region — poor local management, poor management by the Ministry of Children and Families.

It continues to be a concern to me as representative when we bring forward an investigation like this and well into this investigation — this is not in February 2014 — we go to the ministry and say: "We notice that you have some significant challenges meeting your child protection mandate in this area because you don't have any staff." "Well, they're on leave," or "They're coming back." No, we need to see a tool to manage this.

Around the release of the report, it's very important to understand that, unfortunately, a public report like this has to be made by an independent office to fully own that issue. Have they fully owned the issue? I'm not confident they have, because I am still engaged with service delivery area local offices of the ministry where there needs to be a more immediate response, a rapid response, by people who come in when the office can't function.

When an office can't function, because it's a child welfare function, it's not like something else where you just put it over for another day. There are timelines for a child protection investigation. You can't just put it over and never do it.

My concern with this girl's life and her services…. She's in an environment where they're dealing with some very serious issues around family violence, intergenerational abuse, recovering from a horrific residential school experience. The community is not very trusting toward government officials, and they have good reason not to be very trusting. They've had a very poor history of relationships with outsiders. Certainly, they have some very serious concerns there around dealing with their lands and resources and other things.

The people are resistant to engaging because they've really been very harmed by people, yet we need to have an approach in British Columbia where we get in and work with people collaboratively and cooperatively. Certainly, every piece of paper put out by the Ministry for Children and Families doesn't say: "Don't serve vulnerable citizens." It says, "Serve them in a better and more effective way," yet we have no one there to do the serving.

There's one person serving 14 First Nations high-needs communities. To travel and do this work often requires…. One case is going to take a whole day. They've got to travel there. There may not be cell phone service. There are safety issues for workers. They are frequently travelling alone.

As anyone who does this work knows, it's very hard work, and I'm very respectful to the people on the front lines that do this work. It is not easy to attend, to look at how a child is doing in any location, whether it's downtown Vancouver or whether it's in a rural or remote location, to have to knock on a door and be a surprise visit, if you like, and say: "I'm here to see what's going on." You may be met with a lot of hostility. It might be very aggressive, and if you're a young worker, for instance, travelling alone without cell phone service and so on, it's very awkward.

In point of fact, for some of the staff the first thing they would do is say, "Can I use your phone?" and call back to say they had arrived at that home because there's no cell phone service and, I think, just to say, "I'm here, in case I don't come back," because they're quite concerned about their safety.

I'm not saying that this is a completely unsafe community, but these are not people who people are happy to see because, again, there has been a history in terms of removing aboriginal children. They're not necessarily there to remove, but there are serious safety issues. So the staff is under a lot of pressure.

For a period of time…. As I say, the delegated aboriginal agency is supposed to bridge that and build that, but it's not working. It's not functioning, so things fester for years. As a result, this child and possibly many others like her — I'm not saying there are others where there have been suicides, but others who may have had maltreatment — are essentially left to many of their own devices to deal with their issues.

This girl had a number of challenges. First of all, she was born to a mom who had serious mental illness, causing her to behave at times in an erratic way — and, again, because of challenges within that First Nations community and everything they faced, not a very strong understanding of mental health. It isn't like there are mental health outreach workers explaining to the grandparents: "Your daughter has schizophrenia. This is a lifelong mental health condition that will require ongoing attachment to health professionals. There may be periods where she has times where she can't parent."

There's none of that. The grandparents don't understand what's happening. They feel like…. Their daughter has a child. They can't come between their daughter and the child. They'll provide backstop caregiving, if you like, and they're there to help the child, but the mother is the caregiver.

The mother has serious mental illness. Even during her pregnancy she called up the Ministry for Children and Families herself, as a pregnant young woman — she was quite young — and said: "I want to be moved to a women's shelter in another community because I'm not safe in this community." She suggested to them that she had been physically and sexually abused, and she wanted to be moved to a shelter. She wanted to have her child somewhere in another community. She wanted to give the child up for adoption because, she said: "I can't see
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my child being safely raised in the community, given what I'm facing."

There was no follow-up on her request for service. She was also, as a mother, left to cope with mental illness. People just assumed, because she didn't call back again, that she must be okay, and we can never make these assumptions.

After the child was born, the mother's mental health…. She began to decompensate. She began to experience really serious issues. She was hearing voices. The voices would tell her to snap the child's head. The voices were telling her to hurt her child.

What would regularly happen was the mother…. They were sort of living with the grandparents at times, living off the reserve in different places. Most of this child's life was with the grandparents, but the grandparents would also leave for extended periods of time. They'd go camping. They'd go into town. They'd go away, and the child would be home with mom, and mom would not be in good shape. Mom would break all the dishes in the house or become psychotic.

The child, as she got older, would lock herself in the bathroom, where the mother banged on the door and said she was going to snap her neck or would hear these voices. Occasionally the mom pulled a knife on the child. There were many, many incidents in the life of this child where she was dealing with a parent with serious mental illness.

The child herself never received any support to understand that her mother had mental health issues. It was sort of the view in the community that the mom was possessed by her spirits, if you like. The attitude toward mental health was extremely backward in terms of not having the support of a health care system.

Now, I think it's fair to say, although we don't document it all, that there were multiple threats and physical assaults on this child over the years, leading up to her 14th year when she took her own life. Again, the grandparents were loving and supportive, but they were never assessed as to whether they were appropriate to protect the child from the mother.

I can only say…. I'm the Representative for Children and Youth; I'm not the representative for grandparents. But I think also the grandparents went through a very hard time, because I would expect — I'm not speaking for them — they were assaulted regularly and all of their dishes were broken and their house was chaos and they lived with incredible concern about what was going on.

Certainly, around this investigation, I think for the first time they came to grips with the fact that their daughter has a serious illness. It's mental health, and it can be treated and supported. They tried to cope on their own.

I think that even in that First Nations community — and the Chief has told me — frequently when there are issues where there are adults with serious mental illness, sometimes the Chief has to handle it. There will be an episode, and they're the front line of the system, if you like. There isn't a big health care system or what have you. So you have a serious incident, and you have to often use the police and what have you.

In terms of this girl, she was on the radar, if you like, with respect to the system. She was living on the reserve, pretty much attending the day school, the school off the reserve. They bused the children to the reserve. In grade 1 she was assessed in school because she was showing some significant learning problems. She had serious cognitive deficits. Had she survived what she went through, she would be a child who would be eligible for CLBC services in terms of her level of IQ functioning. She had some cognitive deficits.

What's interesting is that she was assessed once, in school in grade 1, and they found that she was in the bottom 1 percentile of children on the neuropsychological assessment. That was the only assessment she ever received, but she stayed in that school right to age 14. Nobody actually took her to a pediatrician to find out: "Why do you have these delays?"

Again, this touches on what's going on in schools in British Columbia. A child presents with serious deficits. Generally, families would then be referred to a developmental pediatrician or go to Children's Hospital for an assessment.

Apropos my earlier conversation about how you get into Children's Hospital, well, certainly this family had no concept of how you get in, and no one helped them. You go to school, you get, basically, a diagnosis that you're cognitively developmentally delayed and that, and you just sit there. She was advanced every single year.

She couldn't do the work in school. She was challenged, and her behaviour definitely showed that she was struggling as she came into adolescence. Some of the teachers, at the time that she was engaging in self-harm later, said: "Well, we think she has FASD." She was never diagnosed. She never saw a pediatrician. She never had an assessment. We don't know if she'd had a form of meningitis. That could have been an effect. She could have had some therapy and support.

This child never received health care, appropriate health care that would be consistent with a child with this level of need. Certainly, the school — while at least they did assess, and they did provide a supportive environment in the sense that she was happy about school — didn't take her learning needs very seriously. There was an IEP on file, but it was many, many years before, and no one had seemed to be paying regular attention to her learning needs.

I note, though, that there are people employed by the band, by the school district and others to do this work. So I have some very strong issues, though they're not explored in this report, about whose accountability this is.

I certainly speak to the superintendent of achievement
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and to the Minister of Education and say: "I'm very concerned about how children with special needs seem to slip through the cracks. Where's the accountability for them?" I say that because many systems keeping an eye on children is important.

This child may have been able to (a) defend herself more effectively. She may have been able to (b) develop better verbal and written communication skills so that she could have told people what was happening to her.

Despite all of that, she did show a pretty feisty temperament to be able to speak up for herself. But there was really no model of care in her life — of collaboration and looking at her development.

She had what was called an expressive language delay. She spoke very little. By grade 4, she was found to be closer to an age four- or five-year-old in terms of her communication abilities. That alone is a marker for someone who would be vulnerable to maltreatment.

We certainly don't have to look very deep into the literature around who victims of sexual or physical abuse are to find out that children with language delays, that can't communicate very well, frequently will be abused, and it will not come forward.

In her later years, particularly 12 and on, as this toll of abuse and neglect she experienced mounted, she suffered from some mental health problems herself. She started to cut herself. She expressed a lot of concerns about her well-being and how she was doing. She had a lot of trouble keeping it all together.

When you think about how poorly she was cared for…. Again, I'm not pointing fingers at grandparents or anyone, but just the concept of how this child was trying to manage her life with a severe cognitive deficit without any support….

When she died, in her room was all of the material that was given. She had several dental abscesses. She was in need of emergency dental care. She was in extreme pain, this child, from dental abscesses. Yet the paperwork, where she would have required approvals to get that dental work covered so someone could be vouchered to pay for it so she would be able to be taken care of, was sitting in her room. She was managing her own care. It's probably likely she would never have received any dental care until she was in an emergency room, probably facing loss of a job because she was suffering that kind of….

Now, again I point to this because I said earlier I was disappointed that the coroner made no recommendations. The coroner knew that. Why is it that a child like this can have such severe pain, dental abscess and be managing her own care? I don't think there's a parent or caregiver in British Columbia that would find that acceptable.

Certainly, anyone knows these are emergencies with children. They can't eat. They can't grow. Their long-term health is affected. Heavens, their physical health is affected. So the type of abuse and isolation that this child experienced, including that pain, no doubt contributed very significantly to this choice that she made to end her life.

In the weeks prior to her suicide she confided in her teacher. A new teacher to the school came. She confided to the teacher that she had been forced to perform oral sex on a boy who was in the school and that this had happened four times, including at the school. Heretofore her school was probably a place of safety and comfort for her, but she had been forced, she said, to perform oral sex on a boy in the school in a locked closet.

The boy had also forced her to perform oral sex at a school, at a church and in a house on the reserve. The way in which that disclosure was handled, you'll note in the report, I find was not acceptable.

The child was interviewed. It was a relatively young…. I'm not faulting the police in any way, but it was a newer constable in the detachment who came up to the grandparents' house and asked to interview the child. They never told the grandparents that the child had disclosed sexual abuse. In fact, the grandparents only found out with this report why the police came to see the child.

Again, you have to tell yourself…. Think of the history of the community and the difficulties that they faced. It's hard to understand why a grandparent wouldn't say: "You're not taking my granddaughter into this car unless you tell me exactly what you're doing." They passively…. She went, when they didn't even know why they were questioning her in a detachment. She was taken into an interrogation room with a fully uniformed police officer who asked her a lot of questions about the sexual abuse.

The police officer wasn't fully cognizant of her cognitive delays, didn't have a support person or a proper…. There was no parent or caregiver there to deal with the fact that she had some developmental challenges. Basically, did the standard interview, which is: "Did it really happen? Did it really happen? Are you sure it happened? Are you sure you didn't consent? Are you sure you didn't consent?"

Basically, wasn't so confident she hadn't consented and didn't do a report to Crown. So the way in which the sexual abuse was handled was less than stellar with respect to the needs of a child like this. And of course, given what I've said earlier, it's really hard to see how a child with the profound dental abscesses she had would consent to oral sex in any event, let alone in a locked closet in a school. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

I'm not saying I'm an investigator, but certainly I've been a judge before and involved quite a bit in the system with vulnerable citizens. It doesn't really wash to me that a child like this would suddenly make up….

There was no consequence. If she had sex four times with this boy, no one was going to punish her for it. It wasn't as though her coming forward was because she had to hide from her deeply religious grandparents or
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something. There was no motivation. She simply came forward and said she'd been sexually abused four times. There was no investigation, really. It all ended there.

Ironically, she had seen the police as a significant support to her because, on the multiple times when she was being abused by her mother, as she got older she got to taking up the phone and calling 911 and saying: "My mother is here. I'm locked in the bathroom. My mother is going to hurt me. Please come and help." The police did respond, so the police were a very important point of response for her.

I do note, though, that probably after this sexual assault thing she wouldn't have been picking up the phone, and that may have also contributed to her thinking that there is no safety for her in the community, because that was one of her safety plans. The engagement between police and vulnerable children in a community is extremely important, and I flagged that in this case.

We have raised it. I didn't make a recommendation, but I have raised it with the RCMP to say that we need to learn from this circumstance about: "How do you handle these cases?" and "How are you trained and informed to deal with these young people?"

In the weeks prior to her suicide, her self-cutting and self-harm increased. She told the teacher. She said: "I'm going to kill myself. I'm in a very bad way." She was coming back. She was refusing to come home. She was running away from school, saying: "I don't want to go home." She was spiralling downward. She was certainly distraught.

Yet, if you look at what happened to her at school…. She had an incident where she punched in the arm the sister of the boy that she alleged had sexually assaulted her. When she punched the girl in the arm, it came to the attention of the principal, and she was suspended. Not the principal suspended — the girl who committed suicide was suspended.

If you look at anytime she brought issues forward in school, she was frequently punished for bringing these issues forward. She reports that she'd been abused. She does assault, if you like — punched — another child. Anybody around schools knows that assaults are important. You can't have this in a school. But in any event, she was punished. She was repeatedly suspended from school. In fact, I counted five suspensions, despite the fact that she was a child with significant special needs, only ever assessed once and never really supported.

Nobody actually looked at, "Are her behaviours related to her challenges?" — her expressive language challenges. "Is there some way we can build better capacity and positive behavioural supports? What's happening with this child?" She was quite severely impacted by her inability, at times, to function, and no one — no one — took charge of her situation and considered what she needed. She was singled out for punishment.

To their credit, the teacher and the school did call the Ministry of Children and Families and say: "She's in crisis." The police were called. As I say, that didn't go very far, but there were calls out. I do give them full credit for that. Yet when the police did come to interview her, the one teacher, the new teacher that she disclosed to, said to the police officer, "I think she has FASD" or "She has FASD," which the teacher should never have said, because the child was never diagnosed.

I think the teacher just said: "I'm teaching here. I see these kids. They have FASD." That may lead to someone not being believed and supported, so even how we label…. Even the fact that a teacher in B.C. could label a child, when there's no evidence that that's what they have, is a concern to me, because that colours everything around: "Is that a believable child? Should we take seriously what they say?"

This child was dealing with a lot of issues. She received no victim support, she really had no one taking charge of her care, and she was coping with very serious chaos with the mom.

What kinds of situations were happening in the health care system? Well, on numerous times the child's mother was certified under the Mental Health Act. She was in a psychotic episode frequently. In fact, at one point, mom hitchhiked from her home on the reserve, her parents' home, and went to the emergency room in the local town. She hitchhiked with the child, the two children. By this time, she had a younger sibling. Mom hitchhikes with two kids to town to be certified.

Think about what that must've been like for that child and her younger sibling to actually walk those streets, the roads — we're talking about a rural area — to wait for a car to flag down to go to an emergency room to be certified. She was in a full psychotic episode, and the mother's obsession was to actually snap the head of the child.

"Whose car…? Who's picking me up? What will happen? Will I get to the hospital, and I'm certified?"

The children were taken by the social worker at the hospital and released to the grandparents. Mom is released and goes right back, and it keeps going on — no follow-up, no report to the Ministry of Children and Families about the fact that maybe the mom isn't capable of meeting the needs of the child. The mom comes back into the home, and it goes again.

In fact, this time that she hitchhiked to town — this isn't a new thing for the health care system in that region — was two years after the same mom, her mom, had been taken to an emergency room in the same health district with an abdominal swelling. She was certified because she was fully psychotic.

The abdominal swelling turned out to be a full-term pregnancy with labour underway. She gave birth to this little girl's little sister in the psych unit, only to be re-
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leased to go home with the baby and return to the same situation. She received no prenatal or postnatal care for the sister, the sibling that saw her sister commit suicide in the front yard of the grandparents' home.

This little girl that committed suicide, the 14-year-old…. She obviously, as you can imagine, became the caregiver to the little sister. When she had herself locked in the bathroom because the mother was threatening to snap their heads and kill them, she would have the little sister in the bathroom with her, protecting her, and she was pretty terrified. So the decision by this little girl to kill herself…. Obviously, it must have weighed very heavily about the outcome of her little sister, because she had been, effectively, the parent for this child.

I can say that my office has been very concerned about the welfare of the little sister for some time. She doesn't want to come home. She's running away from school. She's really experiencing extreme trauma.

She was on a wrestling team with school. This is where I say she showed a lot of resilience, despite everything. She was wrestling. Wrestling is a very important part of the culture in her community, and she was quite an accomplished wrestler, this little girl.

She came back from a wrestling competition, and she didn't want to get off the bus. She didn't want to go home, so she cut herself on the bus.

You know, we think about when children cut. Cutting is a quite common experience to externalize the harm that children experience when they have mental health issues. But this little girl wasn't just cutting. She gave herself a cut that, when she attended at the emergency room herself, required 20 stitches. That's not a little cut. That's a significant cut. She had a cut requiring 20 stitches.

So she's taken to the emergency room. Despite the horrific things that were happening to her, in her family, in her home, her cut requiring 20 stitches, there was no child protection investigation. She was referred to child and youth mental health.

Now, child and youth mental health in this region…. There are two child and youth mental health systems. There's the ministry child and youth mental health system. Then there was an aboriginal stream, run by the delegated agency, which was not delegated to do child welfare work but had a contract to do child and youth mental health work.

She leaves the hospital with the grandparents. They say: "Well, we'll refer you to child and youth mental health." They have a meeting with the grandparents and the child, and they say: "Do you want the aboriginal child and youth mental health, or do you want the other child and youth mental health?" The grandparents say: "We'll have the aboriginal child and youth mental health."

Okay. Well, it's a not a child and youth mental health system. It's a couple of people, working in a delegated agency serving multiple communities, who are actually two half-time people. It works out at about 1.5 FTE versus an actual child and youth mental health system.

She never received an immediate suicide-risk assessment. The grandparents never took her to follow-up appointments. No one called to say: "Where is she?"

Yet the one time that she did talk to someone in mental health, she said to them: "I'd like to speak to you without my grandparents being here. There are serious things happening to me that I need help with." But there was no follow-up. And of course, when you're 14, although she had the experience of hitchhiking with her psychotic mother to town, we certainly can't expect her to be hitchhiking to get her own care.

In the final six months of her life, the MCFD office that was serving her in terms of the child protection issues, as I said, had one fully delegated child protection worker when it was supposed to have seven. Her reports about having risk — even though there was nominal reporting, there still were some reports — were mishandled. Files were lost.

There were eight MCFD intakes about her family during her life, and 33 social workers were assigned — even though some were assigned and never did anything because they were then off or what have you.

As I said before, this report is not to find fault with individual social workers. It's more of a critical comment on the child welfare system in the area. But the one time when there was going to be a child welfare investigation, that critical time when they were supposed to be doing a child welfare investigation, there was a significant conflict with this First Nations community.

The former Chief had made a comment to the social workers that: "You come on this reserve, and you'll be shot. You're not allowed in this community to do your child protection work." Unfortunately, MCFD, because they were afraid — and they couldn't do it because they didn't have the staff — basically drove to the edge of the reserve, did a U-turn and never did their job. They never did the child welfare work.

Now, that situation was allowed to stay for some period of time. In fact, up to the week that this report was released there was still an issue about whether or not people could get out there and do their work. But I am completely confident that there were a number of years during which no child welfare work was really being conducted because of either fear, hostility or what have you.

That's all fine if people want to fight about child welfare, but let's not forget that on the ground there are kids like this who actually need a safety system. I'm not saying they need to be removed. They just need a system of support where the adults — I don't care if they're First Nations, non–First Nations, in the health authority, in the band council staff, whoever they are — need to sit down and work together.

The Ministry of Children and Families has to foster
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the environment where that can happen. Clearly, what they did is they drove to the edge of the reserve and did a U-turn, and nobody talked about it. This is the result — what can happen when you don't do this work and you can't be vigilant.

Workers did face retaliation and violence. A worker in this area did have a knife pulled on them. When MCFD staff would report on something going on, there would be consequences.

Now, the result was that they said they would have people in the band office, this girl's First Nations band, keep an eye on her mother. They wouldn't do an investigation; they'd have someone keep an eye on them.

That person is the band manager. They have 15 other things to do. They're not there. In fact, the weekend they were supposed to be keeping an eye on her is the weekend that the mom hitchhiked to town, floridly psychotic, to be certified. So the keeping the eye on didn't work very well.

You can't, under the CF and CSA, shift your obligation to someone else. You can't say: "Oh well, there's a bus driver" or "There's someone over there. They're going to do the job." Certainly, a police officer doesn't go to work and say: "Here's my badge. Here's my gun. You go do it, because I'm not going to do it today. You're the milkman. You're in charge of it. I'm going to be doing something else." That is not permitted.

There were serious consequences when that happened. You can't say: "Well, I'm not going to take any responsibility for safety, but these people over here tell me they might." They're not trained. They're not the people that are doing it. As a result, this girl didn't have a safety lens.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Mary Ellen, can I interrupt just a bit? I just want to be conscious of time, because I'm assuming that there will be interest in questions from the members. We will be closing off just before noon, and we have another item.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Just to let you know that the members have read the report, and I would assume that there will be questions. It would be good to let them ask you some questions.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Sure. I'll cut it very short and be able to answer any questions.

I just wanted to emphasize a few points. One is on the dynamic of not being able to serve effectively in the child welfare system. I'm not confident that that issue has been resolved.

It is not only in this community. There are other communities. I'm not saying it's a no-go zone, but there have been procedures put in place that make it impossible to get out and do the work in the immediate, emergency way that's needed in cases like this. I'll just flag that issue.

The other issue I'll just flag by way of follow-up to this report is that I did report that there were more than 40 medical professionals who treated this girl's mother for her mental illness between 2001 and 2011 that failed to tell MCFD that there was a family in crisis, a mother that could not parent, for instance, a child that was hurt — 40. That's nurses, physicians, psychiatrists.

I did make a recommendation in this report that there be some action by the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the college of nurses. And I made a recommendation to the Attorney General of British Columbia that they look at enforcing the provision of the Child, Family and Community Service Act that makes it an offence not to report.

I want to spend one minute in conclusion on that to say I've had good discussions with the college and others to remind — they put it out in their bulletin — that you have to report. But there is a systemic problem here.

I'm not sure if it's because it's the aboriginal community, if it's because…. Certainly, in our investigation the suggestion was that there is a low opinion of the Ministry of Children and Families. The idea is: "Well, we don't report because they don't follow up." I've been very clear with physicians and nurses and others that you have to report. We'll address the issues with the ministry. The ministry needs to take responsibility. But you don't get off the hook.

The act has a provision, which is up to six months' imprisonment and a significant fine, a summary conviction offence, for any person who has reason to believe that a child is in need of protection and fails to report.

There hasn't been a prosecution for that in British Columbia. It used to be, under the old legislation, that it was confined to those people who had a professional role, like just health care professionals. It was widened to everyone, but especially people like health care professionals have a very significant responsibility.

The Ministry of Children and Families had eight intakes that they could have investigated. Had those 40 professionals also reported, it would have been another 40 instances. That is helpful. Had the school always reported…. It's really important to report, and it's important that the ministry responds to those reports.

I am very concerned about that. I am very concerned about a health region, about a practice that has become lackadaisical, about not taking seriously these issues.

I am pleased that the physicians and others that we interviewed, and we did interview several here, were really clear to say why they didn't. Now, one of the health professionals said: "I can't report because I will face retaliation. I won't be able to do my job if I report because I will face retaliation on the ground from other people I serve." That's unacceptable. There are really some deep
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issues there. If you can't, you're going to cover that up. That's a concern.

By way of conclusion, I want to say that on the day that this girl killed herself, she was in front of her grandparents' house. This is a very important point that I'd like to conclude with and come back to and get you to reflect on as you think about this report.

A woman from her community who was employed in the addictions area — she was working in the band office in the alcohol addictions area — drove by and saw her sitting there, sullen, in front of the house. She stopped to talk about her. She said: "She's going through a hard time." The older woman, the adult woman, said: "Well, I was sexually abused myself. You can get through it."

She said to her: "How did you deal with it?" The older woman said to her: "Well, later on, when I got older, I got therapy and got help." Ironically, it was probably the worst thing. Even though it was a very sympathetic thing to say, it was the worst thing. In other words, what she said was: "You're going to have to grow up and figure it out on your own, because, actually, there's nothing here for you." That was the day that the girl committed suicide.

Even the sympathetic support of a person in her own community was of the view that there was nothing there to help her. I think that that is tragedy of unknown proportions in terms of the sex abuse issue.

This child made a rational decision to kill herself because she couldn't face what she was facing. She'd been sexually abused, and not only these four instances. There was significant evidence before our investigation that she was sexually abused by an older adult in the community for a long time. That person had recently passed away, and a lot of things had come forward, and that was never addressed.

The child, I think, speaks very loudly to us. "I keep telling people," is what she said. "I talk about it, but no one helps me." What was it that she was talking about? She was talking about being sexually abused.

Even coping with her mom's mental illness, she seemed to be fairly resilient. But when she had added to that load the sexual abuse, the mom's mental illness, the situation that she was facing at school where she was being suspended, she hit a point of no return, obviously.

I think it's extremely important to come back to the issue of safety. We need to create safety and the conditions for a prompt and appropriate response to abuse. We can't just leave girls like this one, as I said in the title of the report, with no service.

M. Karagianis: This is a profoundly disturbing report. There's no question that there are numerous areas where we could wade in as a committee, but I'm concerned, really, with a couple of pieces.

MCFD has said that they are going to comply with your recommendations. I see that you have pretty aggressive timelines on these recommendations. I'd like you to speak to whether or not it's even possible for the MCFD and others to respond and comply with those aggressive timelines.

I'm also very concerned with the lack of front-line staff and the current existing circumstances around that, both with MCFD and the delegated agency, or whatever the status of the delegated agency is. Certainly, even moving forward from here, it does look like there are completely inadequate support resources to even comply with any change in circumstances for this community. It lends itself to wondering what other communities have found themselves in similar circumstances.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, the report has six recommendations. Again, as you know, I don't do a lot of recommendations. I try to keep them focused.

A couple of key issues. One is that the ministry was not able to discharge its child protection mandate here. That has to happen, but leave that aside for a minute. I'm deeply concerned about that. I want to see them respond to that. But more significantly, I think what this report reveals is that there is no child and youth mental health system on reserve.

It's clear that there isn't. There's no mandate, and it's not being filled. It's being filled by 1.5 FTEs that can't be supervised, can't follow policy, can't work together and are just being hived off to work in a community agency. They are doing good work. They're trying. But they can't follow the process. I was talking about who gets into whatever. They certainly can't make that work.

That is a very big concern to me. In the wake of this report, it's a clear admission that there is no child and youth mental health policy on reserve. It's not extended. My recommendation to work that out is a crucial one. This is only one of 204 reserves. You can see there's a profound need, because the child maybe wouldn't need as much child protection if they had good mental health support and good resilience.

Moreover, that would be easy, if we could end it there. There's no system of special needs supports. If this child lived in downtown Victoria with this degree of impairment, cognitive challenges, we'd have support. We'd have a special needs agreement. We'd have respite care. We would have good support in school. On reserve there's no special needs program either.

I think what this report has revealed is that all the children in this circumstance get, really, is child protection, which they do need. But when you have no mental health and no special needs and even the policing is problematic and you know you have situations where you have girls that are being abused, that are experiencing…. There's going to be parental mental illness everywhere.
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That is what the particularly hard part of these recommendations is.

Am I confident that I can meet those timelines? I'm not confident that they'll get a special needs program on reserve within the time frame I've recommended. Hence, I've phrased it to say: take the leadership to get this going. Part of it is owning up to the fact that they have nothing and not pretending that they have something when there isn't something there. This child needed a program.

Now, the band did receive funding for some programs, sometimes through Health Canada. But they had a lot of challenges running their programs because they don't know how they interface with the provincial programs. What are the requirements to run them? They're run at a small amount. Plus the band was running a significant deficit, so money was used to cover off other things. There were a lot of issues. So yes, your point's well taken.

I expect recommendation 5, that the College of Physicians and Surgeons and colleges of nurses bring this investigation report to their members and highlight the practice problems…. I wanted that within 30 days of the release of the report. I'm not confident about the colleges of nurses. I'm in active discussions with them on it. But in terms of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, that has been done.

The other issue, though, 5(b), that the Attorney General review the reasons for a lack of enforcement and report — that hasn't happened. I haven't got clarity on that. But with the colleges, I have been engaged with them, and I am quite pleased. They work on a complaint system, but they need to remind their members to report.

I didn't put it in, but I would like to see the health authorities take leadership that you have to report. Make it easy within the hospital settings and the clinical settings that are paid for and under the aegis of the health authorities and the PHSA.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Mary Ellen. Not an easy report, I don't think, for any of us, but an important report.

Thank you to the Chief for showing some leadership in bringing this forward and addressing the challenges in the community.

Just a couple of specifics to ask about. One of the areas that you identified so well in the diagram in the report was the issue of the lack of staffing in the regional office. My questions in estimates lead me to believe that that continues to be a challenge, that they still don't have the staff in place and the staff still aren't trained. The ministry talked about putting an intervention team in place, an emergency team to go in, so I'd just like to ask whether you've had any conversations with the ministry about whether that team is in place, whether they're in that office.

I think it's important to recognize the comments you made at the beginning, which is that although this is recognizing a challenge in one community, this is not an unusual circumstance. This is not a unique circumstance to this one community. This is a circumstance that we see across the province, and although one community is highlighted here, I think it's important to note that these challenges exist all over British Columbia and are challenges all over British Columbia that we have to address.

Then the other piece to just ask about is: what kinds of conversations have taken place with education or health care? There are some huge issues here, as you pointed out, around a lack of support for education and for special needs agreements, even in the education system, never mind the child welfare system — whether any of those conversations have taken place.

Then just the last piece is if you're aware of any specific discussions that are taking place right now between the ministry and the federal government around the lack of coordination, the lack of supports, between on-reserve and off-reserve services. I think, as we all know, families often and children often travel between off reserve and on reserve for employment, for services, for supports — and whether there have been any specific discussions — not just a letter, but specific discussions — going on.

M. Turpel-Lafond: First of all, the issues about the staffing. Recommendation 6 called for a rapid response team to be created. Now, the ministry has put in place the shape and form of a rapid response team. I check on it fairly regularly. I'll ask Bill Naughton to weigh in on this issue if there's anything additional to add to my latest understanding. That is that they haven't fully staffed that yet, but they have identified how it's going to be managed for the province.

I don't think they've quite figured out how the delegated aboriginal agencies will be involved, because they frequently fall down in terms of not being able to function, and they have people leave for whatever reason.

I understand that they've tried to put it in place. I haven't yet seen how they're going to deploy it. Where does it go, and why? One of the big issues I have is…. It's needed. I'm delighted to see they're going to move forward on it. How many people are in it? Is someone in Vancouver going to be assigned to see that it meets the criteria or what have you? There are so many offices that need it, and are we at a sufficient complement to do the work?

The other thing that they have shown me in relation to this report — and of course I engaged with them before public release on these issues — was to show me who's absent in which office and who's covering for them, to develop a bit more of a tool which I've called on for many, many years, and I'm glad to see they're working it through. I can't tell you yet if it's actually robust, but they know who's on leave, who's covering, and then they can show me a snapshot, service delivery area by service de-
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livery area, if the people are on the ground.

This is the first time I've been able to be shown that, and I've only been shown it for one office at this point. I expect to see that, and I will report back to the committee what I think of it — if it meets the muster of this recommendation. They are dedicated to it, but the sword of Damocles over them is this issue of: do they have the people to do it in the regular offices? So the rapid response issue is very significant.

On the other issue about how the other, broader issues are coming forward, I would say that there are some serious shocks in the system. In part, this report is a sequel to the report that I put out in November, which said that the aboriginal child welfare governance discussions were — you know, $66 million spent without a single child served or things changed. That was a hard pill. Some people have rejected it. That's fine. But it's a hard pill to swallow because they never talked about these issues sufficiently.

There has been some engagement between the federal government and the Ministry of Children and Families on these issues, but I haven't seen the engagement with the First Nations there as well. My recommendation is quite clear. I'm not saying "cut out the First Nations leaders." The Chief himself, who is here — he's anxious to be in a process to get money, to get services seamless.

I'm a little bit concerned that…. They have to get this going. I've seen some work, but I'm not quite seeing them together. Certainly, a plan to manage the issue — I haven't seen that.

D. Plecas: Thank you, Mary Ellen, and I would concur. This is an incredibly disturbing report. One of the things, for me, which was so disturbing is the number of people involved in terms of not doing their job. It would seem to me, given the number of areas you've covered — health, public safety, mental health, education, child welfare — we're talking hundreds of people. It leaves one to wonder what is really going on. Is there something else here that we're missing, that's not in your report?

M. Turpel-Lafond: No, I think the issue was that someone had to seize the issue and get on it, and that was the Ministry of Children and Families. I mean, you have the school principal saying: "This child is going to follow through on a suicide. That's how seriously we're concerned about her. This is going to happen." They're calling, but the child has no suicide risk assessment from the Ministry of Children and Families because they're receiving this special stream of mental health, which really isn't a mental health service.

Really, it's that the Ministry of Children and Families needed to do the role that they have, which is step in. I'm not saying to take control of the child but to take stronger control of the situation so that they would have a clearer idea of what the plan is for this child.

There's an immediate crisis in this child's life, quite apart from the mom and her issues, in caregiving and suitable supports. She's got suicide…. It's not only ideation; she's got serious cutting. She's making allegations. We know when a child…. A child with a parent with a serious mental illness is at risk themselves of harm and possibly elevated suicide. Also, a child who is in this situation where they've recently disclosed a sexual abuse is at a high risk.

She's also on social media, this child, saying: "Maybe it would be better if I didn't live." I mean, the ministry had to take control of this issue. This is their job, but there was no one to take control of the issue. They had allowed that to happen for a long time, so the fault and responsibility are there. There's no way around it.

Yes, many other people could have supported her, but they're some people that are in the constellation of services at the centre and have to do it, and they weren't there. This child needed better. It would have been great if her family was stronger. It would have been great if her community could have had a great child-serving system, but they don't at this point because they don't have the resources and the collaboration.

This is what we need the Ministry of Children and Families to do: meet its core mandate. They couldn't meet the core mandate, and we found out in the investigation that they knew full well they couldn't meet the core mandate.

In fact, how many other cases have they not gone out and dealt with in this same region? I didn't make a recommendation on that because I don't think I should have to make a recommendation on that. I expect them to report to me on that: "How many other cases were not investigated, and what are you doing about that?" Not that the child might be suicidal, but there may be harm.

That's why I'm so grateful the Chief stepped forward to say: "I'm here. I want to do the work. Let's get the work done."

I think it needs a strong response in this area, this region, obviously, but also throughout the province. MCFD has to be clear: "This is what we do. We don't just leave people to figure things out for themselves. We actually become involved." The school needed better, and others, and the health professionals have a great deal of accountability, but MCFD is the lead.

When I look at page 71 and I see these empty chairs, I
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do know for a fact there were some issues there. I dealt with many of them. People were off on stress leave, maternity leave, and there were no backup services. I'm not defending the government. I just know what happened in some of these instances. That's not an excuse for any of this to happen. This is a tragedy, and we all know that we don't ever want to have these tragedies happen again.

One of the questions I do have, though, and I don't know if you can answer it, is: now that we have First Nations health authorities, how will this all fold into the mix of collaboration, of putting all this together in a collaborative manner to deal with these issues?

M. Turpel-Lafond: There has been an agreement with the federal government and provincial government, a tripartite agreement, to have a First Nations Health Authority. The First Nations Health Authority took over what were the services of Indian and Inuit health branch in the B.C. region.

What was not ensured…. You know, the sort of paymaster issues have been taken over. As I understand it — and it might be valuable for the committee to hear from the First Nations Health Authority at some point, for them to describe their work — they're now planning what services they might do, but they're not necessarily providing services. They may be providing payment, but they're in a planning stage right now.

It's still based on the mainstream health system, so you're still going to have the same tertiary care hospital system. You're not looking at a separate medical system — for instance, a separate health care system. But I think that they will be a very good advocate for ensuring that the needs of First Nations families, for instance, are seen in the health care system.

I also think the B.C. health care system needs to do that. I mean, it has to be together, and I think they are working together. I've seem some very promising things there, but it's still planning. It hasn't quite hit the ground everywhere yet.

It might be valuable for you to hear from them directly. I did make a recommendation in my November report saying, "Maybe you should engage with them" — that the ministry should engage with them. But they're not providing a child welfare service. They're not mandated to do that. It's really a health payment and some health promotion areas. It's still a bit unknown, but there's value there in terms of a new lens and a new enthusiasm to work on healthy living and supporting families.

D. Donaldson: I look forward to hearing what Darryl's question will be too. He's always got good questions. But I'll take this opportunity to say…. I'm going to say some comments.

Like the member for Cariboo-Chilcotin and others in this room, I live in a very remote rural area. The communities I represent are brilliant communities full of resilience and amazing people, people who take a healthy approach to life, yet the situations you've described in the report are not unfamiliar to me. I mean, it's not unique, as was said. Perhaps not every incident you described in this really terrible history is wrapped up into one person that I know, but I definitely could say that multiple parts of it are people I know. They're my neighbours, my family members.

From the aspect of this report exposing that, I think it's very valuable. But I'm amazed, really, that this hasn't occurred more often, considering what I know of the people in the communities that surround me.

I think with the recommendations we have to look at short term, medium term and long term. I definitely believe that there's accountability and that the short-term measures have to be quickly put in place in order for this not to happen in the near future.

The medium term, especially under recommendation No. 1…. I call medium term your timeline to June 1, 2015. I think these are recommendations that I find very helpful and that speak to the point, especially on the geography issue. Those need to be implemented as soon as possible.

I think the long term is something we need to consider. I know the representative talked about leadership. I wrote it down — obligation of leadership to collaborate. I think in the long term — this is beyond your mandate — we need to be considering whether the structures that the representative is trying to improve are actually structures that can address the issue at hand.

Some people might call it thinking outside of the box, but we have the box, and the representative is here to ensure that things are done as best as can be done within the box and to make improvements within the box. Are these structures that we have in place to deal with the health of children in need adequate? I think it's the obligation of us as leaders to look at that bigger issue beyond what we see in this report.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I don't have much of a response to that. Thank you very much. I think your sentiments reflect the deeper issue here. They're big issues, but I think we always have to break them down to the lives of actual children and families. They resonate across.

I'm left, with this report and the aftermath of this report, with a very basic question, which is…. There's a child that discloses that they've been sexually abused. What happens? I think there's rampant confusion and, in fact, a culture almost of disbelief and no service. So the child that is sexually abused…. You know, there isn't an answer. And it should be a culture of safety and response by everyone.
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You hit the phrase that I really like, collaboration, which means: how do we work together respectfully, overcoming many generations of distrust and conflict, but work together respectfully for children without someone coming in and saying: "You're going to do this and this"? What is appropriate? I think the leitmotif coming out of this report is: how do we respond to that?

We know that there have been significant intergenerational issues around abuse, for instance, and we know communities are grappling with it. Do we leave them to deal with that on their own? We empower them to get support, but they also have to have a system. That's the crucial…. Unfortunately, with this report, I would have to say that I don't think we have the response to that.

There was recently a parliamentary report from the federal committee that looked at the issue of missing and murdered aboriginal women. It reported not too long ago. I appeared before the committee as one of their invited witnesses. There's the issue about whether or not there should be a further inquiry into those issues, and I certainly said to them that among the issues that need work is: on reserve in British Columbia, how do we respond to the issue of sexual abuse of girls?

I think that was very driven by what I learned in this report, which was actually that everybody seems to fully know that it's happening but nobody does anything about it. As she said: "I keep telling people, but no one does anything." I think that's what we really need to listen to. We think about the collaboration and the political dimension of the work that's needed, but it's the lives of people that can be changed because you have a system that functions.

That requires policing. It requires child welfare. It requires health care. It requires a good, positive…. People who experience sexual abuse are resilient and recover and can get support and go on. It's not a fatal thing, and we have the expertise. But the paved road ended here, and people took a U-turn and didn't help this child — including people in her own family, in her community, in the child welfare system and in the health care system.

Certainly, the Ministry of Children and Families has got to deal with this, but I think that we have to keep thinking about the urgency of it, because we continue to have that.

I completely support your comments. This is not a stand-alone example of what a child faces. It's hard to hear the story, but we have to face up to it.

M. Bernier: I'd like to start first with my comments, because a lot of my questions that I had written down have somewhat been touched on and answered.

I want to start by thanking the Chief for his leadership and his passion for his people. This was difficult for me just to listen to. I can only appreciate what it must have been like living through it. I commend you for standing up and making sure that we try to find a resolve to help not only the people in your nation but all of British Columbia. So thank you.

We talked about the staff issues and lack-of-staff issues, but I want to take it almost to a different place, because putting people in positions does not always solve a problem. We have a societal challenge here, a historical challenge. You touched on it quickly in your remarks around the lack of trust that we have in a lot of nations. So putting more people into a position is not going to fix the trust issue which, really, is where we need to go. That's not really touched on in your report per se. You mentioned it.

This is a cross-ministry issue. It's not just the Ministry of Children and Families. And I think in order to get to a point…. I wish it was an easy fix. I wish you could just put a recommendation in there that everybody trust each other and this will never happen again. We know that's not the case, and this is going to continue to happen until we can figure out how to break down some of those barriers.

When we have reports like this, do you look at, in that deeper sense, not just a pointed recommendation of "if you did this…"? We know that some of these are not going to fix the problem. It goes a lot deeper than that. I'm just wondering if you can comment that way.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I think your question is a good one, and that's why I think this report is a sequel to the one I did in November. The Ministry of Children and Families, for a decade, basically said: "Well, we'll just have governance discussions." But they were just talk, not about the real-life situations.

Actually, people did make a choice. They made a choice to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and never give any service. That didn't work. The whole idea about you can't put people in positions — I agree with that. They have to be well qualified, well trained and know what they're doing, and they have to have collaboration.

The person doing child protection may not be the person collaborating. You may have someone else who's actually got good protocols and practices. But unfortunately, the Ministry of Children and Families, because it's had this decade, has not brought the serious issues out, and the leadership hasn't had a place to talk about the serious issues.

It's been the promise that a new day will dawn, and numbers of: "Here's another couple of million dollars. Go off and have more meetings in hotel rooms in Vancouver to talk about the new day that will dawn." But the new day doesn't dawn, because there's a little 14-year-old girl that needs help. You have to talk about her in order to get the new day to dawn. This is the concern that I have.

The deeper cultural issue…. You're absolutely right. Government has made a choice for a decade to put it there and not deal with the really serious issues. They've also not effectively…. They talked about indigenizing MCFD and bringing a stronger aboriginal leadership
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focus to MCFD. That hasn't happened. There are very few staff. And the training requirement….

In this region there are some training programs and whatever, but really, every MCFD employee that's going to be serving a First Nations community, like the 14 First Nations communities here, should be trained in their cultures and their protocols and their practices. It should just be required. But you don't get trained into: "Don't come on here, or we're going to shoot you." You get trained in: "I want to respect your families and whatever, and how can we work together?"

But someone has to bring forward the hard issue and say: "This girl is being sexually abused." It's not just all pleasant discussion. It's all good to have a good relationship, but you have to talk about the hard issues.

How should we deal with it? This is the challenge. You're right. You have to put people in a position to do a job. You have to have them well trained and organized, but the policy context for it matters. The policy context matters.

The policy context of service delivery to this community and aboriginal service delivery — as I said in the November report, you couldn't find a more chaotic area and, frankly, couldn't find an area more open to political influence. It has to be fixed. It has to become a stable public service area where people learn how to collaborate, and they have to put children first.

I think that what we've seen here is a huge opportunity, and I agree with you. The Chief and many other chiefs, I think, are prepared to deal with it. But the government also has to come forward and say, "This is the agenda" — not "Here's your money; go away" or blame another government. So it's a new discussion.

These reports may help that; they may not. But I think your point is well taken, which is — I think the member opposite said the same thing: has the process started where people actually start dealing with it? No it hasn't. I hope it does, because it needs to happen.

D. Plecas: I do have a question. I want to, again, acknowledge the great leadership of the Chief on this issue. I know there are, in other First Nations communities…. Ironically, the answers and the path to us dealing with some of these issues is within those communities, and they really are a beacon for the right path. That's inspiring, and I don't want to detract at all, with my next question, from the overall messaging of this report.

One of the things that came to mind, which reminded me of your November report, was the reference to the designated agency. It would appear as though they weren't doing their job. I would be interested in knowing whether or not they were paid.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, the delegated agency here — here's the irony of it — was technically delegated, but they were a negotiating delegation because they didn't realize they were technically delegated. So they were being paid to negotiate delegation and then entered into a bunch of small contracts to take other services, outside of child protection, from the ministry and deliver them, but they couldn't possibly meet the standards to deliver those.

How did all of that happen? It all happened because the wise people at MCFD and Aboriginal Affairs didn't pay attention, and they need to pay attention because they really got it wrong. On the ground, of course, there are people extremely uncomfortable when I show up in their office and say: "What's going on here? I can't understand it." Then I go back to the ministry and to Aboriginal Affairs and say: "What is going on? Five years, and we have no documents?"

Furthermore, I go to the Chief and the other chiefs and say: "You're on the board of this agency. What's going on? Do you have a delegation agreement or not? What's going on?" And I guess I come back to one point. I don't want an aboriginal agency to be subject to any more scrutiny than any other agency that delivers social services, but I want it still subject to scrutiny — namely: are the doors open? Are children being served and how and by whom? Who's doing what?

This was rife with confusion, and so this child…. What I talked about at the beginning, a footprint of service — there's no footprint of service. There's money, there's somebody with a title to do something, but there's no footprint of service that's adequate to meet the needs. That's unacceptable, and that had to be well known. I can't be the first person to point it out. If I'm the person to point it out, then the people who are supposed to be closer to it and accountable for it obviously failed.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you, Mary Ellen. I just want to make some final remarks before we're closing and also to reiterate what was mentioned by the other members — our appreciation of the Chief joining us today.

We are very appreciative of your time and your tremendous interest. This is a very good sign for moving forward, for leadership in your community — and everyone's, hopefully. Thank you very much.

Mary Ellen, this was a very difficult report to read. It was a very difficult report to hear you also speak about. We hope that the work of the committee will definitely be discussing more about our special project in the time to come. Perhaps we could incorporate some of your recommendations into our work, in that regard. I very much appreciate that.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): We have about five minutes left with the committee to discuss our special project, so
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if you don't mind us talking when you're gathering up your stuff, we'll just continue on because of time.

For the rest of the committee members, what our vice-Chair, Carole, and myself briefly discussed before we started. I just wanted to ask if you were okay if Carole and I meet to discuss the lists of potential panel presenters on our own. Or would you prefer to consult with us individually — and you can, certainly — on your own? Then we will meet, with your recommendations.

It's coming along. We've actually got a pretty good list, but we've got too many for the time that we're going to have, so we have to shrink it down a bit.

Carole and I have come up, basically, with the same list, so it's not a matter of cutting out on each side. We're going to have to cut out on both sides, because we've got too many people.

M. Karagianis: Great. Well, I would echo that we have complete confidence in our Chair and co-Chair. I would say, given the importance of this report today and maybe the profound impact that it may have on our discussions, let's not constrain ourselves. If we've got a lot of people that we believe are worthy of presenting to us and worthwhile meeting with, let's not constrain ourselves by saying we have to cut them down to fit them into a nine-to-five framework.

I mean, I would rather us be fulsome in this project rather than cut it down for whatever reason. I just think, coming out of this report today, the more material that you can bring to us, the more fulsome our discussion can be, and the more relevant the input for us, the better. So don't constrain us. If it takes us a couple of days to do this, then let it be that. I just don't see that a time frame should be an impediment to us doing really deep work on this.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Which leads me to the discussion that Kate had suggested, actually, that as separate from the special project, would it not be beneficial that we actually did get, say, the First Nations Health Authority or some of the delegated agencies to come and present to us at a separate time?

M. Karagianis: I think that's a separate idea as well, but we've got a special project. We were going to do some in-depth work, as a committee, into youth mental health. Let's make sure we do a really good job on this.

I'd go two very long days or three days if we need to, if that's what it takes, rather than say we're going to pick and choose and squeeze it into a time frame for convenience sake.

I think it's very compelling, what we've heard today, and I just don't want us to shortchange ourselves and the public and, I guess at the end of the day, the youth on this.

I also think that this report leads us to maybe talk about presentations to this committee not just of Children and Families ministry. We kind of hone in on that. We have had the Health presentations here in conjunction with Mary Ellen as well. Maybe it's time for us to have the Justice Ministry in here and the Health Ministry and say: "Where's your part of some of these issues as well?"

I think that there are a number of things that we can do just as a committee that are a bit more than constraining it, because this committee is not constrained to the MCFD ministry, right? We're here as a conduit for the children-and-youth office, and therefore, I think we could branch out. Let's have Justice Ministry here, have Health here to talk about some of these issues as well.

That's separate work for the committee, but I really think that it's so important, this project, and I feel more driven and inspired to do it today than I did even yesterday. I think: let's go full on. Let's do whatever we need to do to make it very real and deep.

D. Barnett: I agree, but I also would like…. There are a couple of issues here that I think we have to address when we're dealing with the mental health project. I would like to know where the funding is coming from for all these different components.

What does the federal government contribute? What does the provincial government contribute? There's a little bit out of here; there's a little bit out of there. I think, to help us, if we're going to talk about collaboration, we need to know all aspects of what is going into helping children. I want that addressed, too, as we move on with this project.

I also want to see us do something, when we're done our term, that we can walk away and say, "We did this" — not just a piece of paper.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): It sounds like we're all on the same page. I appreciate everybody's comments. Carole and I will have a meeting, and we'll move forward from there.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I was just going to suggest, Chair, that we make sure that people are reminded of the tentative dates that we put aside in June, because you might want to put a date on either side of that, just so that if we end up….

C. James (Deputy Chair): If we end up with a couple
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of extra days added in, you should make sure that we've got a little bit of time there. I would just suggest to members that I think it's a good suggestion to expand.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): If I might just take a moment, then. The next meeting of this committee has been set to be Wednesday, May 7, in the same time slot, 9 a.m. till 12 noon. The two days that have been proposed for your special project in Vancouver have been identified as Tuesday, June 10, and Wednesday, June 11.

In the course of our preliminary discussions, the Chair and the Deputy Chair have also been exploring the suggestion possibly of a site visit. I think that was raised at a previous meeting. Depending on the availability of an appropriate site, it had tentatively been flagged as possibly something that we could accommodate on the afternoon of June 9, if members were in Vancouver at that time.

None of that has been confirmed, but we'll certainly take under advisement your suggestions today with respect to the timing of the session in ensuring that the interests of the committee are well served by this initiative.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Should we see if we can get another meeting in before May 7?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes, absolutely, Madam Chair. Perhaps with your input and the Deputy Chair's, we can identify another opportunity so that we can actually have a more fulsome report on the status of the special project.

Just before members depart, I wanted to circulate for your review a copy of the draft annual report of the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth, which has been prepared by our research staff, Byron Plant and Aaron Ellingsen. The report summarizes the work of this committee from November 2012 right through till the end of December 2013. It is an annual report that essentially summarizes your deliberations and the reports that have come before you for review.

Copies have been provided in advance to the Chair and Deputy Chair, and we would hope that perhaps at the next meeting, as early as April, that we might be able to receive feedback and comments from all of you. I'll just circulate that to you now.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): I have digital. We could even have them sent to members' iPads, I understand.

M. Karagianis: I'd prefer that. The whole point of the iPads is to do digital and less paper, so I would prefer digital, please.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Okay. Some of us will take paper; some of us want digital. We will accommodate both.

Thank you very much, everybody. The Deputy Chair and I will get together, and we'll get another meeting going in the interim before May 7. In the meantime, again, we're open to all of your suggestions with regard to additional presenters.

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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:	Aaron Ellingsen (Committee Researcher)
	Byron Plant (Committee Research Analyst)

Witnesses:	John Greschner (Deputy Representative for Children and Youth)
	Bill Naughton (Office of the Representative for Children and Youth)
	Marry Ellen Turpel-Lafond (Representative for Children and Youth)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
CHILDREN AND YOUTH