Children and Youth — Issue No. 8 — Wednesday, May 7, 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; Dr. Moira Stilwell, 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.

3. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions regarding the report entitled On Their Own: Examining the Needs of B.C. Youth as They Leave Government Care, April 2014:

• Dr. Grant Charles, Special Advisor to the Representative for Children and Youth

5. Resolved, that the Committee meet in-camera to deliberate on the youth mental health project. (Donna Barnett, MLA)

7. Resolved, that the Committee approve and adopt the Annual Report as presented today, and further, that the Committee authorize the Chair and Deputy Chair to work with committee staff to finalize any minor editorial changes to complete the supporting text and that the Chair present the Report to the Legislative Assembly at the earliest available opportunity. (Carole James, MLA)

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	205
M. Turpel-Lafond
Representative for Children and Youth Report: On Their Own: Examining the Needs of B.C. Youth as They Leave Government Care	219
M. Turpel-Lafond
G. Charles
Youth Mental Health Project: Update	231
Committee Report to the House	231

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Good morning, everyone. I'm Jane Thornthwaite, the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth.

We have a few items on the agenda today. First and foremost is an update on the work of the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth, and then we're going to get into one of the representative's reports.

Then the committee will have a discussion about our special project coming up in June. Myself and vice-Chair Carole James will have a little discussion about that.

Then we are going to take a look at the draft of our Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth annual report, which I'm assuming that everybody has copies of, and then any other business.

Okay. Welcome, Mary Ellen. I'll keep you on track with regards to the agenda as far as timing, but please begin.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased to be here. This is my 29th regular meeting with the committee, and I'm grateful for an opportunity to provide an update.

I just want to introduce the staff with me this morning. To my left, your right, is John Greschner, the Deputy Representative for Children and Youth; and to my right, your left, is Prof. Grant Charles. I don't think you've had a chance to meet Grant Charles at committee, but Grant is an adviser on child welfare to my office, a senior adviser. He's also a member of the faculty of social work at the University of British Columbia and has a very significant career working with children directly, running institutions for children and supporting research and evaluation around children.

I'm delighted he's here. He was one of the principal researchers with respect to the report that we will talk about earlier this morning.

Also, in the gallery behind me is a person who's recently rejoined the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth — Dawn Thomas-Wightman. She has taken on the position of chief investigator in my office for critical injuries and deaths. That was a position that was held by Bill Naughton, who will continue to be an associate deputy representative for critical injuries and deaths but is also acting as the associate deputy representative for monitoring, research and evaluation.

We're pleased that Dawn has rejoined the representative's office. Prior to her rejoining the office, Dawn was the head of aboriginal services for the Ministry of Children and Family Development but was involved in the representative's office in numerous investigations, including probably one of the more extensive ones we've done into the homicides of the Schoenborn children.

We're very delighted that she's returned and that she will take on the role as chief investigator. I'm delighted that she's here today.

I want to just update on a few items of concern with respect to the committee since we last met. Some of these are pressing and urgent issues that the representative's office is engaged with.

One is the closing of the Victoria Youth Custody Centre. I've expressed a deep concern to government about the decision to close the centre. Both Dr. Perry Kendall, the provincial health officer, and I have written to the Attorney General and the Minister of Children and Families suggesting that this is not a good decision for children and that the impact on the young people who were served at the custody centre will be harsh.

Again, as this committee will know, overwhelmingly in our youth justice system there are children who are in care and aboriginal children, and the consequence of this decision is a significant one. So the provincial health officer and I have been urging both of those ministers — of course, the Minister of Children and Families is the lead, but the Attorney General is also involved because it involves the justice system — to reverse this decision.

Certainly, I am delighted with the fact that the number of youth in care has declined in British Columbia, and it is low and stable, and that's positive. Our youth justice facility in Victoria is a good and appropriate facility for the young people that are in the system.

It's also a facility that could be repurposed for good cause, such as dealing with short-term residential supports for those in the mental health system who are certified under the Mental Health Act. As this committee knows from my prior reports and presentations, we have a dearth of resources in that regard. We need to look at that. Certainly, that custody centre is a suitable and favourable facility to be used for some of those other purposes where a more secure environment is needed.

I also note in that regard that British Columbia has legislation for secure care for children. It has never been proclaimed, but committee members will be aware of, and I do speak periodically about, crisis situations that arise around British Columbia — a family has a child who has fallen into sudden severe drug addiction, for instance, a high-risk environment where there is a need to find a secure resource for them for a short period of time.

I just highlight that to say that there are established and recognized needs. Particularly, on the youth custody centre, I would like to see it continue to be open and running here in Victoria. I checked across the country whether there's another provincial capital, for instance, that doesn't have a youth custody centre operating in any of
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the provincial capitals of the larger provinces. Certainly, the seven largest provinces in Canada all have a provincial custody centre that operates. So it's a bit of a concern in terms of the decision that's been taken.

The other thing I would just note for the committee, because I know the committee always takes a great interest in what happens in the actual lives of children. What this means for a child, a young person…. Let's say you have a 13- or 14-year-old girl who's in custody, and she's been sent to Burnaby. She will wake up at about 4:30 or 5 a.m. in the morning. A panel van will pick her up with a sheriff. In that panel van might also be adults, not just other children. She'll be driven around the Lower Mainland, possibly to pick up other individuals or drop off individuals. She'll eventually make it to the ferry. They'll take a ferry over to Vancouver Island several hours later.

Along the way she'll be locked in to a panel van in the bottom of a ferry. They will then make it to a police cell somewhere here or possibly the cells in the courthouse where they'll spend several hours in the cells waiting for their matter to come forward. It could be at two o'clock or 2:30 when the court finally gets to that part of the list. That child who's been up since 4:30 in the morning riding around in the back of a bus will actually have their matter dealt with.

They will have been fed fast food that day. They will have been transported and been interacting with fully uniformed people in a variety of holding environments and criminal environments. They will finally get a chance to appear in court where, I can assure you from looking at these cases and working with these children, they will be so disempowered that they really will not have a voice to say anything to anyone.

I think if any of us put ourselves in that situation of being picked up from our homes at 4:30 in the morning and being driven around and eventually having to appear and actually participate in a trial where someone is going to determine your liberty — namely, whether or not you will serve a jail sentence or not — under those circumstances, that's inappropriate.

It's especially inappropriate when we're dealing with a young aboriginal person who's already suffered significant dislocation in their family and their lives, who's probably also been a victim of some criminal behaviour in their background, possibly victim of abuse and neglect — particularly when these are children who are out of their parental home. There's no parent that's going to call, for many of these kids, and say: "Oh, by the way, I'm very concerned about the fact that my child has been in a panel van since 4:30 this morning, and there were two adult offenders who may have some very serious violent offences before the courts, and they dropped that person off on the way to my child's hearing."

I put these points out for the committee because of the reality of how the youth justice system works. We're all very insulated from it. The public's very insulated from it. But the youth custody centre of Victoria provides a very important service. It keeps people connected to their communities and their families. There's skill and expertise, and it allows children….

Yes, they have to get up in the morning and get ready and have their court dates, but they don't have to sit in a van and travel around — and travel around for what purpose? Because we don't want to spend the money to have a custody centre here, we're going to make them travel for hours and hours and hours.

I would just suggest to this committee that if it was another service we were talking about…. If we decided, for instance, we would centralize all knee surgeries in British Columbia in one location and let people be picked up and travelled around, there would be a hue and cry about: "We're not having patient-centred care, and I very much value that approach." But when it comes to children and the youth justice system, what about child-centred supports?

I just register with this committee my strongest objections to this decision. I applaud the decision of the Victoria police department in declining to house children in their police cells. They know well that there are serious liability issues with placing young girls and boys in a police cell beside adult populations, not to mention the fact that even that police service doesn't have the expertise to deal with young people.

Again, a young girl who might be in their police cell…. Say she's 14 or 15 years old, she's menstruating, there's no shower, there's no dedicated bathroom and there's no appropriate food. If her behaviour escalates, there's really nothing for them to do other than to restrain them from self-harm, which generally means engaging physically in a police cell environment, and that's not appropriate.

As the Victoria chief of police has said, his police cells, like many of these police cells around the province, have a simple bare mattress on the floor, a toilet in the corner in a concrete cell where the lights are on 24-7, so it is not a restful environment. It is not an environment to put high-risk populations in.

The consequence of the decision that has been made to close the Victoria youth centre is significant. It's a bad decision. It's the wrong decision. I'm urging the government to reverse that decision. I'm glad that our provincial health officer has also joined me in that.

I will just remind the committee, because we've talked about these issues repeatedly, that in 2013 there was a decision of the B.C. Supreme Court about another program that was shut down in a fairly peremptory way, and that was in 2008. The then Ministry of Corrections shut down the mom-baby program at the Alouette jail, which was the only program we had to keep moms and babies together. I was a very strong advocate, with three Solicitors General, not to shut that down. That was un-
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successful.

I was deeply disappointed when they decided to shut it down. It led to the Inglis case, which was litigation brought by an aboriginal mom and another mom that went to the B.C. Supreme Court, which found that the B.C. government violated the human rights of the moms and the families under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that the decisions were not in the best interests of the child, and they ordered the government to re-establish the program.

The government has had six months. They're in the process of trying to re-establish it, but of course, when you shut things down, you don't have the expertise and the skilled people when you have to re-establish it, not to mention that you have five years when you a lose a program.

I raise this for the committee just to say that sometimes these decisions get made. I have not been assured by the Attorney General of British Columbia or the Minister for Children and Families that they've received legal counsel that what they're doing is appropriate, that it's consistent with the human rights of children and families and that it will withstand challenge. It would be very regrettable if we shut down a resource and eliminate staff only to find out it was the wrong thing, and then we have to go and find that staff and that resource again.

I raise that for the committee to say that I've not seen any assessment, I'm deeply concerned about it, and I will continue to work on that issue.

I would like to also address another critical issue that we talk about in the committee repeatedly, and it's an area of deep concern for the representative. That's the area of domestic violence. The last time I appeared before this committee, I was concerned that the government's plan on domestic violence that I had called for in the report into the homicides of the Schoenborn children…. While I was glad that it was finally released, it lacked depth. There was no new money — at least not for another year or two years, and then it was not substantial money — and there were not detailed, serious initiatives consistent with best practices in responding to domestic violence across Canada.

We still don't have established, focused domestic violence courts. We still don't have treatment programs that have the depth and focus that they need. We don't have monitoring of perpetrators to the extent that it does occur elsewhere.

I closed my comments last time by letting you know that I intended to raise the subject as needed, and I wanted to tell the committee today that I am very alarmed about a number of recent incidents that go to the very heart of these gaps that we've talked about before in this committee and that I've reported on. A couple of cases first.

In Langley, in the first week of April, there was a father who was served with divorce papers. The following day, the suggestion is that the family home was doused with gasoline and the mother and daughter were assaulted in their home. The mother and the two children escaped from the home before it was burned to the ground. The father escaped, was later apprehended and arrested and is now charged with multiple counts, including attempted murder and assault. Police knew the home and had been called several times before the incident, but it would appear that the mother's safety was not protected despite being known in the system.

In mid-April a father was arrested for stabbing the mother of his son multiple times and then fleeing with the son — abducting the son and fleeing with him. The father was arrested by police. The child was taken to hospital to be examined by a physician to ensure that he had no physical injuries. The mother was treated in hospital for stab wounds. In that case there were seven previous incidents with the family, the majority related to domestic violence and drug abuse by the parents. But in the most recent incident related to domestic violence, the father was charged and a no-contact order was in place. Despite that no-contact order, he came in, had access and harmed the mother and the child.

In Clearwater a few weeks ago there was an incident where a mother was killed and her three children were taken from the scene by her partner. After a day-long standoff between her partner and the police, the children were removed from the standoff location, although they were there in the standoff during that entire period and may have witnessed their mother's murder. The children may not have sustained physical injuries, but committee members will know that being in that situation — losing your mother but also witnessing the homicide of your mother — is a deeply, deeply serious trauma. In this particular case, we understand that the RCMP had on four occasions attended the home because of verbal and physical violence. Services were offered but safety was not. There was not adequate safety.

It's clear that there are issues around how we will improve the domestic violence system in British Columbia. These are pressing and serious issues. The plan that has been put forward lacks depth and is not effective at this point. There needs to be a much more serious initiative. Just this past weekend in the Lower Mainland there was another domestic violence homicide. There was a young child in the home at the time of the incident who may well have been, and likely was, a witness to her mother's murder. Another example.

In the past six weeks I'm saying that there have been at least four, and those are only the cases where there were children in the home and in the family. There have been other domestic violence deaths where there have not been children in the home at the time, but these are also deaths that are felt by family members — brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, parents and close friends.
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Children, too, get affected by these deaths.

All of these events demonstrate to me yet again that our existing social work, police and justice system responses to domestic violence are insufficient. There's too much violence. The mere existence of a restraining order without a real assessment of risk and real safety continues to be a problem.

I had the great benefit recently of meeting with our committee to look at ending violence, our blue ribbon panel on ending violence. I met with them on April 10. I know Mr. Plecas is here, and he's been leading that panel. I had a chance to speak with him at length about my concerns about domestic violence in British Columbia and whether or not we will achieve our goal of a violence-free B.C. if we do not get serious about this. This is one of the biggest areas of harm to children.

When I look at the scope of it, despite the difficulty with the information case management system in MCFD…. I recently looked at how many cases have come into the Ministry of Children and Families where family violence or domestic violence is a factor in that child welfare intake.

Between April 1, 2012, and March 31, 2014, there are 5,631 safety assessments in the Ministry of Children and Families where intimate partner violence was flagged as a key factor around abuse, neglect or maltreatment of a child. In that period there are almost 6,000, and I think it's probably under-reported, because we're having serious issues with the case management and information system in the Ministry of Children and Families.

I just come back to this committee again to say the area of domestic violence is short on detail, focus and leadership. It doesn't have clear outcomes. There aren't concrete time frames. Safety continues to be a concern — very basic issues like why we have not put in place proper electronic monitoring for perpetrators and better safety protections for known-risk cases. Why do we continue to leave moms and families clearly at risk in the family home where it's well known, easily accessed and where violence continues to occur after there have been repeated incidents?

This is not the practice in other jurisdictions. We have seen a lot more success outside the boundaries of British Columbia. I raise that and flag that as a serious concern for British Columbia.

I regret that some of the news this morning is not as positive as I would like it to be. Another area of urgent concern is the area of the information and case management system, or ICM. In July 2012, as the committee knows, I issued a public safety warning that the information system did not meet the needs of children and there were safety issues. I've never lifted that safety warning. That continues to be a public warning that the child welfare system in British Columbia has been compromised by this information system.

I'm here to tell you today that we have had a week, six days, when social workers have not been able to use the information system at the Ministry for Children and Families — my offices being inundated with calls from social workers in great distress because they can't do their job.

Even families have been calling. I got a call from a father of three who was under enormous stress. He wasn't able to get income assistance because ICM was down and wasn't going to be able to actually feed his family. He was in that much distress.

This type of dysfunction where a system doesn't work would never be tolerated for hours in the banking system. It wouldn't even be tolerated for a day in the medical claims system, not to mention in the private sector. However, for a week we have not had a functioning information system in the child welfare system. That means every social worker investigating every call and every case cannot access information about the family.

That means a social worker today, going out to a home to remove a child, will not know whether, in that home, there are weapons, won't even know, perhaps, the last-known address of the child or who will be in the home and will not be able to share that with police or others. Not having it fixed for a week is completely unacceptable.

I just wanted to bring that to the committee to say that public safety warning is there. I raise that to members of the committee again. This is a $200 million information system that has not worked for child welfare.

I said at the time that there is no contingency plan. I wanted the government to work on this and repair it. They've come to tell me repeatedly the ways in which they will fix it. It is not fixed.

We've known for months that the government cannot work with this system and staff cannot work with it. Again, this past week has brought this into sharp focus. I will be looking at it, but I can only commiserate with the staff and families who are calling me saying: "It's not working."

When this doesn't work, things happen to children that could be prevented. I think that's really important for me to put that on the record in this committee. You have to have a functioning system.

For six months we had an information system where you couldn't even push and print a report to court to go and get a hearing for a child. We fixed the print function. Now we haven't had anything working for a week, of any kind.

I expect the minister and I expect the ministry to come forward and say when this will be fixed. Every day I'm calling, and I'm not getting an answer. This morning yet again I was told: "Oh, it's fixed, but it's intermittent." Yet the front-line staff is calling me saying: "It can't be fixed, because I can't use it. I have to go out and do a call. I have to finish a safety assessment today."

So I make note for the committee that we are in crisis
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in the child welfare system on this issue, and it has been a week of crisis.

With respect to, I guess, what could be considered a more positive note, I wanted to let the committee know that we did have a very positive event last week. On April 28, I hosted an event in Vancouver on tuition waivers and the transition to post-secondary education for youth in care. We are going to have a chance to talk a bit about the report — the second agenda item, on the transitions.

I did host an event last week that brought together over 100 representatives from the post-secondary sector, youth- and family-serving sector, young people themselves, MCFD and others, and the private sector. Coast Capital participated. We were looking at our efforts to have all 25 colleges and universities waive tuition for kids in care. I continue to work very hard on that issue, and I have been advised — I won't name them, but there will be public announcements in the coming weeks and months — of additional institutions that will be coming on board to offer the tuition waivers.

I'm very keen about that, and I will continue to provide strong advocacy there, because I'm seeing how valuable that is in terms of creating hope and opportunity for young people who need to have a good career path. They need education and training. They desperately want education and training, and we haven't been doing a good job at matching their desires and needs with their opportunities. So I'm very happy about that. I'm keen about that.

I continue to work to raise money in the private sector to be able to see a fund grow. I continue to push the government of British Columbia to fund, specifically, the living expenses in an open program that doesn't have the type of barriers that the existing programs have. That's so young people aging out of care will have their living expenses covered to attend post-secondary — so that that can be possible for them. It is impossible without easy access to resources.

Some of our universities…. Vancouver Island University has been a great leader. They now have…. I'm so thrilled and excited by this. If committee members could personally meet these students, you would be so encouraged about our opportunity to improve things. They have 40 students who were former youth in care or on youth agreements attending their programs, and they are doing so well. It's just absolutely amazing.

Of course, they tell me personally about the challenges that they faced and how they're coming to success and doing well. I just see nothing but hope and promise. And I see nothing but hope and promise for them to address some of the trauma that they experienced, because they're still facing that. Education, no matter what you do with that education, is such an important skill to stop and reflect on who you are, who you've become and where you're going.

These young people are great, and we need to harness and involve them in our campaign to make British Columbia a province where every child that ages out of care doesn't age out of support. They actually have a future — a bright future that's a supportive future. I'm very keen about that.

In the same vein, after I released the report last week, I did have contact with a young person who aged out of care. Her success was a bittersweet success. She wrote to me and contacted me about how she aged out of care at 19, basically to the street, and that she went into survival sex work. She worked as an escort to pay for her education. She finished her education doing sex work, and she wrote to me about how demeaning and how desperate she was to do that.

She did achieve her education, but she was very, very open with me to say that she just couldn't believe what she'd had to do to get there, and she's disgusted by what she had to put up with — being assaulted, having to work for people who exploited her and to do the only thing she could do, which was to basically sell her body to go to school.

She wrote to me to say that in her cohort of friends who had been in care with her, not a single member of her cohort of ten survived — that they'd either had drug overdoses or were chronically on the street — and that she was also dealing with, as I think you can even call it, survivor's guilt that she did that. Yet she did it by doing survival sex work and then working as an escort.

You know, it really brought home to me a lot of the young people we do work with…. I mean, on the one hand I'm so impressed with her determination to get educated, that she was going to do everything she could to do it. But how unfortunate that in our society, with the wealth and support we have and all of the attitudes we have around respect for women and support for women, we would allow a young person to have to go into survival sex work and to escort to get an education.

It renewed me to get this pathway cleared and to push government as hard as I can to make that a seamless transition so that at 19 we do not continue to see what we have seen for many years. We'll talk about our report and some of our recommendations in a bit, but the human dimension of working on this is one where, for those 40 students at Vancouver Island University, I'm very excited. There are people who made it, but they made it in a way…. We don't want anyone to have to face that path.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Mary Ellen, if I could please interrupt. We want to leave some time for questions, because you've covered a lot of material. Do you have more?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Yes. I just have one additional thing, Madam Chair. I thank you for your forbearance, and I regret that we may be running over time.
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I wanted to note to the committee that just this week I appeared by video conference before the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights. I just wanted to make note of that because the committee was studying the Hague convention on child abduction. That's our federal Senate committee. It was looking at Canada's implementation of the Hague convention.

In 2012 Foreign Affairs Canada dealt with about 71 new child abduction cases, and some of those cases come from British Columbia. We have very globalized families. There are situations where people remove children from the jurisdiction of British Columbia and go somewhere else, and we have a British Columbian parent or grandparent who is desperate to get the return of the child.

I just wanted to flag for committee members that I did appear before the committee. I did speak to some of the issues and opportunities in British Columbia to strengthen support for families, particularly around newcomer families in British Columbia where there are issues.

I know that many of the Members of the Legislative Assembly bring some of these cases to my office. I don't necessarily have an advocacy mandate, but we do become involved. Frequently child welfare becomes involved in these cases.

I did table a paper with the Senate speaking to some areas for improvement. I did share a copy of that paper with members of this committee, just so you can be kept abreast of that.

One of the areas…. I'll just end it with this. I really feel very strongly that we need to have a stronger response in some of our international entry points — in particular, at YVR, Vancouver International Airport. I think we really need to look at how we can work with the federal government to have a proper child protection unit there so that we can stave off some of these cases and we can respond appropriately. There's a whole range of issues — unaccompanied minors, international abduction of children — that suggest that British Columbia might need to strengthen. Toronto, Ontario, has this. YVR doesn't.

I did speak to that before the federal committee. Although I don't have a mandate on the federal side, because it impacts families in British Columbia, we do raise it. So I wanted just to put that forward with the committee. A copy of the paper is with you. If any members of the committee have questions, please don't hesitate to contact me or my office either today or in the future.

I'll end it there and certainly be happy to answer any questions on the business update.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you very much, Mary Ellen. We have our first question from the vice-Chair.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I have a couple of questions, so maybe I'll just start with ICM, because it's certainly a huge concern. I have been going back and forth with social workers again this morning. Just to give the committee an idea, a social worker actually went in to work before 6 a.m. in hopes of getting on the computer system. She has a court case coming up and wants to get information. She was on the system for ten minutes before she was kicked off, and it's down again. So the frustration….

Thank you, Mary Ellen for raising it, because I think it's important for people to know this isn't simply a computer glitch. This impacts the safety and the well-being of children. It also impacts the Ministry of Social Development. Whether it's emergency vouchers or support for rental assistance, those kinds of things have been impacted.

We know that there are individuals who've gone down to ministry offices, have had to bus down, used their scarce resources and were then told: "Sorry, try coming back tomorrow. Maybe it'll be up; maybe it won't. We don't know." So I think there's huge frustration.

I guess my question to you, Mary Ellen, would be whether you believe…. I know we've debated this over the years, and I think all of us hate to see this kind of money thrown away, but after this number of years and the frustration that people have been feeling, do you feel that this system is saveable? Do you feel that it's possible for this system to be addressed? Then I'd like to just come back quickly to the other question, if I can.

M. Turpel-Lafond: On the issue of ICM, the safety warning I have there is pretty clear, which is that it doesn't work. The issue of whether or not my office — as the representative's office with an $8 million budget overseeing a $1 billion system — is going to tell the government if it's a fixable system or not…. This not the right place to be doing that work.

They paid $200 million for a system. This is a system that was rolled out in another jurisdiction, in Australia, and failed. Did they test it? And why is there no contingency? It's up to the government to be clear about: will it work, or will it not work?

In terms of your question as to whether or not they've assured me on that front, no, they have not assured me. They have come to me to tell me the steps that they will take, yet in many instances I find those steps are inadequate, particularly when it didn't function from the initial rollout. It didn't function for six months. What happened with all of the intakes during that six months? Did they go back and manually enter them?

A good example is this past week. Workers tell me that they log into the system, and they're doing a note in the system…. These notes are very important, like: "Mom has shown up at a hospital, is severely drug-addicted and mentally ill. She has an infant." The alert on the system is: "Mom doesn't leave the hospital with the infant." The worker is entering the alert in the system, and all of a sudden the system kicks her off and says: "Inactivity."

The worker doesn't know if that alert has been saved, is on the system or not. They can't go back on the system
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to reopen it. This is how crucial it is. That worker might be the after-hours worker because mom has showed up at one or two in the morning at a hospital, and someone at six o'clock the next morning has to do it.

I feel strongly that the Ministry of Children and Family Development is not taking this issue seriously enough. They are not reporting. They are not coming forward with a plan. It's a cross-government system. I don't oversee income assistance, except I am fielding calls from desperate parents that can't get their income assistance. I mean, income assistance is a pittance.

These parents are calling, asking: what are they going to do? Put their children in care because they can't get income assistance this week? And they're going to do manual cheques? There is nobody in these offices to prepare these manual cheques, let alone the fact that nobody knows how to do a manual cheque. By cheque, I mean an instrument that they can take, not to mention the depositing of that and the preying upon these individuals in terms of being able to cash these cheques.

The situation is grave. It's serious. It brings the system to a standstill at that time, but it's a legacy that affects the system in the future. We've had…. These aren't just hiccups. This has been a disaster. I called upon the Auditor General. I called upon the government.

Do they need an independent review of this? Certainly, it's beyond the competency of my office. I would spend every resource in my office every day looking at this issue if I could actually answer your question properly, and it does deserve an answer.

There needs to be some type of fulsome, independent look at this. Are we going to keep digging this hole, or are we going to go in another direction? I can't answer it except to say that incidents will happen for children, and they are happening, because this is not working.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Just quickly, on the other issues…. I want to say a huge thank-you to you and your office for the push that you've done around the post-secondary support for universities and colleges. I think it's extraordinary to hear those numbers. It's absolutely wonderful to know that we're seeing children in care who are having the opportunity to be able to access college and university.

But I do have to say that I think there's some irony that in the programs you referred updates to before that — domestic violence, youth custody centre — if we don't provide those good supports, those children will not be in the place to be able to access the post-secondary education. If we don't provide the good supports early on, then we won't have children in care who are able to access those supports because they will be dropping out of school. They won't be able to access, because they won't have stable places. I think there's some irony there, in the other programs.

A last question on the issue of the youth custody centre. I wonder if you could let us know whether there was any discussion with your office around the closure and the impact of the closure of the youth custody centre. It's certainly been a frustration expressed by staff, expressed by the police forces, expressed by municipalities, who have not been included in that discussion. I just wondered if there was any discussion around an impact study or the impact of closing the Victoria custody centre, with your office.

M. Turpel-Lafond: First of all, on the decision to close the office, I was notified on the Sunday before the Monday that the decision was made public. However, the ADM of regional operations and others in MCFD have come to me and said that they're thinking about it because they have a mandate to save money. They presented different options to me in the past, and I said: "Listen, you cannot present an option that will see fundamental legal rights of children be comprised." I said: "This isn't an option unless you show me that you have an assessment and the rights are adequately protected."

This happened, as well, with respect to my office, when they decided to close the remand facility side for girls in Prince George. I opposed that, and I've seen the consequences of that, with girls in the north being taken down to Burnaby, girls very concerned about being exposed to more experienced youth who may be involved with gangs, for instance.

The financial expediency is an issue that should not trump the fundamental rights of children, so I was very clear to the ministry, any time they've raised this, that this is the wrong way to go at things. I appreciate that there will be officials in the department of treasury, the Ministry of Finance and other places that will want to look at: "How much money are you spending?" I'm not averse to that. I'm not ignorant about the reality of public governance.

However, you have to defend services that are under a particular regime. There is a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There is a Youth Criminal Justice Act. That's a federal statute that the province administers through its own provincial law.

My previous reports called for the need for an ADM for youth justice. We've lost that. We don't have a leader. Obviously, they're not looking at it in a full and balanced way. Decisions are being made for financial expediency that impact the lives of kids and, in the end, may result in a finding that the province did the wrong thing.

From my side, this has never had a blessing from the representative. It's a wrong-headed plan. It reflects a flawed thinking in the Ministry of Children and Family Development that you can just centralize children in one location and put them in a vehicle and drive them all over the province. It doesn't work.

Of course, the others in the system, whether they're
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judges who actually run the trials and find out the kid's asleep in the courtroom because they've been in a van since four in the morning…. Or how does the child receive legal counsel? It's pretty hard to give legal counsel when your client is driving around in a bus.

The ministry says: "Well, we'll skype, and we'll use the…." This is just not appropriate. It is completely inappropriate.

So in terms of advising me in advance, they raised it with me only to know what the response would be. It's not appropriate. It isn't done anywhere else. It shouldn't be done here.

D. Plecas: I'd first like to join the Deputy Chair in thanking you, Mary Ellen, for the work that you do and your office does. It's great.

The question I have relates to the matter of tuition fees for children in care — after care. Can you tell us exactly: what is the problem in making that happen?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, I've asked the 25 colleges and universities to waive tuition, which means you don't pay tuition — I'm not saying forever, but at least for the first number of years for a former child in care. That's asking colleges and universities to absorb that internally. Other places, maybe the government pays colleges and universities, or you have a third-party collection process.

What I'm saying in British Columbia is: we'll never get there. Just waive it. Colleges and universities, I feel, have a social obligation to make sure that, particularly, vulnerable young people are represented in their ranks. Furthermore, knowing their circumstance, bringing the diversity to the class and the environment of these young people is extremely valuable. So I'm asking the colleges and universities to waive it.

I'm so glad Vancouver Island University and the University of British Columbia have stepped up, and others will. That makes it so easy.

In fact, when I'm dealing with these former youth in care, they'll say to me: "I've been trying for a number of years to go, but I just can't get the money. I can't get the forms." Many of these young people can't even get their social insurance numbers. They've lost them. They've been in a youth shelter. Their lives are chaotic.

Many of us who are parents to adolescent and university-age or college-age children know how much work that you do to get your kid launched. You help them fill out forms. You make sure. You backfill. You provide all of that incredible financial and emotional support. We'll talk about the report in a bit — about youth leaving care. These young people have had none of that.

The ones that are there now — I can only tell you that they are so excited and successful. But when they realized that they would have a tuition waiver at Vancouver Island University, they were thinking of doing their school over ten years, working three part-time jobs, and even still they didn't think they were going to make it, because they were living, you know, in a basement suite with 12 other people who probably were not helping them study.

Now they actually are going to finish their program within the required three years, and they're thinking about the job they're going to do, which makes me think about the taxes they're going to pay to help build our society, and the healthy children that they will have because they are attached to a good workplace and a good environment and all of the positive things that we have in British Columbia for those families that have that.

The challenge is really getting college and universities, in what I appreciate are tough times, to waive tuition. I'm going to presidents, executives, boards of governors, and I'm telling them: "I want you to do this."

I've received good support from the Minister of Children and Families. She's very supportive of this, as well, and I'm grateful for that. But I want to see all 25 sign on, and I will not be happy until I have all 25 sign on. So I expect you'll be hearing a lot about this.

At the same time, I'm celebrating everyone that comes forward. You have to, in this work, actually celebrate every kid, just as any parent celebrates any kid that can make it through high school and make it into a trade, a profession, a college, a university or what have you. Sometimes they have little exits for a couple of years, as every parent knows, and then they come back. You have to celebrate that. We have to, as a province, celebrate that. We can't see 700 kids age out into a vacuum every year.

Our colleges and universities are stepping up in British Columbia, and credit to them. They're also enjoying what they're seeing. Vancouver Island University is relishing and enjoying. The president of Vancouver Island University, President Ralph Nilson — the committee may well want to hear from him, even about his success.

You know, he has lunch with the former kids in care. For the first time ever, they've met each other. It isn't meeting each other in a place of stigma and shame. They're meeting each other in a really positive way to say: "Well, we can kind of come out here and say we're going to make it."

I was really happy to see the social support that they have. By giving them enough, having enough people there and enough support, they actually are not hiding their heads in shame and saying: "I'm going to be the next bad statistic, so why should I even be trying?"

D. Plecas: How many individuals are we talking about each year? The second part would be: the notion of perhaps adjoining that to the existing student loan program, and to what extent it could be expanded to the whole notion of apprenticeship training and institutions outside the traditional universities.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, I mean, again I can defer
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a full discussion of this to when we talk about the report shortly. But we are dealing with 700 young people who age out of care. There are about 300 others who are aging out of youth agreements. They have actually been pushed out of care into independence, and they're in other places. So we're dealing with approximately 1,000 young people a year.

Your point is a very good one, which is that not every path is college and university. There are many, many paths. Many of them are not ready at 19 to take those paths, but they should be in apprenticeships and training. Our province has got a big push on apprenticeships and training. I'm very excited about that. I think most British Columbians are very welcoming and excited about that.

However, we know that if you want your child to become a plumber, which many British Columbians would, it's actually harder to become a plumber than it is to go to the University of British Columbia. You have to have a job lined up. You have to have an apprenticeship lined up. You have to have all those tools. And you have to have enough money in the bank that the child's going to be able to see three or four years ahead.

The kids that we're dealing with here can't even see beyond the end of their nose. They're in a shelter. They have one month, and they don't know where they're going next. They have the belongings on their back.

We can change that, but we have to look at that. That's why when we talk about the report, I will talk about some ways I think we can change that, that are deeper and earlier. But whenever we have an announcement in our province, whether it's on trades or whatever it is, we can never forget this population.

You will know that. I began this campaign in earnest, although I was unofficially working on it for a number of years, a year ago, in part because I was so upset when I was at the budget lockup that British Columbia was going to announce a registered education savings plan for all seven-year-olds, but they had forgotten about the kids in care.

I scrambled at the budget lockup, and they said: "Well, okay, Mary Ellen, we'll do what we can to get it for the kids in care too." That legislation was recently passed by you sitting here at this legislative session. So we took a year to get that through. But people will forget about these kids unless we make it and build it in.

I think we have a great opportunity. We're getting there, but we have to remember that if we don't make it happen, they will not make it happen. It's not because they're lazy, they're incompetent, or they aren't skilled. Their life circumstances are such that they just won't get there without a bit of support and help. But steer them in the right direction, and they're as resilient as any young person.

M. Bernier: Thank you, Mary Ellen. I always appreciate your passion and what you bring forward with this. Most people in this room probably have children and so can relate to some, if not all, of the issues.

I've got two things here. First, around the youth custody centre. I was asked to bring forward…. I don't want to sound non-sympathetic or downplay the issue, but I've received information and calls. Some of my colleagues in the room can appreciate this. When it comes to rural B.C…. Obviously, this is not a unique issue.

I look up in the Peace region, for instance. I know of situations where a youth might be in custody. If they're not able to be released on a promise to appear to a family who's accepting…. Because we only have a ride one day a week out of the region to the centre in Prince George, they can be held in the city cells. If they're arrested for whatever it might be on a weekend, they can be there until a Friday and then sit there in a vehicle all the way in to Prince George. I'm sure it might work in other parts, on the other side of the province — the same thing.

I only bring it forward just because it's not unique. People in my area, when they heard about what's happening down here, said: "Well, this is something we deal with too. We don't have centres in every area. What about us?" So they just wanted me to bring that forward and make sure that…. I know that it would be on your radar and that you would be more knowledgeable about it than myself. I'm not sure if you have a comment on that before I go to my second question, maybe.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I'd be happy to comment on that. I know the argument has been brought forward that there are young people placed in an inappropriate holding environment in a rural setting, and therefore, we should accept it in the cities. That is a flawed argument. It is inaccurate. I look at the counts and the numbers. The counts and numbers are small. Plus, if we think about it around the system….

It's sort of like saying to people in rural and remote situations in British Columbia and other British Columbians: "You're not going to get your brain surgery in Hazelton. We're going to shut down the brain surgeries in Vancouver and Victoria, and you're not going to get it either because they can't get it in Hazelton."

I mean, it's a completely backward way of thinking. When the government came forward to say, "Oh well, young people are locked up in police cells in rural places. It's not so bad there. We can have it in Victoria," that is completely flawed.

What happens in those rural settings with young people in police cells is completely inappropriate. I get complaints all the time. The government of B.C. renegotiated its policing contract and has a subcontract and a policy on the keep of prisoners that does not adequately address the issues of young people. It does not stand the test.
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The reason why it doesn't come forward is because young people sitting in those police cells in rural areas don't actually get a lawyer to take it on and challenge it. We would hope that we don't have to go to that extent to be able to bring these backwater situations forward. It is a backwater situation, what happens in rural settings for kids in police cells. There's no way around it.

When the government came out and said, "It happens to kids elsewhere; it's okay in Victoria," I had to slap my knee in laughter, saying: "Are you kidding me?" So we should shut down our urban hospitals and tell people there's not going to be any health care because there's no health care in rural areas? This is a flawed argument. It is inappropriate, and there is no advice.

I get complaints constantly about those issues, and the complaints are serious complaints, not to mention the liability issues. Why does the chief of police for Victoria not want to deal with it? Because, believe me, there are big liability issues for what happens on both sides of the bars with kids that are being held in police cells. It's not good. It's not appropriate. Because they're poor, they're vulnerable, they're aboriginal, nobody does anything. But we're supposed to change that situation. We're not supposed to go backwards. We're supposed to go forward.

M. Bernier: Thank you for that. I knew exactly what your answer would be — not that I wanted to bait the answer. But I knew what the argument….

M. Bernier: The whole point was, obviously, that rural B.C. has the same issues as anywhere else. They can be unique because it's rural, but children are children. We want to ensure that when we're looking at policies and procedures of how we're running the province and recommendations coming forward, we therefore have to recommend the issues of children in general and try not to be, let's say, regionally specific, because we have the same challenges everywhere.

My second point — I know you might touch on it, but just something to think about — is around the tuition waiver in education. I'm curious around what we have — let's say, the discussions around templates and guidelines around affordability.

The reason why I bring that up is we tend to always, in this room, by default or because of majority, talk about poverty, talk about issues in care, people in poverty. I just want to bring it forward that there are some, many — you would have the statistics — children who are in care from families who can afford it, children in care who come from upper-class, upper-middle-class families and who, for whatever issues — mental health issues, addictions issues — have been removed from the home and are in care.

There are other backstops, maybe, for those children, but they're not always attainable. I'm just curious…. When we go forward, we must be looking at….

There are, sometimes, means within the family setting to assist. I know we have some of those. But I'm just wondering where that discussion goes, because we don't want to set ourselves up for the tuition waiver issue. I completely understand and support the direction we're going, when you talk about the trades and education, to make sure we have a path for these children and some hope for these children.

What discussions or thought process would you put in around recommendations around where the parents' responsibilities fall in place, though?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, first of all, up to age 19 the state is the parent. When the state becomes the parent, if you have a birth parent, for instance, or a family of substantial means, they can obtain orders under the family law. There are ways to obtain orders.

When you're 19, the state's no longer the parent. Under the Family Law Act in B.C., a young adult can actually seek support — for instance, to do post-secondary education — from a parent. It depends on the legal status. It can be done, but the barrier is high. It's not like we actually have: "Oh, please call us up. We're the department of child support to help you get to college and university."

You also have a situation where…. The thinking is like this. I've had these cases. The thinking is very complicated. You have a really serious family breakdown for whatever reason. Sometimes there's a family breakdown, there's a new partner that rejects the child, and the child comes into care for good reason. The family may be a family of some means, but they've rejected the child.

When they turn 19, are they going to sue for child support so they can go to school? Well, they could. We've got to look at that option. But the bigger thing, from my perspective, is I really want to look at how we're going to get that family functioning again. If that young person actually sues for $300 a month to pay for living, it probably means their father will never speak to them again, because the father values whatever. We have to look at the dynamics.

Financial support is important. My first issue is getting a young person on their way, always telling young people that things that happen in families can be worked through. Time does heal a lot of wounds. People get older, wiser, more mature. Even people that do stupid things with their kids maybe will wise up.

Mostly, I don't want that child to be harmed again, to be told, as they face university: "Oh yeah, here's your $300, but you are never welcome home for Christmas — ever" or "Now your siblings will never talk to you, and we will have a vendetta against you." So the dynamic of what happens in families….

These are families where kids really have suffered
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— that class of high-conflict family breakdown, where people actually have resources and maybe have parental alienation claims. That's a severe, severe case. I mean, people punish the children terribly. They refuse to let them go to schools. They'll say: "I'll only support you if you never talk to your mother." These are just awful cases where good child development doesn't apply.

The better way, in my view, is to say: "Yeah, you can get support. Let's try and get your dad to support you without having to go to court. In the meanwhile, let's get your dad to support you by actually reconciling and talking."

The approach we need to take in our systems isn't about a penny to penny. It's about people needing the type of support they're going to need to make it as young adults. So there are cases that we do support where that does happen. I can tell you there are. But there are a lot of cases where those families are in just terrible condition, and the worst thing you'd want to do is to put the child in the line of fire in a family that's already proven that they've rejected the child.

M. Bernier: I just want to end it by saying I totally agree. The challenge is that we have to make sure systems are in place to recognize that, because the last thing you want is a child who, because a system is in place where it says there should be alternative means to support them, slips through the cracks because those means don't become realistic or realized. I just wanted to say that.

M. Karagianis: Mary Ellen, I wanted to return to the topic of domestic violence. It's been a grave concern. As the women's critic, I discussed in estimates with the Children and Families Minister the reality behind what the domestic violence office is about, the lack of real resources there and the fact that the domestic violence plan won't have any funding until 2015. I have been receiving calls both from the media and from other stakeholders asking about that — about why the domestic violence office doesn't actually have anything to offer up right now in the way of any kinds of supports or resources.

With no dollars actually flowing for even a plan until 2015, what do you think the highest priorities are here? Obviously, the issue around enforcing no contact…. That immediately is pushed into police and, obviously, municipal budgets to cover.

If you had recommendations on what kinds of priorities should, in fact, be effected as soon as possible to deal with what I see as a growing rash of domestic violence incidents, what would your recommendation be for immediate actions and immediate resources that need to be put out, available, to these communities and these families?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, first of all, around safety, safety requires good safety planning, removal of the perpetrator for a period of time and monitoring the perpetrator. So you need to have a good justice system that can remove and monitor the perpetrator and have an immediate, quick consequence. A domestic violence court is the best way to do that, with dedicated specialized teams that have a great deal of expertise and that use risk assessment well.

In the meantime, working with primarily women but other family members and children, you need intensive work. You need supervision orders. You need to support them, because often in families where there has been frequent violence, mothers in particular can lose perspective on the degree of risk that they face. Or because they've been left to deal with safety on their own, they don't have resources, so being attached up to victim services is crucial. A DV court helps with that.

The criminal justice side — we haven't announced anything new. The three-year domestic violence plan said: "We'll study it." Well, I've already recommended to get it going. They're going to study it? There's nothing to study. We have to do it. If you're going to respond to domestic violence, you have to do it.

Treatment options for perpetrators, particularly low-risk perpetrators so they don't become high-risk perpetrators — where are the treatment programs? Where's the support? They should have been investing in it.

Furthermore, I would say this. This has been an issue. I wanted a domestic violence plan. They came out with a domestic violence plan. I'm glad that they did, but it has no depth.

Furthermore, when they say they're spending $70 million a year on domestic violence, I can't, frankly, figure out what it is they're spending the money on, because I think they're spending less money than they were spending before, and they will not itemize for me what they're spending the money on.

It sounds like they're spending $70 million a year on new things. It's $70 million that they've teased out of other budgets that they've always spent, and there is no new money. You can't do more with nothing. We have a pledge to end violence in B.C. We have a blue-ribbon panel. I'm not going to pre-empt the work. I hope they take a serious look at domestic violence.

Again, I met with the chief judge recently. It is the second-largest class of offences that come through our criminal courts: violence against families. It is the largest class that comes through our child welfare system. And we have homicides — homicides that we have to continually look at around: are they preventable? A homicide is a tip of an iceberg. I've talked about this before.

We've recently had a spate of four domestic violence serious incidents and homicides — where children were in the home and either abducted or a part of this — in British Columbia. That is something that you read about in the newspaper and you learn about in your constituencies. Behind that is what's underneath that iceberg, which
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is the 99 percent of chaotic violence where there isn't an organized, appropriate community and justice system response on a daily basis.

What do I expect? I expect there to be real leadership on domestic violence in British Columbia. The Attorney General, the Minister of Children and Families and the provincial office of domestic violence should be pushing out initiatives that are proven to work every single day until we respond to that.

I certainly don't take any joy in having to investigate and report on the very same situation I've investigated and reported on again, which is: why can you have protective orders that are not enforced? Why is there no safety? Why do you have seven prior intakes, yet nothing happens in that family? These are crucial, crucial issues.

I appreciate your comment. That plan lacks depth. There's no money to it, and I'm not confident that we are actually spending more money today than we spent five years ago. I suspect we are spending less money and we are getting less for it.

J. Rice: I just wanted to ask about something that was in the media recently — it occurred in my community — which was a murder-suicide of a severely autistic teenager and a mother who, sort of, was at her wits' end. If you could make comment on that, and if you could comment on the services or lack thereof…. I guess that is something that has been reiterated in my community, that there are not proper supports for these children in my community.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, I'm aware of the situation in terms of what would appear at this point to have been a murder-suicide with a mom and a son. I think the first thing is to offer my condolences to the family. I've been in touch with the family. The family is gravely concerned about the situation.

The case is a reportable to my office. As you know from the work with this committee, I allow the coroner to complete their work to determine the cause of death and the police to complete their work to determine whether or not there are any other parties that may have been involved. That work is underway.

Around the issue of whether or not, in the northern setting, we have sufficient supports for children with special needs, whether they have autism or what have you, I think it's pretty clear on the record that I've said before. We are dealing, on an advocacy front, with multiple instances where families are very frustrated. Accessing intensive behavioural support resources in the home, whether you're in Kitimat, Prince Rupert or throughout the north, is a problem — a very serious problem.

Residential services. Sometimes young people need short-term residential stabilization. I was able to meet last week with representatives of the Provincial Health Services Authority, which is overseeing, for instance, the CAPE unit at Children's Hospital.

I had a chance to talk to them about why it is that these younger adolescents with autism that have serious behavioural issues aren't getting into their unit. They were very clear to me, saying: "Well, the pathway's not clear even in to get these provincial resources."

I'm very mindful about the concerns in the northern side of the province, where we have provincial resources, say, in Vancouver, and they can't get in. How does that affect people's lives? What is happening at the Ministry of Children and Families in those areas? The staff in those offices are in touch with me regularly, as well — the special needs staff. So there's a problem.

This case has come forward. It's a tragedy. We will make a decision internally, once others have done their work, about whether or not we investigate this case. Whether or not we investigate it, there is an issue, which is the opportunity for the ministry to strengthen resources there. There is a key opportunity to do that.

Families of children with autism receive a fund that they are expected to buy their services with. There are no services to buy in locations like the north. You can't buy intensive behavioural support services. There's nothing there. The ministry staff themselves tell me there's nothing to refer the family to.

What happens in the Kitimat, Prince Rupert, places? People get sent to Vancouver? That's not appropriate for families. We have to build those services. I'm always thinking about this, because I'm thinking to the future, where we're going to have, possibly, very significant economic development in that region. The government has a plan to have a real massive development in that area, which could bring a lot of wealth and value to that region. But what are the social impacts?

If we can't serve people today in that region, are we planning to serve them in the future? Where is the social impact on children of what we're doing today? I'm really thinking at the RCY about how we can look at that. For instance, on the domestic violence side when we catalogued what's available for aboriginal people in the northern part of the province on domestic violence, the provincial office of domestic violence brought back an empty binder to me.

When we catalogue what's available on special needs, what am I getting? We have to always take that focus geographically, so I appreciate the question. I am certainly engaged with the family, looking at that case seriously. It's a horrible, horrible tragedy. It has all indications at this point that there are going to be lessons to be learned here. Do we have to wait to learn them? That's a big issue for me.

I'm certainly engaged with MCFD on: what are you learning from this? I will be briefing this committee, I'm sure, in the future on what the progress of that is. Of course, I'm prepared to meet with you to discuss it fur-
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ther as well.

I guess if I could just make a comment and reiterate that I do offer my condolences to the family, as well, and I do want to respect their privacy. But it has been all over the provincial media, so it's not a secret.

Since this case, the learning for me, as the MLA, is that people have come forward to me and said: "Yes, I may get funding, but I don't have any opportunities to spend this funding on my autistic or special needs child." So if I could just add my voice to that as well.

Others have contacted me who have left Prince Rupert, where I live. They have said that they left because they couldn't provide the services or there were no services for their child. In our MCFD office there's such a high turnover of staff that they're not necessarily…. I mean, I don't want to knock them, but it's just that they might not have, necessarily, the training or local knowledge of our community issues.

As well, within the Northern Health umbrella, only one speech pathologist. Again, those sorts of specialties are not consistent in the north.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I agree with you fully. You know, I have reported on the situation in that region before around issues for children with complex special needs. But where special needs and a sudden deterioration of behaviour go together, what do you do? We always have to plan in advance for the fact that there will be children and families that need certain types of supports. All of us wish that didn't happen — right? — but it does happen, and you need those supports.

What's available in those communities…. I'm certainly deeply concerned and have been for some time about the resources there. I have provided advocacy and engaged with families who have had to move because it was the only way that they could find some service. Those families are very unhappy about that. Often you have one parent staying back earning an income and the other parent, with the child, receiving support.

Even issues like the provincial health services agency and the health authority…. Telesupport around proper psychiatric services for young people with dual-diagnosis special needs to be able to help advise a local team — even that is achievable. But why isn't it in place? Are we using our provincial health services effectively in those regions?

These are big issues, and I think they're important. Again, this committee hears about this occasionally, but this case really has shone a light on it. When the staff in the MCFD office is calling me to say, "We can't do our job," I do tend to pay attention to what they say. Then I look at whether or not it's true. Are they just griping because they can't do their job, or do they, in fact, have nothing to refer families to?

In this instance they certainly suggest to me that there was nothing to refer the family to, but that's not acceptable. So I will be looking at that situation very carefully and looking at that region, because I think we will need to cast a very strong light on it, given not only this case but the other concerns that this case has brought forward.

M. Stilwell: I have a couple of questions going back to the tuition waiver, which maybe you'll want to address later when we talk about the report. But I do just want to also offer our sadness and condolences with respect to the recent episode with the mother and her autistic son — it is indeed a terrible tragedy — and also to comment, like everyone here, how shocked and horrified I am at the recent spate of domestic violence incidents that ended in murders of women. You just can't ignore what has happened in the past week.

With respect to the tuition waiver — I know Pres. Ralph Nilson; it's not surprising that he would lead in this area — I do know from previous work that, first of all, a tuition waiver is a significant chunk of money. But as you know, most of the debt that students acquire in post-secondary is actually for living expenses. So I am interested in hearing how this will go forward.

I hope and suspect that part of VIU's plan will include help in navigating the academic and financial planning so that these students don't end up in worse shape. As you know, you cannot declare bankruptcy for default of student debt. So setting these students up for as much success as they can get with financial navigation, which is frequently lacking, is something I would like to hear about.

Then numerically, the 700 plus 300 that are coming to post-secondary age, at least, if not capacity…. Presumably, we would be able to see, three years before, which students are most likely to succeed and benefit from going to post-secondary and which students should be, perhaps, encouraged to start their trades in high school when possible and those kinds of things — how you would see that working — to triage and advise for success earlier on, when other young people are also beginning to make these plans, you know, in high school.

M. Turpel-Lafond: First of all, the issue of the other supports. Tuition is major because it opens a door, but you can't really go through that door if you don't have anything in your backpack. You do need some living expenses. When we think about what we do in a family setting…. We'll talk about this around the report, but most people who have young adult children or adolescent-age children know that you provide all kinds of things.

You help buy some clothes. You may help with a vehicle, with transportation. You may help backstop because
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there is a sudden expense. Textbooks cost more than they thought.

You want them to learn good life skills. You want them to learn how to work, but that's not going to be conceivable — that your own child is going to be able to work enough to pay all their living expenses. But you want them all to show initiative.

I think it's important, from my perspective as representative, that I'm not advocating some type of a nanny state, that we just give a handout to people. I believe that you need to work to get ahead, and you need to learn the value of good work. I certainly believe it as a parent. I believe it as Representative for Children and Youth, and I think it is a British Columbia value.

But these are young people, where…. They don't have any of that backstop. There isn't the used couch. "Oh, here's your couch. We'll set you up in your first home. We're going to help you out a little bit."

What is impressive about this initiative, and Vancouver Island is a good one, is that we went into it knowing that there were going to be other supports needed. We did create, with the help of Coast Capital, a fund that the Vancouver Foundation is administering to be able to cover off some of those other expenses.

While we expect young people to work, seek out loans, we also know that we need to incentivize this, and we need to consider what a parent would do. We have to have that thinking.

I've submitted to the committee a research paper that I've had done, because I have a very positive association with Dr. Amy Salazar. She's a professor in the University of Washington School of Social Work. She's been evaluating, in the U.S., a group of programs where kids have left foster care and had post-secondary success. You'll see that we've submitted to you some of the factors associated with success.

Ironically, what they found…. If you read it, it's very interesting. I'm not saying that we're going to see the same thing in Canada, but it's interesting to learn. They found that the academic challenges were among the least problematic — that, actually, kids that had done very poorly but were put in good environments all of a sudden rose to the occasion. But the economic barriers, the trauma — these are areas of social support. These are areas where they needed support.

I don't know if we'll replicate that in Canada, but this is why we should analyze it. You're absolutely right, and I think you know from your previous experience, that we do know who these young people are early on, but we don't pay attention to what we think.

Now, any parent in this room or any room in British Columbia will know that you may have your first child, where you learn a lot and realize, "Gee, I should have done things differently," but after you've had a couple of kids and got them through the system, you know these are the steps we have to take early to plan.

Plan, plan, plan — you plan for the best. You don't always expect the worst, but you also plan for the worst, and you get people through by support, support, support. Our social-serving systems need to have that mentality, and they don't. We need to change that. Certainly, our Ministry of Children and Families needs to do better.

We'll talk about it around the report, but the thinking is not about a big handout, a big social program — that we're going to make it easy for one group to do it and make it harder for someone else. It's about getting it done.

Absolutely, we saw the Vancouver Island University piece — the mentor on campus. When someone doesn't show up for school…. Thirty percent of college-aged students in British Columbia drop out of school by October. Well, that's even preventable. I don't like to see all those kids drop out of school, no matter what their background. Someone needs to be paying attention. Like any parent would say: "Well, how's that first term of school going?"

For these kids, they get the attention on them early on. And President Nilsen having them in and getting them working together — you can really see the leadership, right? That's a good example. I want to make sure other colleges and universities go through that.

In the end, we can really support families too. This is a way we can support a lot of people on the margins, not just these kids but other people who fall down. In many, many families, their children can't navigate that system. They're ashamed and embarrassed.

Well, you know, a lot of kids have problems. We need to actually make these systems more responsive to the real lives of families. That's a good opportunity, I think, when we talk about the work for children and families. It is for the deeply vulnerable, but it is valuable for a whole range. I mean, immigrant and newcomer young people in our colleges and universities frequently don't have success.

There are many, many chances for us to improve it. I know, with your background and knowledge, some of these are not difficult fixes if we actually put our minds to it. Certainly, credit to our college-university sector for stepping forward — because they are, and they're enjoying success.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you, Mary Ellen. As the committee members probably realize, we've gone way over time with regards to our schedule in our busy agenda. We're going into the report, which you've alluded to quite a bit, and there seems to be keen interest in questions — really good questions and very, very thorough answers.

I might want to suggest, since we've all read the report, that you don't take the 30 minutes. Take 15 or even less to go through the report, and then throw it out to the committee members to ask questions. We're learning a lot and benefiting a lot from the answers to the questions. I didn't want to limit the amount of questions and
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the timing for the answers.

If the committee is in agreement on that…. Vice-Chair, Carole, are you okay with that?

Mary Ellen, if you wouldn't mind cutting the actual reporting of the report…. We've already read it. Everybody has read it. Then allow committee members to have more time for questions, because we've only really got, in this segment, another 35 minutes total. Okay? Thank you.

Representative for Children
and Youth Report: On Their Own:
Examining the Needs of B.C. Youth
as They Leave Government Care

M. Turpel-Lafond: I'm delighted to do that, Madam Chair, and thank you for that direction.

I won't go through the context of the report, because you have had a chance to read it. One area, though…. I did want to invite Prof. Grant Charles to speak a little bit about the methodology and how this report fits into evaluations that are or are not done for this cohort in British Columbia and throughout Canada.

How we actually did this report…. I know we describe it, but we did a lot of outreach. We interviewed young people. We took a bit of a different approach in the sense that we didn't do surveys. We have some valuable information. We did some face-to-face engagement.

We've been talking this morning a lot about the good stories around tuition waiver and so on. Unfortunately, around this report, those are the minority stories still. We are dealing primarily with young people who are aging out to the abyss, and we need to look at a variety of issues in their lives.

Just before Professor Charles has a chance to describe a bit about the background and our research here and our ongoing work…. There was a very good report from the Conference Board of Canada. I've had it circulated to the committee members, and it's been referenced. The Conference Board of Canada did a piece of work that we watched and we've looked at, and I'd really like to promote that we do it here. We've talked about this at the committee.

They took a group of young people in care and looked at what the potential cost savings is to government of actually doing a good job to plan for them. We are now doing more economic modelling around the value of this investment, because I appreciate that we live in times where we can't initiate and start up social programs if we don't think they're going to be of value. We certainly are of that view.

I was grateful for the Conference Board of Canada and for the assessment they did and feel very strongly that it can be replicated in British Columbia, from what we know. That is a very big undertaking, to look at it here. I put that out to the committee just at the front to say that we have a sound economic policy reason for doing this as well as a social policy piece.

With that, I wanted to just invite Professor Charles to speak a bit about how we did it and why this research is important. This phase is a very important phase.

G. Charles: Good morning. This was a difficult report to gather information on, because we don't have a lot of information about these young people in British Columbia or in Canada. We really don't know who's in care. We've got broad, sweeping understandings of it but not the particulars of it.

For example, we're not really clear on which kids go to university or college or into apprenticeship training and which don't and why. We just don't have that knowledge. We've got our guesses on why that is, but it made it very difficult to gather information here.

What we did, though, as the representative mentioned, is that we talked to young people, foster parents, social workers in the system and just asked them in an open-ended way: "What was your experience? What do you think is going on?" I think if you look at the report and some of the quotes there, they quite capture the overall sense of what people think about what's going on in the system.

The other thing we did was look at all the jurisdictions in Canada, look at what's provided by the other provinces and territories. We looked into the States to see what was being done in the different states and then into Australia and Great Britain.

We really wanted to know how we compared to the other jurisdictions, where we were and what they knew. Generally, what we found, though, is that Canada is quite far behind other jurisdictions, meaning the U.S. and the U.K. and Australia, in terms of supporting young people that have been in care to go on to school or even to make a successful transition into adulthood.

Successful transition into adulthood means that, at the end of a number of years, they're productive citizens and taxpayers — that, really, they're benefitting from our society but also contributing to it. We looked at that.

We saw data coming out of the U.S. They've been following, in one study in the U.S., young people in care for a number of years. They started when they left care, and they've been following them each year since then — so a longitudinal study.

There's really valuable information coming out of that, although we're not sure if it really applies to Canada. The U.S. system is significantly different than ours. Even what it's like to come out of care is different there because of the lack of health care there. At least the young people coming out of care in Canada can access health care.

What we saw, again, was a lot of lack of information. We couldn't find figures anywhere, for example, on how much money it costs to set up a young person going into an apartment coming out of care or even coming out of
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their parents' home. The best we came up with was the estimate in the report from the U.K. that says it costs roughly $4,000 to buy towels, sheets, blankets, salt and pepper — all of that.

We know that that doesn't happen for young people coming out of care in this province or in many jurisdictions. Even if they're getting support as they leave, those kinds of costs aren't there.

We also looked at what it costs to live on your own in Canada as a young person, what it's like in terms of getting work. What do you need — not just the kids in care but young people in general?

We looked at the trends that have been happening with young people — again, generally, and the kids in care — in terms of who stays at home. We know that more and more young people are staying in the parental home or leaving and coming back in a way that didn't happen when we were younger.

It wasn't unusual that when I left home, I left home. I never moved back again. It was nice to have my folks there, but I was gone. That's not been my experience with my children, unfortunately. Or fortunately — it's great to have them back at home.

We looked at that. One of the things we found that's quite interesting is that Canadian social policy and B.C. social policy for young people is based upon the concept that there will be parental support that will continue as they mature into adults. Now, if you're a young person in care and you leave care at 16 or 18 or 19, that support ends for the most part.

Just because you've got a family that you could even reconnect with doesn't mean that family can support you. If you've grown up in a family with alcoholism and you've experienced violence against yourself and that's why you've come into care, there's no guarantee when you're 19 and you try to reconnect with your parents that they're going to be any healthier than they were before.

There are lots of anecdotal examples of people actually getting school scholarships, university scholarships or something, where the parents end up taking the money from the young person. That exploitation that may have happened when they were younger can continue into adulthood.

We looked at those factors. We particularly compared against Ontario, which at this point has the best support system in the country. You'll see in the appendix of the report really concrete examples of what they're doing.

Now, we don't know the outcomes of a lot of that, because most of this has just come in, in the last two years. We know that young people who succeed in going into apprenticeship programs or colleges or universities need a couple of things. They need support before.

They have to have a dream about going. If I want to be an electrician, I don't…. I shouldn't say this, because my son went the exact opposite. He went to university and then came back into the trades. But most of us have a dream when we're an adolescent that we can go into the trades or college or university. A lot of these young people, because of what's happened in their lives, don't have that dream, and there's nobody to dream with them.

If you look at the number one question that parents, around grade 9, start asking their kids, it is: "What do you want to do?" That continues until the poor child decides what they're going to do and leaves home and gets away from us asking that question.

Lots of young people in care don't have that. We've got really good examples of young people in care who have done tremendous things — gone on to university, gone on to advanced degrees, gone into medicine, all kinds of things like that — but they're really the exception. They're people that had a dream from a very early age and filled it.

We need to have somebody helping that person see that there's a future, which is harder than it sounds given their life experiences to that extent. If you spent the first ten years of your life in an abusive relationship, then problems continue when you're going on.

The other thing they need is support for educational success in high school and grade school. They need mentors to help them do that. They need people that acknowledge that they can actually achieve something with the right support, and they need stability in placements, which a lot of kids don't have. Every time you move placements, you tend to move schools, which puts you further and further back.

They also need a recognition that many of these kids are developmentally behind their peers, not that they won't catch up, but they're behind because of their life experiences. If you're thinking about all the trauma you've had, you're not paying as much attention to grade 3 math — or something like that.

Then they need support once they get into college and universities. About half of the U.S. states now have supports, tuition supports, and many of those jurisdictions also have mentorship programs and support programs for young people that are in college and university and apprenticeship programs. Again, the representative mentioned that. Generally, what we need are the proper supports when these kids are in care, with a real focus on making up for educational gaps that they've had.

We need an understanding that they may be delayed a bit in terms of going to college and university. We have a system now that, for the most part, if you're doing well and you continue a path from high school straight into college, university or apprenticeship, you'll get some support. But if there's a gap there, when you're struggling for two or three years like many young people do, trying to figure out what the heck they want to do with themselves, it's really hard to then get support when you're finally at a point where you can go to college or university.

We need all these really comprehensive supports. They're not necessarily expensive supports. We've found
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in the U.S. that it really doesn't take a lot to get some of this going. Some examples, like the Eastern Michigan University: There they have a caseworker on campus from their department of human resources or their child protection branch to work with these young people full time to help them navigate through the system, to call them to make sure they're getting up in the morning, like parents do. When we have those kinds of supports, these kids do well.

M. Turpel-Lafond: If I can…. What I wanted to do — I appreciate Grant's presentation — is just really quickly touch on the recommendations, and then to explain a bit. When we do develop recommendations, we do consider what's practical, what's achievable and what points in British Columbia might be the key points to push for change. I just will really quickly go through those recs. There are not a lot of them. Some of them concern members of this committee.

The first recommendation is that the Ministry of Children and Family Development establish a youth secretariat. Now, I make that point because even though it's the Ministry of Children and Family Development — there's no "youth" in that — they do have a mandate up to 19, and they have been running programs somewhat off the side of their desk.

I did push in my term as representative for them to get amendments to the CFCSA to be able to do agreements with young adults, and I've pushed hard. But they don't have a single focus for young people — this has been a concern to me — inside MCFD. They need a clear youth secretariat. If they did, today I'd be appearing with, probably, someone from the youth secretariat to come and tell you what happened to the 700 kids that aged out of care.

They could be a point of lead across government so that when the government is announcing a major initiative with trades and apprenticeships, they won't forget that there's a cohort of young people that need support here. Right now that doesn't exist. There isn't sufficient youth leadership in MCFD. They don't routinely engage with young people. There isn't a youth advisory committee in every region actively working.

The relationship with the Federation of Youth in Care, which is an important organization…. It's regional. It's valuable. I so much support that organization. It isn't as strong as it could be because, in part, in my view, the ministry isn't strong enough on a youth focus. All of these areas need improvement.

It's always easy to not face the young people that you serve. Young people in care in British Columbia who are on youth agreements may have worker upon worker upon worker. The ministry accountability structures at headquarters, the minister — they're very insulated from ever actually seeing and working with young people. While I'm delighted to provide advocacy support, I think they need to change their structure so they're directly in tune with this developmental stage of youth and more thinking about what a parent would think about, which is: "When is my young person in this family going to be more independent and sustaining? What is it that they need, and how can we support them?"

The first recommendation was that youth secretariat. The youth secretariat should be leading a collaboration across these other ministries that touch down on young people — Education, Advanced Ed, Social Development, Health, etc. — and they should have a good partnership with youth in care. They should also make sure there are regular evaluations of the programs that are there.

As Grant said, there are programs. The government will invest in very important things that I so much support. Recently they put money in the Y in Vancouver to a Strive program, to look at supporting a group of young people. It's a fantastic initiative. I'm impressed with it. I support it.

There's Aunt Leah's program in the Lower Mainland, another good program where MCFD does invest. It's geographically limited. It's valuable, but we always have to look at: is this scalable throughout the province? Will this work for everyone? Who gets in? Who gets out? What are the outcomes? Is it working? Are we getting the investment?

I don't want them not to make the investment, but we don't know what we're getting for the investment in terms of outcomes. This committee, and you as legislators, need to know that. I want that youth secretariat to get on that and really do the follow-up. It's always easy to push the money out the door and say, "Here's some money. Go solve our problem," but did it work? Then we find out that maybe it could work differently.

Baseline and longitudinal data around the outcomes of these young people are important — and really looking at it. I raise that because we've talked about this in this committee in prior reports, and I frequently update the committee, again at a fairly granular level.

How many kids in care this year took math 12? How many kids wrote the exam for socials 10? How many participated? I expect to know that as representative, and when I call the Ministry of Children and Families, they don't know the answer because they don't ask the question. Then I, in turn, go to Ministry of Education, and we drill down and we find out the answers. It's not easy to get that answer, and I think it should become routine.

A youth secretariat needs to make that routine, to make sure: "Oh, my goodness. Why didn't anybody write the test again this year? How did we not get them there? How come they did write the socials 10 but nobody passed it?" These are such basic issues any parent pays attention to and focuses on. We're not doing it.

Youth focus, youth secretariat with leadership is really important, knowing how people are actually doing.
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Working to solve easily solvable problems, like making sure young people can get health, dental and vision care as they age out of care so that isn't going to be a big barrier to them functioning well, making sure that they have access to support and services.

One of the recommendations in recommendation 1, and I'll speak to this, is the Public Guardian and Trustee in British Columbia. Catherine Romanko is our guardian and trustee. They run superb programs and services. They've done a program recently, with some private sector money, on financial literacy for children in care — a really good program. We need to have a youth secretariat really partnering on the financial literacy piece because a big part, as Grant mentioned…. There is the exploitation of young people. Let's say they suddenly come into money, whether it's social assistance or…. It's gone.

One of the reasons I promoted tuition waivers is that I didn't want these young people to actually have the $5,000 cheque in hand to pay for their tuition, because they're preyed upon, sometimes by their own families and others, and that would never make it to the tuition payment. I want it to be a direct waiver. No money changes hands until we can get some financial literacy going.

The youth secretariat needs to have it. They also need to have more engagement with young people. I have recommended…. This is a very key thing, again. People around this table will know this. From a political perspective around how political organizations work today, compared to how they worked in the past, MCFD does not have a social media policy to allow them to stay connected with young people, whether that be through Facebook or Twitter. They need to change their own way of running.

If they had a youth secretariat, the youth secretariat would tell them. Probably the first thing they would tell them is: young people don't want to call you on a land line. They want to text you. They want to have social media. They want to stay in touch. MCFD needs to come into the 20th and 21st centuries and have a social media policy so they can stay connected to young people. Even younger kids are using social media, but especially youth.

There's a simple issue. I want to push that ministry: get your social media policy out there; stay connected to young people. Young people are already not connected to youth workers and others. There's no single point of place that you can go to, even for these savvy kids, who may be marginalized, but their life is still there. If they could navigate those resources, they probably could find them better.

MCFD needs to come into the 20th and 21st centuries, so part of my recommendation is: get a social media engagement policy so that you can actually communicate with young people the way they want to communicate.

It's hard to believe we have to recommend it, but we have to recommend it, track it and report back: are you in there yet or not? As you can imagine, inside MCFD there are people that want to push it. Other people say: "Oh, I don't think we can do it because of privacy." Well, you're missing…. You're not where young people are if you're not going to do it. You have to do it.

The second recommendation — and this speaks to the point Grant made and some of the questions earlier about schools…. This is to the Minister of Education. Both under the School Act and the Independent School Act, starting in grade 6, I want proper career counselling for kids in care — in grade 6; not grade 12, not grade 11, but in grade 6. Why? Because you begin thinking about the transition. You come into middle school and the transition to high school.

The conversation Grant mentioned — which is "What do you want to do?" — is a really important one. I want to see not only that they start the planning, that they mandate it, but that they report out on how the planning is going. Too many of these young people never get in. That counselling office is: "They've moved schools." They're like: "It's so far beyond what they need." But we have to start doing that. We need to start planning for them. When we see that they aren't making it in school, we don't intervene at grade 12 when they're going to get a school leaving certificate instead of actually a Dogwood. We intervene earlier.

Recommendation 2 is all about the education system — early and effective intervention. Although we have certain, let's say, dysfunctions in our education system in British Columbia, this is a recommendation that is achievable. I also do direct it to the independent schools and the superintendent for independent schools, because many children in care are in independent schools. I'm not confident that the degree of planning is adequate there either. So we need to make sure that happens.

The third recommendation is really about this issue of expanding foster care on a case-by-case basis beyond the age of 19. In Saskatchewan and Ontario it already goes to 21. I've provided you today with a copy of the U.K. Children (Leaving Care) Act and the trends that are underway in the U.S. The trend is to expand foster care beyond 19. What is the magic age? I'm not taking a position to say what the magic age is. I'm not saying to do everything overnight. I'm saying to stage it, but look on a case-by-case basis for what is appropriate.

Those young people who are actually doing well…. It's ironic. It's sort of the talented-tenth model. People who are doing well — let's just keep doing well with them for a few more years. And then learn about the people who aren't doing so well, who don't want to be connected to a stable home environment, and figure out how we can capture them. But let's keep those kids that are in foster care at 19. They're almost ready to make those transitions. Let's just let the foster parents keep them for a few more years.

Make appropriate financial and other arrangements.
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Right now foster parents are often penalized. If you keep the foster youth in your home past 19, you then won't get another placement. Or it becomes that you could actually be punished. They do it under the table.

Foster families. Let me just speak not on behalf of them but in support of them. They provide a lot of emotional, financial and other supports. They are actually dipping into their own resources to support these kids. No one is compensated fully for this. It isn't a profession that people enter into.

There are always these situations where there are sort of abusive areas, but rank-and-file foster families in B.C. are incredibly supportive and want to keep supporting. In fact, they're the ones that are phoning me at 19 and saying: "Everything was so great, and now it's a disaster. Please, can you do something?" And I know what the "do something" is. Can we just leave them in that home for two more years, because they're almost launched?

I want the CF and CSA amended to allow us on a case-by-case basis to keep those kids attached. That's a great thing, because foster parents…. We always look at it, when it comes to families: who brushes the child's hair? Who makes sure they get their teeth brushed? That's in the early years. Well, when they're 19 and 20, who makes sure they get up in the morning and get to school? Who makes sure, if there's been a sudden deterioration in their mental health and they're not coming out of their room…? Someone actually knocks on the door and says: "Hey, you haven't been out of your room for two days. Get out of your room." I mean, these are the basic things that young adults need.

Extension of foster care — we really need to look at it. I want MFCD to promote discussion of this. I'd like them to do a white paper, a discussion of how they could do it. Identify the options. I'm not telling them what to do. Identify the options. Bring the options, for instance, to this committee, where this committee can look at it.

So my fourth recommendation really goes to members of the committee and with respect, because I know you set your own agenda. It's not up to me to set an agenda for you. That's why it has no time frame on this recommendation. My recommendation is that if MCFD can do some groundwork, it would be a good opportunity to have some youth-leaving-care hearings perhaps in the future.

I appreciate not in the immediate future — you have a busy agenda — but in the future, think about that opportunity to hear directly from so many of the young people we've heard from. I think you would find it to be extremely valuable. I also think it would be very empowering for these youth, because they really say to me repeatedly that they don't feel heard. The ministry doesn't return their call. They're not on social media. They're not connected with anyone. They honestly do not understand when I say there's a standing committee at the Legislative Assembly, and their job is to make sure you get…. The state is the parent and does a good job.

The idea that there could be even an opportunity for them to speak, I think, is hugely valuable and important. Of course, my office would work closely with you.

Ontario did do this. They had youth-leaving-care hearings. They presented a very good report. They made some strong recommendations. I mean, within six months the youth submitted a report called My REAL Life Book.

You remember when we looked at planning, I talked about the life book. Kids at 19 get a little file. Their picture every year in school is supposed to be some information about them. But very often they get an empty file. There's no picture from grade 2. There's no material for them.

I was very struck by this recently. I attended a high school graduation fair where the kids who were graduating from high school at this particular school…. They lay out in front of them at a table all the work through their high school years — the teams they were on, the photos. The parents and others come by and celebrate their kids' graduation.

Well, I attended that particular high school. There were two kids in care. I knew who they were, and they were sitting at a desk with nothing in front of them. They were in really bad shape. The foster mom was there too, and I talked to her about how things were going. It was so humiliating, even though they have a great foster mom who's been trying to backfill, that they didn't have a life book. They had nothing to put in front of them to say: "This is my work from grade 9. This is the sports event I was in."

These kids in Ontario…. It's not surprising that after they had their committee hearings, they said: "Here's my life book. I want to have a real life book, which actually looks at the goals and recommendations I have for your system, because when I aged out of care, I had nothing in my file. I want to give you something to put in your file." I continue to see that in British Columbia.

We have to be mindful. Frequently we have these things at schools, like moms day, fathers day, grade 12 forums. Then there are the kids in care with nothing in front of them. That is just not acceptable. It really isn't acceptable. I don't even think it's good for mental health of people to make them do that. At the same time, you don't want to excuse them from it.

It just struck home how much their experience…. You know, sitting there thinking: "I bet they would have something to tell." There are people who actually really want you to succeed and want you to have a presentation here today. That's a little bit different than what we're seeing, which is the empty desk. I'd encourage you to consider that as a committee.

I'll leave it there. I know you probably have a lot of questions. I can also provide any information that committee members need, because we did meet with over 24 communities in six regional tours in doing this. So we
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did meet in many of your constituencies with those who serve young people and with young people themselves. I'm happy, on any local or regional side, to address concerns that you might have.

D. Plecas: Professor Charles, I know you know this, but one of the things that strikes me in reading this…. I say this as someone who has spent 35 years teaching university. If somebody were to ask me what one of the single biggest reasons is that people don't succeed in post-secondary and why we've had this, for decades running, abysmal track record of retention, more than anything, it's a consequence of our inability in post-secondary to pay attention to the factors associated to student success.

When I look at what goes on at virtually every post-secondary institution in this province, they haven't given proper attention to that. I think that with all you're saying here, that issue needs to be highlighted as part of what we can do to correct this situation.

I also think it needs to be within the framework of respecting that most students won't do well. There's always the risk — and no one is more guilty of this than post-secondary institutions — of focusing on those who succeed and punishing those who don't.

We say: "We'll help you for a while" — I mean, everybody says that — "and boy, are we going to cut you off fast. By the way, we're not even going to let you in the door unless you're a demonstrated success. And if you're not, we're going to set up a few little games you can play so that at the end of the day you can have a start."

I just caught one sentence from this Conference Board of Canada report, referring to the high percentage, 25 percent of students, who drop out who say that it's a consequence of course work. Boy, is that true, and probably a gross understatement.

What you're trying to do, I think, is wonderful — long overdue. I think it just needs to have that…. We're making sure in the exercise that universities get it. It's not just about letting somebody in the door. Again, I would ask this question of them: how many of them have a single course in student success? I already know the answer to that. It's virtually none. That's pretty pathetic when we consider that it's such an important variable on whether or not people succeed. If you could comment on that, perhaps.

G. Charles: Yeah, you know at UBC, the first week of school…. We call it orientation week; I call it zombie week, because there are a few thousand students walking around with blank looks on their faces, bumping into things. I mean, they're just overwhelmed by the place. That's no different than when I taught at college. It was the same sort of thing.

If that's happening with young people who have supportive families and people that are asking how they're doing on a daily basis and willing to travel across the province to drop in to see them if they need help…. If it's that hard, and we lose 30 percent of students in the first year — and that number has stayed relatively consistent over the years — then imagine how hard it is for somebody who's trying to do that on their own without family support. The fear, even, that anybody has going to a place like UBC or UVic or anywhere — just make that so much bigger for youth in care who have nobody helping them.

I think your point is an excellent one. What young people in general need for us to have success…. The 30 percent dropout rate — the millions of dollars that costs us as taxpayers in a year is just outrageous, but for them to have success, they need systems that are welcoming to them and they need people who can help them get through the doors and walk those paths.

I remember with my first child, trying to get him registered in university. I'm a prof, and I was just going: "What?" I couldn't even think of what it would be like for him to sit there by himself to try to get his courses done.

I think the representative does a great job in the report of saying that if we want this to be successful, we have to be doing changes at multiple levels. They're not huge changes. In many cases it's just reallocation of what we're doing and a focusing of it, but we do have to pay attention. It's such a waste.

D. Plecas: I just want to say this, to emphasize this. There needs to be a thinking in post-secondary that every kid is a star and every kid can succeed beyond their wildest dreams if you structure that educational experience properly. That somehow hasn't sunk in to that whole collection.

G. Charles: No, and it really is a waste to us collectively. I talked to a young person who, against all odds…. I would have never bet that this could have been possible. He had got accepted into medical school — a youth in care — and he was so terrified that he wasn't going to be able to go because the support was ending. He was out of the foster home. He had no support. The foster parents wanted to stay connected, but they were going to be punished. I don't mean that people were purposely punishing them, but they were going to lose something by continuing to support him. Of course they were going to continue to support him, but not in the way they could.

I don't know what happened to that young man, if he actually ever went to medical school. It's difficult to get into medical school — not as difficult as getting into plumbing, as Mary Ellen mentioned, but difficult — and I don't know if he did it, but what a waste if he didn't, because he was an incredible young man.
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M. Turpel-Lafond: Just to follow up on that, quite apart from the fact that Grant's clearly a helicopter parent…. I'm more of a trapline parent. I think you just drop the kids and let them figure their way. In any event, between that there's…. I don't know what the prudent model is. I think the challenge around the college and university side….

I think this addresses a key thing. It's outside the representative's mandate to evaluate the education system in B.C., but certainly, when I look at things like no kid in care taking math, not succeeding, then I look at the math and think: "Is this conceptually appropriate for all kids? How come all these other kids failed too?"

Whenever I scratch the surface, I seem to find a bigger problem, which is: "Well, it can't be possible that only 25 percent of the kids in grade 12 take math 12 and succeed. What about the other 75 percent?" They're not conceptually able to do it, yet we're supposed to have one of the best education systems in the world.

I can't answer those issues except to say that when we look at some of these things that really don't have a lot of regular reporting and oversight, it would appear that we sometimes open up a bunch of other issues. Nevertheless, around the pathway…. We need to make the pathway easier for these kids. You're right. Colleges and universities need to be more supportive toward students, and they need to be accountable for what they're doing.

My view, though, is that they need to represent the entire student population. Children come from every ethnocultural background in British Columbia. They come from every socioeconomic strata. They come from every parenting structure. We should have a fair representation of kids from all of those environments succeeding, and I can't say we have that.

I can see some of the success we're having. Then we end up having, as Grant has said, a bit of an aha moment, with the VP of student services saying: "You know, we really don't do very well on these other kids."

It's a learning opportunity, because actually we're talking about the social and emotional development of young people. It isn't just about fulfilling course requirements. That's not a bad discussion to have in British Columbia, but I can just say that it doesn't really happen anywhere.

I think university presidents get together, college…. Advanced Education may look at it, but they don't produce anything on social-emotional well-being of students and if we can improve it.

Obviously, the representative's office can't do all of this work, but we expect those ministries to also do it. Of course, this committee can invite those ministries to come and talk about who's going to colleges and universities, what their service contracts are, what the agreements are around the public funding and what their priorities are. These are all positive.

We've had a very good reception on this issue. I will not be satisfied until we have 25 colleges and universities signed on. We've had a good reception, but we have now opened a can of worms, and we're going to have to look at those issues. They're important issues for all British Columbians.

D. Donaldson: Thanks for the report. I'm going to back up a step, I think, from the post-secondary part of the discussion. It's based on my experience in remote, rural, primarily First Nations communities in the last 25 years. I think that it's not just there, because the work I did in that field leads me to believe that it's a shared experience in a lot of communities in B.C.

I think Dr. Charles really hit it on the head. From my experience, when you talk about the ability to dream…. I started, along with my partner, an organization called Storytellers Foundation 21 years ago, now. It primarily worked with people who hadn't had great success in the formal education system and were now 19 to 30 years old. Primarily, there was a lack of ability to dream, a lack of ability to imagine that their lives had any impact on anybody else's life, let alone that they could influence the future of the community.

I think the recommendation that resonated with me the most — and not the recommendation, but a little bullet point at the end — was in recommendation no. 1: "Promote civic engagement of youth in care and out-of-home placements so they can be supported to be active and engaged members of their communities."

This was the work that we did at Storytellers Foundation, and it continues. It's not government service delivery, which a lot of non-profits engage in, and that's fine. I mean, governments found a way to deliver those services, perhaps in a cheaper way and at the community level, but it's a different niche. Sometimes it runs up against the inability of government service delivery programs to effect change.

I'll give you an example. We have many young people who don't have a driver's licence — pretty basic. We're not talking about getting into post-secondary and succeeding in colleges and universities. We're talking about a driver's licence.

There are programs now, like through the Aboriginal Mine Training Association, where that program is being offered. But if you don't have a young person who feels like they can make an impact with their lives, not only about their own life but about the future of their community, they're not even going to access the ability to go to a program to get their driver's licence.

I think this is a really important part of the work that needs to be done. It doesn't cost a lot of money. What we could do for $5,000 was unbelievable. It's not sustainable — in the way that many times we would give up paycheques so that others in the organization could get paid, just to keep the work going. I think it's something
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that needs to be recognized more as a step in rural areas, especially with connection to First Nations communities.

We ran up against reporting out to grant organizations — primarily have gotten off government funding. This was the work that was done before. When government funding was involved, we oftentimes ran up against project officers saying they didn't want to know about the learning. "Did they get a job?" Sure, they might have got a job. Two months later they didn't have that job, but the learning that occurred meant they were participating in the fee system. They were connected to their elders. They were checking in on their elders. They knew who their family was. They knew about people who cared for them.

These are the kinds of things, I think, that need to be emphasized. I know that you work within the institutions that your mandate deals with, but I think that the important work of civic engagement, civic literacy, needs to be highlighted.

It's not unknown in other jurisdictions. In the U.S. they do a much better job of this. It's the kind of work, my experience has been, that needs to be done before we can get to some of the more successful steps.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I appreciate very much those comments and echo and support them completely. I think the backdrop to this report…. When we look at, for instance, education planning beginning at grade 6, my recommendation, really, is directed…. I did it to the minister. But I've also raised it, for instance, with the First Nations Education Steering Committee and First Nations schools, making sure that the on-reserve schools and the kids on reserve, attending off reserve, also get it.

The issue in the rural-remote locations around the quality of education supports is a massive issue. You know, there is a federal bill that was tabled in the federal House of Commons, Bill C-33, to promote a new structure of responsibility on First Nations education. That bill — I don't know what the future of it is. There have been a lot of political disputes about it. But leaving aside the politics, there is a desperate need to improve the quality and success and equivalency around the education outcomes.

We continue to see very poor outcomes for First Nations children living on reserve, attending off reserve. The work there is a big piece of it. All those children…. Again, more than half of our children in care in British Columbia that we're talking about here are aboriginal children. The quality of education that they receive is important.

I know that that federal government bill had come with a promise for approximately $1.9 billion of new money into the education system. That may not happen if that bill doesn't go through.

These are the types of variables where it's hard to know…. When I crafted a recommendation, I didn't know what the status of that would be. But I have been engaged with the federal government and written to them and said: "Please make sure that these particularly vulnerable kids will benefit from any improvements in education, and please make sure there's enough money to actually work with them."

I agree fully with you that any opportunity to connect children positively to their community, to their families, to activities, is crucial.

But what isn't happening in the schools is a big factor. Communities, despite trying their best to take control over their schools, have not been able to deliver a high-quality curriculum because they can't attract and retain teachers. They don't have the resources. These also contribute to the over-representation of children in care, aboriginal children from rural-remote locations. In turn, they are barriers to success. Those background factors are so crucial.

I will continue to sort of advise the committee on how that moves forward. But in our education system, we are not getting good results in some places, and they have been stuck or declining for a long time.

It's not surprising that we have a lot of work to do with these kids, but there are a lot of other areas where work is needed. And even if programs are there to support people where the systems haven't worked, those are essential supports because that can build resilience for young people and for families.

I'm aware of the Storytellers' work, and I think it's really valuable work, really important work. But we need a strong education system in rural-remote locations as well.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I think we've heard a theme around the table from all the colleagues, and I think it's the most important theme in this report, which is the issue of collaboration. I think collaboration is critical in all areas but particularly for youth as they're transitioning out into the community — whether it's community, whether it's universities or colleges, whether it's other supports, whether it's family or foster families. To me, that's the most important piece that I take from the report.

Anyone who's worked in social services, in particular, knows that collaboration doesn't happen by itself. Everybody works 24 hours a day. People are overly busy. They have huge caseloads. Collaboration won't occur unless you put a structure in place to have collaboration occur.

That's why I certainly support the youth secretariat approach, because I think it does, then, give a structure that requires people to come together, that requires the universities and colleges to have that conversation, that requires the community to be engaged in that conversation. You know, breaking down silos is a way-overused term, but that's really what we're talking about here on behalf of youth. They don't live in silos, but they're coming out of a ministry silo without those supports.
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Grant, you mentioned in the report a number of different other jurisdictions that you looked at in other areas. I wondered: is there any other province that has a youth secretariat?

My other question would be: does it always reside in the Ministry of Children and Families? My thoughts are that there are also opportunities in Education and other areas. Obviously, the legal responsibility sits with Ministry of Children and Families for the custody of these children, but are there any other jurisdictions that look at a youth secretariat anywhere else?

M. Turpel-Lafond: I'll just to speak that issue. British Columbia did have a youth secretariat. It was disbanded. There was also, for a period of time in British Columbia, a youth engagement initiative and secretariat in the Premier's office. So in British Columbia in the past it has landed, but in recent years it has dissipated.

Different domains. Education is believed to be in the K-to-12, and post-secondary in Advanced Ed. Health — it's unclear. The adolescent child health piece is sort of MCFD and Health. Where does it exist? It exists at this point in British Columbia nowhere with a clear focus, and so your point about collaboration is key.

People don't collaborate unless there's a lead. Now, in a community side…. Sometimes Health can be a lead agency. I'm not saying it's one-size-fits-all. But for a province, you need a lead.

I'm just really mindful of the fact that it's "Ministry of Children and Families." There's no "youth". Where is the youth? Is it in income assistance side? The youth are supposed to be there, but they're not there either. So where is that population? I think it's essential.

I'll get Grant to speak a bit to the other jurisdictions, but we did reference the Youth Leaving Care Act in the U.K. That applies to Britain and Wales. It's been really valuable because there's a strong youth component and every local authority has to have a youth responsibility and secretariat.

They actually mandate specific things, like that every child that's aging out of care — and the care system can go later — has to have a non-paid caregiver-mentor. So you have to make sure that they have a good relationship with an adult person, a pro-social relationship in that community. We know that's important. People have aunts, uncles, friends, neighbours. These kids really just have a paid caregiver, frequently, or a social worker, and they have no one.

Some of those goals are really significant. Ontario and Saskatchewan, which allow even now expansion of foster care to 21 — they promote that. There's a stronger youth focus in other provinces.

We've lost our youth focus in British Columbia. I'm not sure we ever had an effective one, but we've lost a strong youth focus. Yet we know we need to have strong, effective youth programs. This is a good chance, I think, for the ministry to begin that collaboration.

I'll ask Grant to speak a bit about other jurisdictions and how they ensure there is constant youth input and evaluation.

G. Charles: Different jurisdictions do it differently, and not every jurisdiction does it. At the core of it, really, is the concept that there is somebody driving a youth-focused set of programs.

Sometimes that's a specific youth secretariat. Sometimes it's an interministerial committee that's more than just a talking committee and actually a doing committee. Sometimes it's an outside organization. In Ontario the — I'm blanking on the name of it — children's aid societies there have a body that helps them do training and research, so they're driving the initiatives that way.

Just to emphasize what the representative just mentioned, there really needs to be somebody pushing it. They need to have power behind them — both policy and resource power behind them.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I think the other issue around the initiative we've had around tuition waivers comes back to something very basic that I think all of you will know. If someone isn't calling the president of every college and university, nobody does anything. And so when I call up presidents and boards of governors and so on and annoy them about this issue but then talk to them about their opportunities, they're like: "Well, I know you're going to phone again, so we've got to do something, because you're probably not going to stop phoning me." And the fact is that I won't stop phoning them because that's my job. But it is sort of not really my job. It should be a youth secretariat that's doing it.

That's the issue. How do we make evident what the needs are of young people? Many of us around this table may be on the back side of 50 or what have you. We may not be all that young, even though we may think we're 18. You know, our experiences are not the experiences of young people today, and we need to make sure we hear from them.

What do they think of the services that we've designed and are responsible for, for them? Maybe they're not working because we actually never talk to them. Certainly, when I talk to them and say, "Well, did you not know there are 18 programs that are available for you in 25 different locations?" they're like: "I can't possibly get that support." "Well, how about a tuition waiver?" "Okay, I can understand that."

That's part of the issue. Do you listen? Do you hear? Do you advocate? Collaboration needs someone to leave the meeting and be a lead. The youth need to be in leadership. We need to hear their views. They have a right to be heard — you know, under the UN convention on the rights of
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the child. It's important that we hear from young people directly and engage them, but someone has to follow up.

If there is no one assigned…. There's no single person assigned to the Ministry of Children and Families for young people. There are, sort of, some people in income assistance and social development, but they don't necessarily respond to my inquiries. Who in education has this cohort? Well, everyone and no one.

That's why you need leadership and you need accountability and you need to report. And then, yes, a great deal can be achieved, but we tend to forget that it isn't there. We are thinking of all the leadership you provide in your own families and communities for young people, but for this cohort there isn't that equivalency inside our government services.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I just want to caution everyone because we are running out of time. We've gone way over, and we've got two other items. So if you could quickly answer, but then Mike has got another commitment as well, and I want him to get his question and his answer in.

G. Charles: I just wanted to tie a couple of things together. An example of how we don't have somebody advocating correctly is a program that Mary Ellen has mentioned and the minister mentioned: the Strive program in Vancouver. It is a great program, but it only works with people that can get to the program. We've got thousands of young people in other parts of the province that can't access that program. Nobody's advocating and pushing for that. We're looking at a program that works, but it only works for the people that can get to it.

M. Bernier: Some of your comments kind of segue into where I'm going around how…. You know, one thing I somewhat like and that can also be depressing on this committee is the fact that we don't have one focus. There are so many cross-ministry issues that we have to try to deal with.

What I was looking at…. One that caught my eye was recommendation 2. Remember, I have five children, so I've lived a lot of this. One thing I always have to be cognizant of is that we have to be very careful that we're not setting up people for failure. The reason why I say that on recommendation 2 is….

We can have some great recommendations. We have some great processes putting in place to try to capture information. And this is where the cross-ministry comment comes in, you know, around education.

Right or wrong, the way we have some of our systems structured, I feel bad for a lot of our teachers out there that are put into these situations, because our teachers are no longer teachers. They're expected, with some of these challenges that they face, to be life counsellors, social workers. Some of them are quasi physicians. They're expected to be a lot, and the problem is that a lot of them aren't trained for that, I would argue — to be into that. So we're putting a lot of pressure on them beyond what their passions might be about educating kids. They have to take away a bit from that.

I'm just kind of curious. For rural B.C. we have a hard enough time finding teachers, and now they're going to be put into this additional…. Well, they already are. I shouldn't say we're going to be adding it. They're already in this additional stress zone of dealing with it.

Reporting it is fine, but we have to remember we need to make sure we're putting tools out there and recommending tools to help the teachers who are expected to help these children as well.

The thinking into why I said grade 6 is, in part, informed by my experience with teachers and principals and vice-principals. I think at pretty much every school I've been to — and I've worked pretty extensively in the education sector — the teachers, vice-principals and principals will say: "You know, we had a little girl" — or boy — "here in grade 5. They were the smartest kid we ever had. So much was going well, and something terrible happened to them." They moved for the tenth time or whatever. Their life fell apart, mostly because they were kids in care and pretty vulnerable.

I was very influenced by talking to those teachers and others about when is a good time to actually start. Now, I agree. It should be in kindergarten and forward. But really starting in grade 6 paying attention, because the middle school years are where often the social-emotional issues appear, and the kids just fall apart. The teachers, principals and others need the social worker partnership. They need the foster parent partnership.

What we need to not lose focus on is what Grant said earlier about how we've got to get the kid back to "what's your dream for the future?" We need to be able to address behaviour that arises, high-risk behaviour sometimes, and all of the things that come forward during these years around puberty. Grade 6 is a key part.

I'm not trying to put more responsibilities in the system. In a way, actually, they're the ones that have told me, "You know what, Mary Ellen? I really think we shouldn't be doing this only in high school. We need to go in grade 6, as we look at the transition through middle school," when things can go pretty off the rails. Anybody who teaches grade 7 deserves a Purple Heart in this province. Anyway, then you want to get them through high school.

It's that practical issue of the where and when. I didn't say a lot about the what that I'm expecting people to do,
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but I'm engaged with superintendents. People can prime their systems up. One of the most important things is that maybe they should call in for assistance early. I'm always disappointed when the teacher said: "Well, this child has been out of control for six months, but we didn't know who to call." Okay, call the Ministry of Children and Families. Call our office. Let's get on the plan.

Or they haven't been in school for a period of time. Or they're going to move schools, "but they're doing so well here." Well, we can work on all of those issues. That partnering is good. I'm not trying to layer more on them, but they're the ones, really, saying to me we've got to do well.

In fact, many teachers and people in schools are foster parents. They're prospective adoptive parents. I mean, they love children. They want them to do well, and their generosity and learning is pretty impressive. I really have learned a lot from working with them.

They were instrumental in framing this up: "Start in grade 6, but do something." But I'm expecting the superintendent to tell me what happened in every school district for all those kids. Are they going to be able to do it right away? Hence, I put a recommendation. I've given them till May 31, 2015, to report, which is a long time. I know that it's going to take work, and I'm prepared to go out in the education system and talk about the whys.

I appreciate your comment for sure. I don't want to make their lives more difficult, but they actually are doing the work already.

J. Rice: A couple comments and then one question. As someone who's on the back side of 40, I can definitely relate to just the fact that nowadays….

For example, both of my parents, my biological parents, don't have post-secondary education, but they were able to step into middle-class life with a good union-waged job. My brother is 30 and just finished university last year. What I've learned vicariously through him is that…. He said: "I don't want to have children, because I can't imagine bringing a child into this world, with the amount of student debt that I have." I remember my parents sort of going: "God, he's 30, and he moved back home."

When my parents were 18 or 19, they could go and work in a restaurant or a bar, but now you need Serving it Right and FoodSafe. In my community there are forklift operators that don't have a driver's licence. Now the law requires you to have a driver's licence to operate a forklift, so then they're excluded from jobs in our local fish plant.

I'm definitely in support of doing anything that we can to help kids into their 20s. Heck, it should be into their 30s, if you look at the realities of today. I'll speak anecdotally as someone on the back side of 40 who did move home twice as well, because I just couldn't make it in the world on my own. I'm just totally in support of that.

I was reflecting on how the first week of your university, you said, was zombie week. Well, it makes me feel like my first week in the Legislature. I wished there was someone to hold my hand and help me find the washroom.

I guess my one question is…. I was talking to some foster parents in Prince Rupert who recognize this and have kids close to 19. Why are foster parents penalized for keeping kids after 19?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Just on that issue, the child welfare legislation only contemplates fostering…. The age is 19. There is the ability to have an agreement with a young adult after. We had that added in recent years, but it's something quite different. It's time-limited, and it has all kinds of conditions on it. The legislation has an upper limit.

I have been a very strong advocate inside the corridors of MCFD, saying: "We routinely bring forward amendments. Bring forward amendments, and on a case-by-case basis, we will work it through."

This is why this recommendation has come forward again. We need to have that lifted. Never say never; never say always. Not everyone will need it and want it, but there are sufficient numbers of those 700 every year that do need it. The foster parents are asking for it. All evidence is that we're actually treating these 19-year-olds more harshly than any family would treat their 19-year-olds. That's the standard that we always have to come back to. What is a reasonable community standard in British Columbia?

We've been talking today about how standards have changed. What happened in the 1960s is different than what happens in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s. Young people do stay at home longer. People need a higher level of skill and training to be successful.

They need more social and emotional support to be able to navigate systems. Parents do provide a lot more backfill and backstop than they ever did. That's a reality. We may like it or not like it. It's a reality.

For these kids…. I just want to really make the image clear, because we've had a lot of very valuable discussions about all of our own parenting and our childhood experiences. The predominant experience for these kids is they turn 19, they go to a shelter, and then: "Here are your belongings in a garbage bag." That is it.

There is no one to call and say: "Can I get a used couch? Can I get set up?" Whatever. They are in a very disadvantaged situation. So you're right. Whether we extend it to 20, 21 or 25 — just look at lifting that. It requires a simple amendment to the CF and CS Act, and I think we should make that amendment.

Hence, that recommendation is: let the ministry come forward, do the paper on what the options are…. Not having an option is not appropriate, because we're treating these children more harshly. Even our social assistance policy is premised on the fact that people have families to fall back on to help them in times of need. This is not a group that has a family to fall back on. We have
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to have a more effective social policy.

That's why I think these recommendations are actually fairly modest. I'm not recommending that we have, as I said, a nanny state. We're not talking about that. We're talking about just giving some basic equality to people that will help themselves if we help them.

I think that in the communities that I come from we have some very large issues, as the commissioner knows.

Something we've done…. As a community, we came together with the education system and put together what we call "storefront school." We have young people that will not go to our school system because they are either bullied, they're different or they have issues. We've got these storefront schools. We've got two in my region. They're some place where they go, and they've got great teachers, great programs. If they don't show up for a week, they're not kicked out. They can go as long as they want. Most of them eventually graduate.

I think we need more of this, so that more youth who feel that they're not as good as somebody else or they don't have the right clothes…. We are still supporting them, and they are getting an education. Eventually, they come out of hiding. We've done a great job. I'm proud of the education system, because they bought into it, and it's carrying on to help these young people who otherwise would have fallen right through the cracks.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I think that comment is extremely important. One thing I look at in every school district in B.C. is: are we piloting and doing something that is going to capture those who are not in school or are at risk of poor school success?

I expect every school district in every region will have it. I see these types of initiatives, and often they're viewed like: oh well, it's a discretionary thing, and it's not really all that great. But actually they're accomplishing a lot around ministering more to the social and emotional needs of kids, understanding that sometimes they cannot succeed in that mainstream.

I think we have to always see that. Every school district should be piloting that low-barrier, not coming to school…. You can just walk in, and you're here. I always look, when I'm dealing with advocacy cases, at those situations where sometimes kids are disciplined and sent home because there's been a behavioural issue at the school. How you engage with that student and their family or caregiver can mean they never come back.

We need those programs, because you need to keep people engaged. If they're not in school and employment, we know what happens. It's not good. We have to make sure every young person between the age of 19 to 24, not to mention the younger ones, is in education, employment or some type of community service. That has to be our model in British Columbia, because we know that's what works for their development.

Unfortunately, there are places that doesn't happen. I know, particularly in the Williams Lake area, there are some superb programs. Evaluating that would be a good plan, so we could show over ten years what, in fact, has been the savings from having these good programs.

That's why it's valuable to have this opportunity to look and say: "Maybe kids in care could be benefiting from that. Why aren't they in that program? They're not in school. Should we be redirecting them there? Should we be supporting them?" These are key issues. I'm hoping to work closely with the Ministry of Education around that recommendation to support that.

Supporting local resources that are there that these kids are also not connected to — that should be the case in every school district, that we can identify that and fill that gap.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you, Mary Ellen. I've just got a couple of comments before we close on this section.

First of all, I appreciate all of your work to bring the interests and the issues surrounding kids in care not just to us but to the general public. I'm struck by the announcement that was made last week to re-engineer our school system — K to 12, post-secondary — with the Jobs Ministry and Aboriginal Ministry. So four ministries all involved in targeting education funding to make sure that all the jobs are filled by our people.

We focus on the aboriginals, and we focus on disabilities, but I don't think we have focused enough — and it hasn't been mentioned enough — on kids in care. You've brought this to our attention, and you've brought it to the public's attention, which is really good. I really very much appreciate that, and I'm sure everybody agrees.

Then just the last point, with regards to some of the issues that were mentioned at the beginning of the meeting at nine o'clock. We do have the opportunity of getting the ministry to come and respond and give us an update on, for instance, domestic violence initiatives, the ICM, etc. — whatever they want to respond to — so that we're up to date, the committee's up to date.

You've brought this to our attention. You've brought us up to date from your perspective. I'm sure the ministry would like to also respond, and we're going to allow them to do so at the earliest possibility, when we have our next meeting. I just wanted to bring that up to everyone.

Perhaps we'll take a two-minute recess while Mary Ellen is able to go out. Then we've got two other items that we've got to cover in the next 25 minutes.
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J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you very much for being quick on our little recess.

We've got two items that are remaining, in addition to any other business, which is basically just to talk about other meetings. The first one is the youth mental health, our special project, plus we have a tour date that's coming up of one of the facilities.

We're got two items that we just want to clarify. The first one is our youth mental health project that's coming up. We have June 10 and 11 confirmed. Staff will continue to contact the people to confirm their availability. We have a tour date set on June 16 for the Hope Centre. Members can get back to us on their availability. We have an outstanding date that will be happening sometime, date to be determined, but that committee meeting will be in Victoria.

C. James (Deputy Chair): If I may, Chair, just one other thing for the public to know. We won't have the opportunity for everyone to be able to present at the committee on our two hearing days. We recognize there are many more people than we're going to be able to fit in, but we will be sending out a notice for written submissions. Anyone who is interested in presenting on youth mental health to the committee will have the opportunity — if not in person, then to provide a written submission.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Then just the last item with regards to the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth draft annual report. Our vice-Chair has a motion.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I move that the committee approve and adopt the annual report as presented today and, further, that the committee authorize the Chair and the Deputy Chair to work with committee staff to finalize any minor editorial changes to complete the supporting text and move that the Chair present the report to the Legislative Assembly at the earliest opportunity.

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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:	Dr. Grant Charles (Office of the Representative for Children and Youth)
	John Greschner (Deputy Representative for Children and Youth)
	Mary 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