Children and Youth — Issue No. 17 — Wednesday, March 25, 2015 (HTML)

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

2. The Chair welcomed members of the Representative’s Advisory Committee on Services to Children and Youth with Special Needs.

3. The Representative for Children and Youth and Acting Deputy Representative provided an update on the work of the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth.

4. The Committee agreed to postpone consideration of the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth Report: Investigative Report — Children at Risk: The Case for a Better Response to Parental Addiction (June 2014) until the report can be reviewed in conjunction with a forthcoming report on the topic of addictions.

5. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions on the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth Report: Who Cares? B.C. Children with Complex Medical, Psychological and Developmental Needs and their Families Deserve Better (December 2014)

• Bill Naughton, Associate Deputy Representative, CID and Monitoring, Chief Investigator

6. The Committee reviewed and considered details relating to its youth mental health project including proposed consultation questions and planning.

7. Resolved, that the Committee meet in-camera to review its draft report on its statutory review of section 6 (1) (b) of the Representative for Children and Youth Act (SBC, 2006, c. 29) (Darryl Plecas, MLA)

10. Resolved, that the Committee approve and adopt the report as amended today, and further that the Chair present the Report to the Legislative Assembly at the earliest available opportunity. (Doug Donaldson, 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	397
M. Turpel-Lafond
D. Thomas-Wightman
Representative for Children and Youth Report: Who Cares? B.C. Children with Complex Medical, Psychological and Developmental Needs and Their Families Deserve Better	406
M. Turpel-Lafond
B. Naughton
D. Thomas-Wightman
Youth Mental Health Project	417
Statutory Review: Representative for Children and Youth Act	420
Committee Report to the House	420

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Select Standing Committee for Children and Youth. We have a busy agenda this morning, but we do want to be out of here before 11:30 because there are other things going on today. We have a few items that we’re going to be going through with the representative.

Before we go on to that, I wanted to introduce the Advisory Committee on Services to Children and Youth with Special Needs for the Representative for Children and Youth and just recognize them here in the gallery: Angie Kwok, the executive director for the B.C. Centre for Ability; Faith Bodnar, executive director for the B.C. Association for Community Living; Sgt. Howard Tran, youth services and mental health from the Vancouver Police Department; Dr. Christine Loock, developmental pediatrician, Sunny Hill Health Centre for Children; Paul Pallan, a consultant; and Keli Anderson, president and CEO of the Institute of Families for Child and Youth Mental Health.

Welcome, Mary Ellen, once again to the committee. We’ve got your update from the office as well as two reports that we’ll be discussing on the agenda. One is an investigative report, Children at Risk: The Case for a Better Response to Parental Addiction. The other one is Who Cares? B.C. Children with Complex Medical, Psychological and Developmental Needs and Their Families Deserve Better.

Our committee, after that, will be reviewing some items to do with our special project for children and youth. We need to get our invitations for presentations out as soon as possible. Then we’re going to be talking about our review of our draft report for the Representative for Children and Youth Act statutory review section.

Is there any other business that we are all going to want to discuss that I missed? No? Good. We’ve got a jam-packed schedule. We’ll just delve right into it then.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Thank you, and good morning. I’m pleased to be here today. This is my 31st appearance before the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. I appreciate we have a fairly compressed time, and we have two reports to present. I’m going to perhaps err on the side of brevity in the presentation to allow time for questions.

I’m also very pleased that we’re joined today by members of my Advisory Committee on Services to Special Needs Children and Youth. This advisory committee has been in place since 2009 and has served as a very significant source for information and networking. They are incredible individuals. Some of them are here. The others will be here this afternoon when we have one of our regularly scheduled meetings.

They are the folks that really speak to me directly about the challenges that they face in their very significant positions in meeting the needs of children and youth. I really lift my hands up to them for being here, and I just really want to recognize how important it is that they are here and that they’ve taken time away from incredibly significant jobs to give the input to the representative’s office.

This afternoon I’ll be joined by the deputy. I’ve invited him to attend our meeting. The former deputy, Steve Brown, did attend once, and Mark Sieben will attend today. I’m firmly of the view that, really, the ministry should have an advisory committee like this and should be meeting with them directly, regularly — not only the Ministry of Children and Family Development but the Ministries of Health and Education together.

Some of the individuals in the gallery are dealing with children and families with 18-month wait-lists to get an assessment; dealing with families for whom there is no one to refer them to for assessment because no one will take the cases of their children who have complex development needs; dealing with the many, many challenges we’ll be talking about today around how getting mental health services connected to those who work with children with developmental disabilities is nearly impossible in British Columbia.

These are the individuals who remind me every time we meet about the fact that family-centred care in British Columbia is really more of a bromide than a reality for most families, particularly families who are struggling that are new immigrant families and don’t have the language skills to get their children in the system.

This B.C. Centre for Ability does remarkable work in that regard, and I’m delighted Angie Kwok is here, because she has huge experience in that regard — but also dealing with children, frequently low-income families, where getting children into the system is so important.

I just wanted to also recognize…. There’s so much I could say about them. Dr. Loock, in particular, has pioneered and worked with a group to do social pediatrics in some of the neighbourhoods in Vancouver that have really been underserved or not served and has partnered with Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services — Ray-Cam and others — to bring health care services to the community. That is with incredible work on their part, way above and beyond any policy or directive and with very little recognition.

Again, these are individuals…. Dr. Jonathan Down is also on my committee. He’s not here this morning, but
[ Page 398 ]
he speaks to me regularly of his position from here on Vancouver Island, with VIHA, of an 18-month wait-list to get a child in — not to mention an 18-month to two-year wait-list for genetic assessment for a child that may have a very significant genetic developmental disability, whether that’s fragile X, whether that is another range of issues that are so significant in terms of their development.

I just say that because these are the individuals that really often inform the broader recommendations that are made in my reports and who have the direct experience that, sometimes I have to say, is frankly missing in terms of the leadership in the ministries that serve children and families. Individuals have never worked at the front line of the system, and they don’t work with families. Frankly, when we bring complaints forward from families, they’re just far too difficult to get them resolved, which is why the systemic work that we have today is important.

I’m just so glad that you’re here, and I hope you will have a chance to meet them. I do hope the Ministry for Children and Families and the Ministry of Health will…. I don’t want to give the committee to them, if you like, but I wish they would follow my advice and have a meaningful advisory committee so that they can get regular feedback and not be afraid of the type of feedback that they need to have family-centred and child-centred care.

In terms of the office update, I just want to say that we continue to work with great dispatch in our office. We have just completed, in the last couple of days, a very valuable opportunity to do staff planning at a retreat. Again, a shout-out to my office staff — incredible people in three offices that work so hard together and really work hard to be a team and deal with very distressing content, but really work hard to be a team.

We’re certainly at a time in public service in British Columbia where there’s a lot of attention to how offices do their work and what they produce — how they actually do their work.

One of the things I’m really proud of in the representative’s office is the strength of the staff to be a team and the strength of the staff to, in particular, push me as a leader and push our executive to be collaborative, to listen, to work together and to make sure that, with the mandate we have, we do everything we can in our abilities to meet it.

Also, we recognize that sometimes for staff, working harder for less — because we’ve had a stand-pat budget for the last couple of years — can be really hard. Sometimes staff have just finished a really good piece of work, and we turn around and ask them to do another really intense piece of work.

We will be releasing very soon an investigative report into the situation of the death of a young person in the Downtown Eastside. That report has involved more than 100 interviews and looking at, really, the entire life circumstance of a young aboriginal woman who died by drug overdose in the Downtown Eastside, whose mother died by drug overdose and whose grandmother died by drug overdose.

You can imagine the type of work that was required by the team — headed by Bill Naughton, my chief investigator — to complete that. I’m just, again, so mindful of the fact that this is a team that works so hard and is so committed and collaborative that it’s really impressive. I know there are many areas in public service where you can’t get the quality of work that you get….

It really has to do with the quality of the people. So a shout-out to them, because, again, meeting with them for the last couple of days just made me feel extremely optimistic and positive about the fact that, in public service, people really can pull together and do excellent work, particularly if you listen to them and respect them.

I look forward to releasing that report fairly soon. Also, work continues on releasing my second version of the report Growing Up in B.C. We’ve had that out now to a number of external experts to make sure that the work is accurate. That will, again, be an important pulse on how we’re doing in British Columbia — if we’re seeing progress, where we’re seeing gaps or not seeing gaps — and will have a more system-wide understanding.

In terms of our advocacy mandate, we’ve now opened 13,615 advocacy cases. As you know from my reports to the committee, some of these cases are fairly easy to become involved in and resolve, and some of them are very complex. We’ve been involved with a number of very complex cases recently. I’m pleased to say we’ve made progress on some, including some very high-profile cases that were public.

Again, we’ve made some progress by working really strongly with the ministry, sometimes having to escalate cases up the chain of command in the ministry, but by working very closely with everyone to try and really stay focused on the children. So I’m really pleased about that, but I’m reminded of how children in British Columbia do face very difficult circumstances.

We have to work together — whether that be across the lines of the Legislative Assembly or out in the community — to really do that. I’m always encouraged when I see that happen, because I think that’s really positive. The capacity of people to come together in the end can be really remarkable for those kids.

Just last week I was able to support one young person we’ve been advocating for, who is a young person who had to do something very difficult, which was to testify in a sexual assault case. There is a very serious…. I’m not going to speak about the criminal matter that’s ongoing except to say that she’s 18 and had to testify about sexual abuse she experienced when she was 14. I personally attended in the court with her — just to be a support for her, really.

Sometimes in these types of difficult circumstances that young people are in, there’s very little you can do
[ Page 399 ]
other than be present. Going through the criminal justice process is a very difficult thing for a victim. Multiple days on a witness stand, being cross-examined, is so difficult for a vulnerable young person who’s in care.

Certainly, I was mindful of the fact that there are probably very few parents in British Columbia that would allow their child to sit through that and go through that. That was a child that showed a lot of resilience. Dawn accompanied me. There is a lot of support needed for her.

Again, I was also reminded of the fact that she was there by herself. There’s no family with her. Her mother is deceased. There was no friend with her. There was no one there. There was a very, very committed and skilled person from victim services in the region. I was really grateful to her for showing up every day. We had many chances for that person from victim services to come to me and say “Please, Mary Ellen, do more advocacy for victims of sexual violence, because how they’re treated in the court system is not with respect and not with the type of care that we need to have.” I had many good discussions there.

At the same time, supporting the young person just reminded me that sometimes in our advocacy you have to be there for people. Again, the system has to send people there for people and be committed to people. This is a young person that will age out of care very soon. I hope this young person ages out of care into education and into good supports. But with the trauma that she has experienced, I know that’s a crossroad.

I just speak about that because, in our advocacy work, we’re pushing the envelope. We’re working together. I also learned at that proceeding of the fact that the institution where she was placed had a number of practices that were extremely harmful to children and were shocking.

I shared that with the Ministry of Children and Families, including the fact that the youth are not allowed to make phone calls and that they are punished by having the door to their room removed. She, in turn, is alleging a sexual incident by the staff. Well, your door is not even on your room to shut your door.

These are things that…. Again, we forget in British Columbia that there are places where there are children with deep vulnerability, where things can go wrong. Where they go wrong, people tend to run away, which leaves them alone. They do not engage. People are afraid of the criminal justice system. They are afraid to face the child who suffered. They are afraid to stand with them, and people really don’t know how to promote resilience. I have to say that.

I bring that to you just to say how important it is that we continue to think about the mindset and the values that we bring to this work, and that we continue to put those young people at the forefront, even if it means having to criticize and having to challenge some very powerful systems. We have got to be able to do that. When systems are just too allergic to feedback to be able to talk about it, that’s not a healthy situation.

Our advocacy cases continue. As I say, I’m not personally involved in every case to the level where I see the children. There are many that I am involved in, but I’m very fortunate that the staff is actively involved in many, many cases. Some of the cases are deeply distressing because we’re having challenges solving them. We’re having challenges supporting the young people. We will continue to bring that information forward.

I do want to note on a positive side that I was very pleased with the announcement, the policy change, with respect to financial support for single mothers who receive child support and disability assistance. I’m delighted that, effective September 1…. Of course, I’d like it to be effective immediately. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of confusion on that front because many single moms are saying: “Why am I still getting clawed back? Why can’t it happen now?”

In any event, it is coming. Effective September 1 there are a number of, primarily, single mothers and their children who will see an end to that clawback, and I think that will be important. I know it will impact approximately 5,000 children in about 3,200 families in British Columbia. While those aren’t all of the families that are living in deep poverty in British Columbia, that’s a very good start. Again, I really lift up to say this is an important thing.

I regret that that is not part of a poverty reduction plan. It’s unfortunate because, again, when government makes an initiative that’s so positive, it isn’t put into a plan either to be able to celebrate that. That’s regrettable, and I think we do need a more detailed, comprehensive plan with outcomes and accountability, because good things can happen, as we’ve seen there. It might be a small thing, but it’s a very important thing. Of course, as you know, we continue to deal with deep issues of poverty.

I’m also delighted that there will be some changes coming to increase support for training and child care to allow single parents, in particular, entry into the workforce. That’s really positive. I know how difficult it is to get into training and education because we’re working with the kids in care, trying to get through that path. This is another very positive step, and I’m extremely pleased about it.

I want to speak very briefly about adoption. We continue to work very collaboratively with the Ministry of Children and Families, the delegated aboriginal agencies, all the aboriginal leadership organizations and, in fact, the federal government on issues of adoption.

We’re hosting an event — really co-hosting with MCFD, delegated agencies and First Nations — in Nanaimo later next month, which is called A Consortium for Change: Reconciliation for Today’s First Nation and Aboriginal Children through Custom Adoption and Permanent Placements.

It’s a very important event. It’s our attempt to take the work we’ve been doing and really move away from this
[ Page 400 ]
1950s attitude toward adoption for aboriginal children. It’s to really strengthen their connection with family and find their connection to their community and to actually begin to plan how we will move and transition children in care in British Columbia, who are aboriginal, out of care into family — where we’ve had them sitting, drifting through foster care. It’s hugely valuable.

I was actually in discussions this morning with the advocate for Ontario, who intends to attend with a senior person from their ministry because they’re really looking at what we’re doing and they want to do the same thing.

At the same time, as members of this committee will know, it’s one thing to will and want to change. It’s another thing to get the results. I’m going to ask, actually, Dawn Thomas-Wightman, my deputy, to speak a little bit about where we are with adoption, just as part of this update.

In that event next month the minister will be present — Minister Cadieux, who has been very committed to work on these issues of adoption. We will have a very good opportunity to discuss it with community groups and others. We’ll be extending invitations to members of the committee. I appreciate the session is still underway. The Friday might be available to some of you, so you’re more than welcome to attend. You’ll receive that invitation. If you’re able to, we’d like to have that.

I’m just going to ask Dawn to speak very briefly about the aboriginal adoption initiatives that we’ve had and how, on the one hand, they’re extremely promising if we can get the work completed.

D. Thomas-Wightman: We’ve been working in partnership with the Ministry of Children and Family Development to really support permanency for aboriginal children. It’s something, professionally and personally, that I’m very committed to and pleased to work on, although the latest update from the ministry is that they’re likely not on track for the goal that they set for 300 adoptions for this year, despite a financial increase of one-time-only dollars to help support those numbers.

We’re not exactly clear what happened. With the increase in the budget and the $2 million, why did we not get the outcome? A lot of work has to be done regarding what’s happening at the ministry that those numbers didn’t happen.

I just want to share a bit of good news, I guess, or something that was positive around adoption. I speak to an adoptive parents education group probably four or five times a year. I’m an adoptive parent myself. I have three children that I adopted from the ministry — First Nations children. I like to say I’m committing to reducing the number of aboriginal kids in care, doing my part.

My children have special needs, although I don’t want to go around and say: “I have special needs children.” They’re children, and they have some wonderful strengths but also some challenges.

That’s why I speak to parents first about aboriginal adoption. My preference is aboriginal families for aboriginal children, but we can’t keep up with those numbers with the population that we have in First Nations communities. In fact, we overrepresent as caregivers, so non-aboriginal families need to come forward to adopt aboriginal children and have permanency placements.

I go to talk to families about what that looks like and how you can support the culture identity and how important that is. We have those courageous conversations and opportunity for parents to really talk about what that means and what supports and education they need as parents to be able to raise a child, in today’s society, that’s aboriginal and might face some things that non-aboriginal kids don’t face.

In addition to that, I really have an opportunity to talk about what it is about raising a special needs child. Most of the children in B.C., just by virtue of being in care, have some type of special need, whether it’s trauma or FASD or autism, etc. What I encourage the parents to consider is the children and not necessarily the labels, although the labels are important for funding and education — to really look at how the child is presenting day to day and not to be scared about what those special needs are or aren’t.

I was really pleased yesterday. Often there’s a group of about 15 or 20 that I speak to, and yesterday there were over 50 parents that were on lower Vancouver Island that are interested in adopting, which is really good news. I joked with the ministry worker: “Please just get these parents in right away.” There are 50 people on south Vancouver Island who are interested in adopting some children with special needs. That is a positive story.

It’s one of my favourite engagements to speak to. I often go overboard talking about my kids. I can do that forever. But I really want to share, not to sound trite, that my kids, despite some of their challenges, bring me a lot of strength and have taught me a lot. That’s important for other parents in B.C. to have those experiences as well.

The numbers are significant, right? As First Nations community members, they’re not just numbers. They’re not just statistics. Those are our children, our families, our aunts and uncles. We need to do something different for those kids. They can’t, year after year, remain in permanent foster care, changing homes five, six, seven or more…. It just cannot continue. It’s a crisis, and I want us to address it as a crisis and not continue to norm that those numbers are okay, for the number of kids for adoption.

I’m very interested in working with the ministry on what we can do to make that difference and how we do support, whether it’s adoption, whether it’s another form of permanency for aboriginal children. I’m looking forward to the forum and even identifying what permanency means — we don’t have a common language around that with the ministry — and having those difficult conversa-
[ Page 401 ]
tions with the First Nations communities. I have to say, quite frankly, that I don’t feel the ministry has necessarily done some of the reconciliation work they need to do with First Nations communities around adoption.

I know Mary Ellen and myself and the executive team…. Every opportunity we get to meet with First Nations that’s our conversation. What can we do to support you for placement around the children in care in your community? Let’s have the conversation about what adoption looks like today, what openness looks like, what a family connection means and continue that community and tribal connection. We do that. Sometimes they’re difficult conversations, but it has to happen.

I look forward to working with the ministry and developing capacity around having those conversations. I look forward to working with First Nations leadership to help debunk some of the myths around adoption.

M. Turpel-Lafond: On the adoption issue, I guess, we continue to be deeply committed and involved. We want to see change. We have more than 1,000 waiting children. We will be reporting next month with the ministry on whether they’re on target or not. As Dawn has indicated, indications are that they’re not going to make the target they set.

I think it’s important, though, for me to say to the committee, on the adoptions issue, that it’s very important that the amendments to the child welfare legislation that were recommended in our adoption report be put in place. I’ve been advocating very strongly with the deputy, with the minister and with others that there is a reason why we recommended there be amendments. We didn’t think we were going to be able to make change without changing the accountability system and strengthening the requirement to plan after the child becomes CCO.

We’re going to be pushing very, very hard with the ministry. I’m hoping — I’m actually cautiously optimistic, shall I say — that the ministry has really come on side to see that as we more deeply evaluate why. People can commit to change, but if you do not get a result, that’s not change. So what is it that’s missing? We recommended a change that they didn’t uptake at this point, so we’re going to come back to that.

In the meantime, we’ll do everything we can to support every child to have a permanent family. That young woman I was supporting in court last week is the eldest of five children. There are five children in three foster homes. Every single one needs permanency. In fact, those children themselves don’t all get to see each other as a family because sometimes the ministry can’t even bring them together to see each other, let alone have a permanent family — which they not only desperately want but need. We will keep working individually with those cases. Thank you for that update, Dawn.

On the issues around post-secondary education. I always like to touch down again on a positive note with the committee. We now have ten post-secondary institutions that have some form of tuition waiver, some of it not coming until the fall, September 2015. Nevertheless, the numbers continue to grow, with a lot of work. Again, hands up to my office and to others in the field that are working with us.

At this point there are at least 80 youth attending post-secondary education with the benefit of a tuition waiver. We’re having a gathering of some of these students in the spring to ask them how it’s going and what they’re seeing. Of course, we’re touching base with them regularly, hearing from them and learning from them. We’re really pretty excited.

Not surprisingly, as you can imagine, one of the issues we’re finding is that quite apart from tuition, they need living expenses. They need support. They need books and so forth. I’m continuing to push, and I will continue to push, with respect to the private sector and government to see that it’s easier for them to obtain support so that they stay in school, they complete school sooner and find that pathway out of what is often intergenerational welfare dependency, child welfare involvement.

You know, 80 is a big celebration, and I think it’s so important that we continue. My goal is that every single child in care should age out to employment, education and training and that there should not just be 10 percent aging out. We have to get there. I will continue to keep you notified.

On an individual basis, I just can’t tell you how proud I am of those kids. I’ve spoken to you before about the fact that many of these are young people who basically didn’t complete high school, who were identified in grade 3 or 4 as: “These won’t be completers.” Or they were lost. They didn’t attend school. Nobody actually went and found them and brought them back into school.

Yet through real grit and determination and reconnection around 18, 19 years old, they have completely turned things around. I say “they have” because they really haven’t had a lot of support. It speaks to resilience. It also speaks to the fact that a more coordinated education and post-secondary program will pay off big-time in British Columbia.

Listening to people really does matter. I’m hoping we can continue on that front, because while 80 is a good start, we still have far too many. That’s 800 every year, and a very small number are in that situation.

I’ll stop there because I’m going to move on to the reports. I’ll stop there at your disposal, Madam Chair, with respect to whether or not there are any questions on the office update.

Dawn, you were talking about the ministry not being
[ Page 402 ]
on track for the 300 adoptions and the one-time lift of $2 million. Have you gotten anywhere with some reasons why that hasn’t happened? You said you’re looking into it and having discussions, but anything you can share with us now?

D. Thomas-Wightman: Not to date. The ministry…. Because they don’t have their final numbers, we haven’t engaged in the conversation. It’s something we’ve asked, although we haven’t had necessarily a strong response back. They have some questions, of course, as well, around why they aren’t meeting those numbers. I think a lot of work needs to be done.

We need to look at the structures in the ministry to support that, some of the cultural shifts that may be necessary supporting adoption. What are the expectations on adoption workers with caseloads, etc.? So increasing that number — was there an assessment of what the caseloads are currently? How many workers would they need in order to reach those goals?

I’m not sure how the 300 was decided. I believe it was based on numbers in previous years. But how was that $2 million spent? Where was it spent? We’ve asked for some information on that, as well, so that we can see if those dollars had outcomes attached to them. We are anxiously awaiting for some of those answers ourselves.

D. Plecas: Thank you very much for the presentation — again, the hard-to-listen-to presentation. I’ve got a couple of questions. One goes back to your first comments about there being no place to send people with early identified developmental needs. Can you say more about that? How is that possible?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Sure. We’ll be talking about that a little bit around the group home report, the second report.

What happens is you have a child that’s exhibiting some fairly significant challenges. They may have evidence of a developmental delay. They may need, for instance, a genetic screening to understand — is there fragile X? Is there some cause of a developmental delay? They may have some really significant behavioural issues where they are not able to develop as would others of their age range. They may be very challenging behaviours within the home.

One of the difficulties in British Columbia is you may or may not have a family physician. You may get a referral to a complex child development clinic. You may be sitting on a wait-list for two years. You may not be able to get a pediatrician in the meantime. You may also not be able to get any school-based support — if you have school or preschool supported early childhood support.

When you have to do a pass off, particularly where you have the mental health…. A number of children have needs that span mental health and developmental pediatrics. You may not be able to do a pass off to anyone because people don’t want to take these children on their caseload. Basically, there’s a limited number of people, and they don’t want to take them. They don’t want to care for them, frankly.

This is a really serious issue, because the idea is: “Well, this is too complicated.” We develop a care plan, but it’s not followed through on, and then there are massive gaps in areas in British Columbia where there really are no services coordinated — like speech pathology. So they identify a child with very significant language and speech delay, but there’s no one to pass it to. There’s no one doing the work. It has largely disappeared in most areas, and then the school-aged piece as well.

You know, upper-middle-class families in British Columbia can organize themselves to purchase and acquire support, and many of them do. We could talk about what is an upper-middle-class family in British Columbia, because it’s probably a little different than other places in Canada, but they may be able to organize and purchase care at a phenomenal cost.

In terms of the public system, it’s a bumpy, rocky system. The challenges we see are kids sitting on multiple wait-lists for a long time. So you’d be on the genetic screening wait-list for two years. You’re into a complex development assessment clinic. You get your date, and they say: “Well, we’ve got to wait for genetics. Then we’d better discharge you to a care plan,” but there’s no one to take it up.

We’re supposed to have a model of family-centred care and child-centred care. We have the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Children and Families. But actually, it’s a chimera, because there is no family-centred care in British Columbia.

Who are you to call and complain to? Do you do quality-of-care complaints to PHSA because of the genetics clinic delay? Do you do quality-of-care complaints to VIHA because you can’t get into a complex development clinic here? Do you do quality-of-care complaints to the Ministry of Health because you can’t get a pediatrician? Do you do quality-of-care complaints on your family physician because they don’t know what to do either? The idea of care for children that have needs on the ground in British Columbia is not a smooth system by a long shot.

What we are dealing with — again, my advisory committee on special needs…. We’re sort of on a case-by-case basis trying to get families through some of these systems. Let me just say that behind the 18-month to two-year wait-list is a loss of care and a loss of a family. Many families do not have a navigator in the system because the system can’t be navigated. That’s not saying much, even about just the mental health side, which is huge in terms of the behavioural support that children need who have a dual diagnosis, if you like.

They may have fragile X, or they may have a developmental disability or a genetic issue, and they need be-
[ Page 403 ]
havioural support integrated. It’s almost impossible for those families to navigate the system. In some instances there’s no care. There is no service to get. The other is that whatever service there is, there’s not enough of and it’s not available.

I just give you that quick answer. My reports will speak to that. The group home report will speak to that. Of the children in the group home report, 12 of those children are children put into voluntary care because their parents couldn’t manage their situation and couldn’t navigate the health care system.

I know a little bit about this, because I sat on the board for quite a number of years for a child development centre. As you know, they do a substantial amount of good work once they get somebody.

In terms of moving forward, couldn’t we see the child development centres as a hub, if you will, to do more in bringing people to where they can start getting those needs? I know what you’re talking about when you say that there are extensive wait-lists and that. Maybe in answering that, could I ask you about what it would mean if those centres had more resources? I know that’s not a complete answer to the problem.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, early childhood development…. These are age-based, right? There’s no question that more of everything is needed in our system. Really what’s needed is more accountability. Why are all these children on wait-lists with these wait times, and why are we not reporting provincially all of the wait times and the wait-lists? Why are we not doing that in the health care system and in the MCFD child and mental health system?

We are still without appropriate wait-time and wait-list data in this province, which is unacceptable. You know the reason why it’s not there is because people do not want to report on the fact that they know they have a very serious problem. There’s a complete unwillingness to own up to the fact that they are not serving the children.

Putting a bit more money in a child development centre is not a bad thing. We are piecing it together. Again, when I just look at…. You know, we have Dr. Angie Kwok here from the B.C. Centre for Ability. They do incredible work and massive wait-list management. They’re dealing with families.

They spent this spring break offering a program for kids that can’t really get speech path and learning in the schools, because there isn’t anything. Angie was telling me this morning about how a lot of the kids are like: “I’m sad to go back to school, because I had such a great time here during spring break actually helping me.”

Child development centres and the Centre for Ability. Again, people are trying to do very good work, but that work should be done in the school under school-based speech language as part of a plan with a treatment team that actually makes every opportunity to meet the needs of a child with a real IEP that actually means something in British Columbia. As we know, in British Columbia most IEPs are meaningless.

These are really serious issues. I appreciate you’ve got experience, so you can speak to it. I’m urging the members of the committee to push. Government needs to account for the fact that we don’t have wait-list and wait-time data, and behind that are real kids who need services.

The push and pull…. We’re not getting a pull toward more services in this area. As a result, you end up with child welfare issues, where you should really have healthy development investments.

Your point you made about moving people into post-secondary, which sounds very exciting. I know how successful that can be. I’m not sure that I would have complete confidence in our post-secondary system to do what needs to be done for those people who come into the system who need an exercise in academic success, if you will. There’s not a whole lot of that in the system right now.

What is in place, if anything, to make sure that those students who do enter the system are getting all of the help they need to be successful? I say that being reminded again of the fairly significant number of people who have difficulty getting through first year in the best of circumstances.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, I think you’re right. I think this is an area where I really want the Ministry of Advanced Education, the Ministry of Children and Family Development and the Ministry of Education to work with me with the post-secondary institutions to see: what are we learning from the experiences of the 80 students?

We’re bringing those students together. We’re trying at RCY to stay connected to them, to give them an incentive to come together and to say: “What worked for you? What didn’t work for you?”

The one thing I know that really does work…. As anyone who is a parent of a child that’s done post-secondary education will know, your parenting does not end when they enter post-secondary. You need someone to listen and to support, and you need to promote their resilience.

These are kids and young people who still need that resilience. So positive peer relationships at those schools and good-quality student service support are really important. Student services vary institution by institution.

Where we’ve seen some great success…. I don’t want to just single out one place, but Vancouver Island University has been really amazing. They didn’t just do the tuition
[ Page 404 ]
waiver. They wanted to get everybody a part-time job. They wanted to get everybody connected to a faculty member or staff member. The president actually hosts a lunch and stays in touch with people.

I have a fantastic relationship with my office there, where I can call up Vancouver Island University and say: “Gee, I’m a little bit concerned about this young person. What do you think?” They don’t just get cast adrift. I love that about Vancouver Island University because they’re very values-based, and they really do something.

I’m confident every college and university could do that in British Columbia, but someone has to do the work for the kids. Pretty much, as you know, they’re shown to the curb, and they have to go forward. I think any of us, if any of our children were shown to the curb at 19, would know where they’d end up. It doesn’t matter what family they come from. So you have to stay there with them.

British Columbia does not have a policy for transition of kids out of care into post-secondary. This is an initiative I’ve pushed, pushed, pushed. I’ve got some support. I’d like it to be stronger. There’s a lot of opportunity to grow there and develop and prevent another generation of kids being in the child welfare system.

D. Plecas: My last one, Chair. My follow-up question on that. I’m sure we could have a very, very long conversation about this whole topic. It would be good to have at some point.

Right now we have 80 people in this program, if you will. How many could you have, in an ideal world? If I said to you, “I want to see every single person who has any reasonable shot whatever of seizing on whatever opportunity they could get through entering something in post-secondary,” how many people would that be?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Every year we have 800 young people age out of the care system. If you look at a 19-to-24 cohort, you’re dealing with 4,000 young people who should be captured in post-secondary education, a training program or employment — employment leading to development of the skills that they’ll need to be successful in the adult world. So we’re dealing with, at a minimum, 4,000. We have 80. We have 3,200 that are not there.

You can see it’s a bittersweet thing, but it’s better than what we did have — right? — which was two.

Again, and I’ve said this repeatedly to the committee, yet another year has gone by that not a child in foster care completed math 12. That’s not acceptable. That’s getting people ready to go into everything.

There are many pressures that need to be brought to bear to change the system. I speak a lot about how we think. One of the things we have to think is we have to norm excellence. We have to norm good outcomes for those kids. We can’t accept: “Oh well, they just are never going to make it.” That’s what we do in British Columbia. We just continue to have an intergenerational group of people who will not be successful.

That’s not possible. That’s not what education is about. It’s a great leveller in our society, and we’re supposed to have a high-quality public education system. Why do we consistently fail this cohort? We have to change that. That’s going to take activity. Hence, my office is very focused on it. I’m very happy, but I need to take that from every end — from post-secondary, from early preschool to the school years.

Yes, FSA results will come home this week for the parents in British Columbia of children in grade 4 and grade 7. I will be checking the FSA results for every child in care, and I will be asking the Ministry of Children and Family Development and the Ministry of Education: why did they not meet expectations, and what are you doing case by case for every child?

This is the type of focus that has to be…. You’ll never change it unless you focus on it. Even if the government sets a target and says 100 percent of kids will meet expectations, I know they won’t meet that target unless you really do the work. We’re not really doing the work. We’re getting closer in places, and we’re getting mindsets changed, but the work is not yet done.

We need to continue to support real change for real kids and outcomes. If outcomes don’t change, any piece of paper, any program, any plan is not of any value — unless the outcome actually changes. And then understanding why you don’t hit the mark when you set the mark — that takes some very, very strong mea culpa. Like: what is it we’re not doing?

The government is not entirely responsible for everything, but when it comes to kids in care, they are the parent. They are responsible.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): If we could perhaps wrap this section up in ten minutes, and then we’ll have to shorten your presentations of the two reports, because we obviously want people to have an opportunity to ask questions. Plus, we do have other items to cover in the last half hour.

C. James: Thank you to the member across, who asked my question, which was around follow-up. I agree. I think the numbers are exceptional given where we were — disappointing still, but exceptional given where we were — but I do believe that follow-up and tracking of those students is going to be critical to success. As we’ve seen with other things, the exceptional, that we have these numbers, could go by the wayside if they all drop out in the first year and nobody’s tracking, nobody’s following up.

I appreciate that your office and your staff are paying attention to this. But I think it’s also important to recognize that the extension, giving you the ability in your office to look after those children after 19 during that
[ Page 405 ]
transition time, was done without resources and without support as well. I think there’s an important piece to recognize there.

I just wanted to touch on…. It touches on your last comment that you made, Mary Ellen, around focus and attention, and it ties back to the presentation we had as a committee last time by the ministry around quality assurance and some of the measures that are being put in place. I just want to emphasize and, I guess, ask how that’s going with your office, around that quality assurance work.

From my perspective, I couldn’t agree more. I think not only do you need focus but you need actual measures, because what gets measured in government often gets paid attention to. If it isn’t measured, it doesn’t get paid attention to. If we don’t see, as you point out, wait-list numbers, nobody pays attention to it. It isn’t something that’s out there that people are accountable for, and therefore it doesn’t get the same kind of attention.

I have to put in that that’s the same with the poverty plan. Our haranguing around the poverty plan from our side of the House isn’t because a poverty plan is going to fix everything; it’s because it’ll give some attention and some measure and some focus onto something that needs to be paid attention to.

I wondered if you could just give a couple of words around how the work around quality assurance is going.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, I read the transcript of the presentation, and John Greschner attended part of that session. As you know, I have a very strong and positive collaborative relationship with the leadership of MCFD, which I think is very healthy. It has its necessary tensions, but it’s very healthy.

I think that there’s a pretty clear realization that they don’t, as of today, have a framework for quality assurance that’s working. I’m glad that they’re owning up to that, and I’m glad that they’re working on it. I think that they have some very good ingredients, including that they’ve built up that unit a bit.

You’re absolutely correct to observe that even what we mean by quality assurance in, for instance, the health field versus child welfare is apples and oranges. We sort of punch the real quality assurance outcomes measures back around in British Columbia, so we don’t have to actually bring out the fact that we are not meeting the types of standards of care that we need to meet, particularly where there are mandated needs where we know we have opportunities.

Again, in the gallery today is someone I’ve worked very closely with, Keli Anderson, who works with the FORCE, which is with parents of children that have mental health needs in British Columbia. She’s been involved in that work for a decade or more and is a leader as a parent and is a support to parents through her organization throughout the province.

To those families that come forward and say, “Oh, what’s the wait time for me for an assessment?” or a support for a child in whatever region, she can’t tell them. She can only help them cope while they wait. Just like I can’t tell them. I can only help them cope while they wait. But the Ministry of Children and Family Development and the Ministry of Health should tell people.

They can navigate them to an intake. How long are they going to wait to actually get service? And why are they not getting service? And what is service? High-quality cognitive behavioural therapy in British Columbia is in very short supply. There are many thousand times more children waiting than are receiving that service.

Again, you can hold the hand and support people to be resilient. And again, I lift my hands up to Keli, because her work is amazing. She really represents hope and optimism. But I think she also knows very well that it’s pretty hard to extend a hopeful outlook when you know that someone who’s got a seven-year-old trying to get high-quality support is going to wait for six years.

British Columbia doesn’t report on its wait times in mental health. As a result, we do not know how long people wait. Well, we know that they can get in and make a phone call to someone. But can they actually get a care plan and have it followed through on? Anybody can take a phone call. But can anybody get care? That’s the challenge.

So you’re right. Quality assurance speaks to real things. It isn’t just the exit interview for the five people that got in to say: “Did you enjoy that?” “Yeah, we did.” “Oh, 100 percent of participants enjoyed our care.” But it was only the five people that got in; it wasn’t the 7,000 people that have been sitting on a wait-list for six years. It’s a very different thing.

In some of these issues, as you know, around quality assurance it’s important, because families feel a lot of shame about having to seek care and not being able to cope on their own. The shame is used in a way that doesn’t allow them to advocate, because they feel that there’s something inadequate about their abilities, and that, in turn, affects the development of the child.

Again, I just recognize Keli because she’s been really a big part in British Columbia of trying to remove the shame from families and get families mobilized across British Columbia, which is really wonderful, and trying to positively engage with the system to get family-centred care. And family-centred care has to actually listen to families.

J. Rice: Actually, I was going back to the post-secondary opportunities. You said there were ten. I could find eight institutions on line. I was just curious what the holdback was for the rest of the institutions in the province.

M. Turpel-Lafond: There are 15 that we still need to get. I think their holdback is multiple. One is the finan-
[ Page 406 ]
cial issues. They talk about those. I think it’s a drop in the bucket. Children in care in British Columbia — we’re dealing with 8,000 to 9,000 kids; 800 kids age out every year. You’ve got colleges with 10,000 students in them; ten kids is — what? — 0.001 percent. I mean, we can do it.

I’ve got to continue to mount the challenge, to say: “Waive the tuition.” Not to mention the value of having the students in a student body. Other jurisdictions do reimburse those institutions for tuition. I wasn’t terribly optimistic that we would take that path in British Columbia, because there’s no appetite on the part of the Ministry of Advanced Education to do that. I wanted the universities and colleges to step forward, and I continue to do that.

I would like to see those others…. I’m working with their boards of governors, their presidents, their students, their foster parents in their regions to try and get them to come on board. My goal is 25. We started with zero. We’re at ten. My goal is 25.

I hope I’m not still going to be here when I’m 90 trying to do that. But if I am, you can trust me that I will still be doing this when I’m 90 years old. When I set a goal — it doesn’t matter what my job is — I’m going to accomplish that one. I hope we will all continue to work on that, because it will be one of the big answers that we need to have to these problems.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you, Mary Ellen. I’m not seeing any other questions or comments.

I think that you’ve covered quite a bit of stuff with regards to one of your reports in your report-out of your work. We have just an hour. I’m assuming that most people, if not all, have read the reports, so we should have a handle. Maybe if you could give a brief overview, and then we’ll open it up for questions or comments, recognizing that you’ve got a total of half an hour for each report.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Yes, I recognize the time pressures that we have this morning. The complexity of the issues require time and discussion, and I’m completely at the disposal of the committee in how you want to proceed.

If I can, I would maybe recommend that I spend less time on the first report, although it’s very important, about parental addictions. But as I’m releasing a report shortly that deals with addictions, it might be better for us to come back to some of these themes when I speak to that report. Perhaps I could focus more on the report about the residential services, which is one that may take a little bit more time. I’m at your disposal. I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get through both of them, but I’m at your disposal as to how you’d like me to address that.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I’m seeing nods from Carole. Do I have any other comments on that? Sure.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Okay. I’ll leave the one on parental addictions and the injury of the boy who’s living with the grandparents aside for a bit. I’ll come back to that when I deal with the other report that we will be having, which will maybe give us a chance to talk more intensely about how we’re addressing issues of addictions. I know it needs some time, and it will provoke some needed discussion.

Representative for Children and Youth
Report: Who Cares? B.C. Children
with Complex Medical, Psychological
and Developmental Needs
and Their Families Deserve Better

M. Turpel-Lafond: I will speak, then, to the second report, which is Who Cares? B.C. Children with Complex Medical, Psychological and Developmental Needs and Their Families Deserve Better.

This report builds on my 2013 report Who Protected Him?, which members of the committee will recall was about the boy in northern British Columbia who had been tasered by the police. What we found out when we looked at his care and his situation was that, actually, that was the least of the concerns, even though he was at risk of death because he has long QT syndrome, which is a heart disorder where when you get tasered, you can die instantly. He had very substandard care and was placed in what can only be called completely inadequate situations. We continue to advocate for that young person.

At the time of that report release there was a bit of a suggestion, as there always is, and rightly so…. Is this just one case, or is there a concern about level of services for children with more intense behavioural needs — for instance, developmental needs?

In this report we looked at a cohort of kids who are in care, who have been injured or harmed in some way and who are placed in the same category of residential services that that boy was placed in. We looked across the province at a variety of situations. We did a detailed analysis of their cases, and we interviewed 100-plus people. We interviewed youth, we interviewed workers in the system to try and understand how it is working, and we found conclusions very similar to what we found in the individual case. Even though we’re now looking at something 18 months after the prior report, these are persisting issues. We’re not moving effectively and quickly to resolve them.

Overall, the finding was that B.C.’s residential care system lacks the capacity to provide adequate, appropriate supportive care to these children with complex needs. Again, by complex needs, I mean serious emotional, mental health, developmental and behavioural needs. They often require sort of a specialized treatment and support. They need a high quality of care that’s trained to assess and understand, for instance, their behavioural triggers, their unique medical needs, etc.
[ Page 407 ]

What they do get, though, is often group homes staffed by underqualified staff, poorly trained staff, and frequently quite far out of the oversight of the Ministry of Children and Families. We have some kids in hotels. In British Columbia we don’t have a lot of children in hotels, but some of these kids do end up in hotels.

It’s comparable to what you may have read recently about what happens in the province of Manitoba. The good news about British Columbia is that at least a worker stays in the hotel with them when they’re there. They don’t get sent to a hotel and just spend the night there by themselves and leave. Here there usually is a worker with them, but these are not appropriate situations, because they’re not getting often-needed medical care. In British Columbia a variety of things can make what is a health care issue become a child welfare issue.

As I said earlier, for this cohort of 30-plus kids, 12 of these kids came into care because their parents entered into a voluntary care agreement, meaning they said: “We cannot take care of this child. This is a child on a wait-list for two years. This has deteriorated. There are siblings at risk. I’m at risk. The child’s not in school.” I mean, the world’s falling apart for these families, tragically.

The child has this unique set of needs. The child comes into care, quickly runs through to a group home. What happens in the group home, and what we found in this case, and these cases, is that despite the commitment of people that run group homes to try and do better, they’re not working in a system. They’re not qualified. They’re not staffed with high-quality care. They’re not a parallel health care system, by any means. They are often sort of one step above a hotel, and the kids are retraumatized. They’re harmed.

When this group of young people…. There were sexual assaults. There were physical assaults. There was self-harm. You see the cases that show that not only did they come in with high needs, but they’re now acquiring new needs for support, because they are experiencing trauma and concern. So there is a particularly acute set of needs here.

The concern I have with respect to families is that it’s a very difficult decision, for instance, for a family to put a child in voluntary care, which means they won’t be living at home. Families place their faith in the system. They’re only some cases, but these are cases, I would suggest, that when you go back to talk to the families, they’re like: “My biggest regret was that I placed the child in care, because they ended up in a group home somewhere else in the province. And by the way, they ended up on the street, and they ended up sexually abused or harmed.”

When you don’t have a functioning health care system for children with complex behavioural and developmental needs and you don’t have a functioning child welfare system that has intense support, this is what you end up with. It’s an area that needs a lot of work.

If you look at the report, pages 17, 18 and 19 in particular — because I appreciate you may not be familiar with this — you can see that we have different levels. On page 17 we describe the different levels of foster homes. This is really an old system. British Columbia hasn’t fundamentally changed its thinking here.

You have a level 1 foster home. You know that the child with complex developmental needs, if you put them in a level 1 home, they’re quickly going to be going to a level 2 home; they’re going to a level 3 home. They’re having this very specialized degree of support. They’re going to have to go to get some….

They’re not getting other care needs met. Things are falling apart. There’s no foster family. Their own family can’t meet their needs, including families that have a lot of capacity. There’s no foster family that’s going to be able to meet their needs. Then you are moving them into a group home, which is pushing them away farther and farther from oversight, engagement and involvement. Many of the kids aren’t in school. They’re AWOL. They’re developing very harmful secondary behaviours here, and they’re dealing with some really difficult, difficult situations.

You’ll see on page 21…. There are other models. In fact, British Columbia did a review of its residential care services, calling for fundamental change, including the ministry in partnership with those who provide these services — the federation, child and family–serving agencies.

They worked together for quite some time. They did a blueprint. They came out with an action plan, and it hasn’t been actioned. Again, the concern I have frequently about blueprint or blue-sky activities is that they don’t always parlay into change, unless you have an actual, meaningful change process and a commitment to do it.

As you’ll see there, one of the concerns we have in British Columbia is a concern that we do not have a system of care for children with complex behavioural and developmental needs with a common set of values. We have a series of these overlapping, sometimes contradictory programs or resources that have any different number of foundations.

It’s because one has a one-off: “Oh, we need support in Cranbrook. We don’t know what to do. Let’s set this up” or “We need something in Prince George. Let’s put this together” or “We’ve got somebody who is willing to give us something here.” It’s very ad hoc and episodic why something comes on. Then it’s there. It isn’t necessarily connected to a system.

I’m not saying all children need to be in a more intensive program of support for intensive behavioural and developmental needs, but there is a stream. You need to be able to step up and down. We don’t want children in a hospital. We don’t want children on the street. You have to have a triaged and a levelled system of care, which is what works.
[ Page 408 ]

Unfortunately, because we don’t have it, we don’t have any cohesion in British Columbia. We end up with kids all over the place, moving through multiple placements and also being placed in what I would consider to be inappropriate placements. There’s no one that can meet the level of care that they require, and they are increasingly labelled as behavioural problems — therefore, police interventions — and their life circumstances deteriorate pretty significantly.

We’re not reinforcing safety, well-being, permanency. We’re not designing practice. I think it’s important to note that the on-the-ground experience for these children and families is very different, again, than what I would say is the high-level concept of what’s supposed to happen in British Columbia.

For instance, in British Columbia we spent a lot of time developing a cross-ministry framework for children and youth with special needs. It’s a high-level framework developed by people in committee — again, not necessarily informed by advisory processes of people who work with them, but a high level.

It does appear extremely positive and valuable. It talks about how all ministries will collaborate. All care will be done. The system can be navigated. If you need this support, you go here or you go there. On the ground, though, there are no residential supports to do that, so things happen that have very serious consequences, as you can see here.

The care pathways for these kids are chaotic and, unfortunately, lead often to harm. This is a cohort of a number of cases. I’m not going to go into them because you’ve read them. Every one of their cases is horrific and has led to multiple, multiple challenges, in some cases leaving kids in very dangerous situations with a contracted resource, with someone that’s not safe. They’re watching pornography. They’re engaging in sexual acts. They’re being exploited.

In other instances there are just no rules. There’s a group home setting. There are no rules. You don’t have to go to school. You don’t have to go to bed. You can have your boyfriend/pimp over for a visit. There are no rules. I mean, there are more rules in a halfway house for a parolee than there are for children in some of these group homes.

Not having that cohesion is extremely problematic and certainly bears no resemblance to what I see as that cross-ministry framework on children with special needs. There is a massive disconnect around what ministries seem to think they’re doing and what happens on the ground.

This report was a bit of a push-back because there is a debate in British Columbia about who is responsible for complex developmental needs in mental health. Is it MCFD? Is it Health? Is it Education? Well, really, it’s everyone. But, for instance, if B.C.’s Children’s Hospital decides that their child mental health unit will only be out-patient…. They won’t have any more in-patient support. They make a decision over here. Well, where do those kids go?

Some of those kids are going to end up in a group home over here because they have nowhere to go, but they needed a period actually there as a part of an actual system. They needed a period of in-residence assessment by a very good team with a care plan so that they go out and step down and eventually get back into the family setting well supported. There are no stairs in that stepping and navigating for many, many, many children and families.

These children in particular are the ones that are never going to be coming out of care. This is where they’re going to be living, in the group home setting. There’s really no way to get them back to somewhere. The family grief, their lack of support is really significant, and the human cost of lost potential is very significant.

I appreciate that it costs money to run a properly supported residential care system with the right continuum of services. It does cost money. It requires an investment. It requires coordination. There’s no question that it’s going to do something. But I think we also know that the long-term costs of poverty, homelessness, incarceration, mental illness, substance abuse and victimization are more. That’s the problem here.

One of the roles of my office is to be able to go back and look at these cases and bring the information out in public, to be able to say: “What are we doing?” My recommendations in this report are pretty straightforward. In fact, they repeat in large measure the recommendations I made in the tasering report, which was to have a proper complex care system.

At the time, the minister and the ministry said: “We’re going to open up Maples, have a cottage at the Maples.” As you know, the Maples is a condemned site. It’s been sold to someone else. They have to get people in a new site. They’ve been very slow to open that, let alone get anybody there, whether or not any of these kids could be appropriately placed there. They haven’t been able to staff that up.

It’s been quite a challenge to get the Maples going for a variety of reasons, which speaks, again, to the fact that a one-off, as opposed to a system, is difficult to manage. It’s a concern. The first recommendation is to stop placing these children in inappropriate residential placements.

Now, the push-back I get from the ministry is: “Well, where are we supposed to put them, Mary Ellen? We have nowhere to put them.” And I think this is…. Well, that’s not my problem. It’s your problem that you are not treating them well, which leads to this huge pressure, which is that we pretty much put them away from public sight, so we don’t really find out about what happened to them till much, much later. That’s not acceptable.

I also recommend in No. 2, further to this issue of quality assurance, that the ministry have an oversight
[ Page 409 ]
and accountability body. Actually, they’ve already adopted recommendations. They’ve adopted a blueprint. We need some accountability to move forward, and we need Health, Education and MCFD to be together on this, but I don’t want a high-level framework that doesn’t relate to the actual care pathways.

Again, I’ve spoken about that in the area of health. You know, family-centered care has to actually assist these families and these children. In Education you need real support around their behavioural and special needs in school. In MCFD you need to work with families to help them navigate the dynamics to prevent abuse and violence of children. Not surprisingly, children with developmental disabilities and behavioural challenges are the most likely to be abused — physically abused and neglected.

Today we’ll meet with our special needs advisory group. Faith Bodnar is here from Inclusion B.C. — a very important voice for preventing abuse of children with developmental disabilities. If you don’t support them positively, you can see the behaviour as somehow being bad behaviour. Sometimes parental care and institutional care and school care can be very abusive and coercive.

We have to change that system. We have to be vigilant in B.C. Children with developmental disabilities continue to be abused in our province, because we are not supporting a caregiving system that actually understands that their trigger can be adjusted and we can have behavioural supports so that they can function more effectively. Harsh discipline, neglect is not the way to improve their life circumstances or improve family functioning.

One of the things I recommended in recommendation 2 — and again, I mentioned Inclusion B.C. and others — is this issue of shared care, a different model of foster care. I don’t want families to have to think: “Well, we put our child into care, and that’s it.” The director takes over. They end up in this group home somewhere, and then we find out they were abused, and they’re on the street.

Shared care is really about how parents can still share the care with the ministry and they can get support during times they need it. It might be that we really need to come back to this model of shared care, to really have that commitment to families that you’re going to work with them when their children have major behavioural and developmental needs. Shared care is possible.

We’ve had discussions about it. I’ve put it out there. We actually had a very good engagement with CLBC. In the old days, when they wanted to serve young people, they wanted to have a shared care model, this model of actually working with families. You don’t just drop the child and go, because the families don’t want that. You’ll see there’s a big recommendation that we really reconsider. How do we serve these kids, and how do we serve their families? That’s a major recommendation.

The third one is a very straightforward one. As you know, I don’t like to make a lot of recommendations. I try to be really focussed. There are only three. The third one is that the provincial director has got to audit these contractors. They’re not complying with any of these standards. Some of them do. I’m not saying every one. The ones that we looked at had compliance issues in every instance. They’ve got to be audited.

Again, the independent oversight body…. We can’t be auditing every contracted resource of the Ministry of Children and Families. They have to have a quality assurance program that includes an audit.

They did recently do one review of a group of group homes that were affiliated with them, after there was a concern in British Columbia, about 14 months ago, about a caregiver who was hired in a foster group home placement, who had a criminal record from another jurisdiction. That became public issue.

The ministry, at our urging, did a review of all the resources run by that agency, and they found many breaches. I think it was in excess of 30 in different places — and non-compliance — and it was a review not an audit. But I was glad that they reviewed it. They engaged. They had a plan.

But any time you review and plan, you then have to go and audit. You have to go and say: “Is it working? Are the caregivers’ criminal record screenings being done? Is the health compliance there?” You have to actually follow up. You don’t want to just do a review because you’ve had a crisis because you don’t have an audit program.

The recommendation there for No. 3 is that we audit, making sure that the operational and staff decisions are made with the best interests of the child and for the appropriate standard of care.

You’ll note that this recommendation has a reference to cost drivers. It says that the residential services really look at supporting this cohort of kids rather than cost drivers as the only consideration.

I have to be frank with the committee to say that what has driven the rise of group homes are the cost pressures in the Ministry of Children and Families to find cheaper care and push it away and away. Cheaper — okay — isn’t necessarily better. You’re dealing with a staff that may be low-skilled. As you know, in some of these instances, staff was hired from the local Starbucks to run the group home, whatever. The Narcotics Anonymous self-help group — found some staff there, found staff elsewhere. This is not a highly skilled, screened staff cohort, but it’s cheaper, right? But that’s not what we need. We need, actually, a quality system. The cost driver….

If the ultimate metric in the Ministry of Children and Families is to bring down the cost of residential care, this is what you will end up with. We need to bring up the cost of residential care, match it to these kids’ needs. So it is a difficult, difficult report.

I have spoken to the Auditor General of British Columbia to say: “If the ministry is not auditing, you need to audit, or may I respectfully suggest that you
[ Page 410 ]
consider an audit, because I can’t do everything to look at what’s happening in these situations, but you need to audit it to find out where the value for money is.” Some of these contracts are massive contracts. They’re not delivering the service required. They’re big contracts.

I appreciate that there are people going to work every day to try and do something, and it’s not working. We are spending money. Can we get better value?

I mean, the world doesn’t have to listen to the representative’s office, because not everybody will be motivated by meeting the needs of children and making sure that they’re safe and well. But some people might be more motivated by the fact that their taxpayer money doesn’t get them anything. I don’t care. Use whatever motivation you need to look at the fact that this is not working.

It seems to me, when we look at the challenges here…. There were some studies done around homelessness, and the cost of leaving people homeless was far greater than housing people. Now, although we haven’t been enormously successful in resolving all of that, I think that there’s a general understanding now, socially and politically, that it is more effective to house people than to leave them homeless. The costs, generally, on the system are far less to house them.

It would seem to me that there does need to be some kind of study — maybe an audit by the Auditor General or something — that says to us that the cost to us socially and in all aspects of ministry financial costs is far greater by not providing all of these early interventions and effective oversight and proper supports and care.

We’ve been through a forum on youth mental health. We’re partway through the process there. We heard unequivocally that the lack of continuity, of a sensible system, the lack of early intervention, things like these wait-lists, have huge impacts that are lifelong. The sooner you can make these interventions, put in place thoughtful, responsible, caring support systems, the better the outcomes are, both socially and personally but I think financially as well.

It strikes me that one aspect of this argument, if common sense doesn’t prevail when you present these ideas to government, is to say: “Here are the long-term costs.” Just like we see in homelessness and other aspects of social justice, this reckless lack of responsibility on the front end of these systems has a huge cost socially, economically and in all other ways.

Whether it’s the Auditor General or something, I would hope that there may be some other academic application to looking at some of these things, as well, that might be useful in the long term.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, I’m in full agreement with your summary of what the research and the assessment is around the costs being high. The other part of it is understanding what I call, again, the pathway. These cases — how do families get there?

Those 12 voluntary care cases — I profiled them in this report because it was such a wrong-headed thing that happened for them. A family is overwhelmed. The child…. I’m going to ask Bill to speak to this consistently, because he has really been the person who has seen it consistently across a number of reports.

The family calls up the ministry and says: “Boy, we’re getting burnt out. We’re waiting on that wait-list. We need special needs supports. We don’t know what it is. Something’s going on here. Can we just get a bit of respite? You know, my partner and I and the siblings, if we had just had two hours of respite a week, we’re going to make it. But we’re desperate.” Nothing. They get nothing.

One month later: “Okay, we’ll do a voluntary care agreement. Do we call the police? What do we do? We don’t like to take our child to an emergency room.” The police are here. The child’s screaming, being handcuffed. They’re put into, basically, a room, where they’re re-traumatized. They’re in voluntary care, and — bang — they’re in a funnel, and they’re gone.

We profiled here what happened, because it isn’t even all the expensive residential care. But you do need that. It’s: why are we using that when all they wanted was respite? Why can’t we have a respite program? We have no respite program for kids with complex needs. And high-quality…. “Okay, well, we’ll give you some money. Go hire respite.” There’s no one to hire. No one will work with the child. They come over, and then they say to the family: “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I’ve no training.”

This is the issue of the system. The high-quality supports are needed, but it’s that mindset of: “We know that this family needs support. We know they’re on a wait-list. We know that’s not acceptable. We can give them some respite. We can work here.”

When you do mobilize families — whether it’s through FORCE, whether it’s through Inclusion B.C. or other places that work with families — the entry part is always respite. “Just give us a bit of respite. We will do everything we can. We will try to replicate the health care system. We will take the courses. We will be part of the groups. We will buy whatever private care we can, but can you please help us?”

Not only was what happened here unnecessary, but there weren’t even helping relationships with families. They were told to call Children and Youth with Special Needs, and they were shut down. They did not even have a door into the system, and this is where their kids ended up.

You’re right. The cost just doesn’t make any sense, but from a fundamental, almost human-rights, integrity-of-the-person perspective, how can we have such a callous
[ Page 411 ]
system that we shut people down who need a little bit of support? Then they end up — where? They end up in a group home. That’s not working either.

I’m going to ask Bill to speak to it, because really, the reasons and the patterns that we’ve seen…. These are all fixable issues. But there is a pattern.

B. Naughton: One of the things that makes our work occasionally difficult is the degree to which there is an element of predictability to what we see and what we repeatedly see in terms of the reports of deaths and injuries that come into our office. I think the representative was making reference earlier to this very predictable trajectory of events often leading to really tragic consequences for the child. It’s a pattern that repeats and repeats, apparently without end.

I think when parents are going to the ministry seeking assistance, seeking help, relying on the expertise of the ministry staff to be able to assist them in what are really emotionally very, very difficult decisions, there’s a notion, or a reliance on the idea, that the ministry will have appropriate resources and skilled and trained people on the staff who will be able to assist.

What we’ve seen is that particularly in rural and remote areas, the level of service is almost invariably inadequate. One of the things I’m often reminded of is a comment a social worker made to me when we were interviewing her during a recent report. She said: “The highest-need kids get the lowest-skilled people. They get minimum-wage staff who worked in the mill last month or who were installing your cable service last month, and now they’re child care workers in group home settings.”

To me, really, that strikes home. That’s one of the enduring lessons that I’ve taken away from my work in this office. The challenge for us all is that ability to disrupt or to interrupt this pattern and to achieve better outcomes.

D. Plecas: Mary Ellen, let me first say, with regard to your recommendations, recommendation No. 3…. I hate to use the word “audit.” As members opposite will know, it’s a bit overused these days.

But certainly, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that we need more. We need a better system of auditing contractors.

My next comment. I preface this by saying that I don’t think I’ve read one of your reports where I didn’t agree with your recommendations, but I think I’ve found a report here where I have to disagree with one, and that’s your recommendation No. 2 — essentially, a call for more oversight.

When I think about what you do, what your office does, much of it is focused on causing us to look at how we can intervene more appropriately, calling attention to the need for more intervention, more supports.

As you just said a minute ago, and as Bill just said, it’s all predictable. It’s all very fixable. I guess all of that, for me, says…. I’m not sure we need more oversight. We know what to do. You certainly know what to do. You are our oversight, to a very large degree.

Over time, what’s been put in place…. It’s my understanding — from the ministry and yourself, from some of your comments — that we have a system whereby you, working together with the ministry, are developing a system where we can move towards improving what we need to do.

Of course, not all of that happens at the speed we want it to. But when I consider what you do, what the ministry has done, and consider it with other sectors in government and other jurisdictions, I’m inclined to think we’d have to search the world over for a better system.

Most recently, with calling attention to the need to focus on quality and the ministry’s efforts there…. While we might argue that they could be more pointed towards outcomes, still, before someone was…. As I’m sure you’d be the first to say, before we get to the place where we can say how we are doing on all of these things, a very first ingredient, which almost never happens, is making sure that there’s an audit of the quality of what’s being done.

For me it’s inspiring to see what’s happened on that front so far. Obviously, we need to do more. But again, at the end of the day, I say to myself: “Wow. Do we really need to get focused on another level of oversight here?” We’ve got our hands full with what you’re trying to do now, with what the ministry is trying to do. You need no lessons on what else we need to do. I think that’s just abundantly clear, over and over again, from your work.

I guess, again in a nutshell, I’m thinking this recommendation would be extremely hard for me to support. I don’t see the value in it right now.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I really welcome that feedback. I’ll give you a bit more background to the thinking behind this recommendation just to, respectfully, put it a little bit differently.

I would be happy to provide this oversight, but that would require the government to agree to give me oversight of the Health Ministry and Education Ministry so they can actually do their part for kids. Despite me asking, they don’t want oversight on that area.

I’m recommending something less than a Mary Ellen effect — which maybe isn’t the most popular approach, for whatever reason — and that is that MCFD, Health and Education have an accountability. They actually start working together with some accountabilities.

It may not be an independent office, but start working around the residential care system together and have, at least, an advisory group, like the people that have advised me, so that they really can know: how is the health care
[ Page 412 ]
system working or actually not working with the child welfare system, working or not working with the education system?

The idea here was really to get parents, aboriginal communities and others together with those ministries to really talk about this residential service continuum and actually have a serious discussion about things like the community living movement — why are we not looking at shared care? — and to look at evidence-based practices, to look at better practices around youth transition.

I agree. I have no interest in expanding the representative’s office. In fact, I just met for two days with my staff, who said: “We already have so much to do, Mary Ellen. Please don’t give us anything else, because we can’t.”

I’m a $7 million agency overviewing a $1 billion sector. There are 20,000 contracts. The ministry needs to audit its own contracts because that’s $1 billion of taxpayers’ money. They need a quality assurance program. I will do my bit, strategically, to audit and report back, but they need to get on it.

The government needs to get on the issue of the kids with complex needs. They are getting no care or substandard care. When you add to that the behavioural dimension, it becomes really punishing. These are kids, like the young boy that was tasered or like the kids here, whose behaviour is challenging. But that can be turned around overnight when you understand, well, this child has a genetic condition. They can’t be given this medication that you’ve been giving them, or they need behavioural therapy. By the way, things change dramatically.

I’ve been dealing with a case recently. The boy has now aged out of my system. The mother spoke publicly about his case, a boy with Asperger’s syndrome, who had a job at a video store, was going to school. He had some behavioural problems. He’s now spent seven years in the psych hospital. He hasn’t had any education. He has turned 24 in our psych hospital, and there’s no plan to get him in the community that anybody can agree to. He’s out of my mandate now.

Did the boy with Asperger’s have to be in a psych hospital in B.C. for seven years? I really am troubled by that. That’s a really serious issue. The mother is distraught. The boy spends most of his time in administrative segregation or solitary. That’s not the outcome I want for children with special needs in British Columbia, and that’s an outcome that’s tolerated.

Yes, I agree. We don’t need more…. I don’t want more oversight powers. I’m not coming here… But believe me, nobody in the government of B.C. who knows that there are these problems is coming to my office and saying: “We want you to have really rigorous oversight of the health care system and the education system because they’re not working for kids with special needs.”

I think that this is the challenge. We’ve got to find a way to own up to this issue, and we’ve got to bring real families to these senior officials so that they can understand. Unless you have a family in the care pathway, you do not know what you’re talking about.

Some of those big frameworks. The cross-ministry framework on special needs. I have no quibble with it. It’s a beautiful framework. It’s even in a nice font. It’s lovely. It’s a fantasy. It’s a dream. It’s a wish list to Santa when there are families sitting two, three years on wait-lists, putting their children in care to end up in these crappy group homes. That’s not shared care. That’s not an appropriate process.

I didn’t make a recommendation here, which I really do struggle with. And I get advice from the special needs advisory group on it. Do we need legislation in British Columbia so people with developmental disabilities have human rights? Do they have a right? Do we need a disability rights legislation so people will be seen as people with disabilities instead of bad people that you throw away and bad families with bad children that you throw away? I really think we need to consider that. That’s a big-ticket item.

I’m not all into law and policy because that’s not all it’s about. It’s more about how we change how we view things. But this issue on accountability is…. B.C. Children’s Hospital shuts down its in-patient mental health services. Where do the kids go? They end up in a backwater group home. Or they end up in a hotel.

I’m not saying they should be living at B.C. Children’s, but who actually sits down…? Does the head of the PHSA sit down with the head of the Ministry of Health, with the head of MCFD, with the head of Education to problem-solve that? No, they do not. Do they take my phone calls? Some days they take my phone call. Do they take the family phone call? Absolutely not. “Here’s your patient quality review process. Please fill out ten forms. We will get back to you in three years,” by which time you’ll be too burnt out to care about the answer. That’s not a quality system.

This recommendation. The government hasn’t accepted this recommendation, but I just want you to really understand where it comes from. Real oversight. You don’t have to have a bunch of oversight agencies. You can do your work. If you’re not doing the work, somebody has got to prod it along. But there is no oversight in the health care system, and there’s no oversight in the education system, which is why we have 55,000 kids with special needs with an IEP and we can’t even figure out if they get anything around that IEP.

I have my role in MCFD that I’m trying to support the families. We are getting some success, but people have to be willing to listen to families and willing to look at the care pathways for these kids that don’t get any care.

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Like Bill, I look for patterns. I’m going to talk about a pattern and ask you to comment on it, Mary Ellen. It relates to recommendation 2, the bullet point that discusses developing robust practices for contracting of residential services, and also recommendation 3.

To me, MCFD is legally responsible for these children and, in effect, I think somewhat typified as being the parent, and I think you’ve pointed that out in other reports. From reading this report, I don’t see a lot of due diligence being done by the ministry before they place these children with a lot of complex needs into residential or group homes.

You’ve foreshadowed this before. I mean, I see a liability issue here, and I wonder why there haven’t been more cases of parents or family members or, actually, the children themselves when they become older taking legal action against the ministry. Is it because they’re so marginalized to begin with and don’t have the resources? Or, based on some of the other cases that you’ve reported on and foreshadowed this, do you see that becoming more of a pattern these days?

M. Turpel-Lafond: I think if you look at page 49 of my report, I’ve tried to show that…. The recommendation I’ve made here is a recommendation I’ve actually made in three separate reports, so this will be my fourth time making this recommendation. I know that there’s always frustration, you know — “why do you keep making the same recommendation?” Well, I keep making the same recommendation because we’re not getting movement.

You’re absolutely correct. There are various ways to come at this issue, and I’m not proposing any one way, which is why I’ve got a list. I’ve talked about the auditor, and I’ve talked about other things. You need to audit your resources, and you need to see what’s going on. But at the other end, you could actually have procurement practices that were better, which is have an independent body that actually does an RFP or an RFQ, a request for proposals and qualifications. So you could pre-vet people that are actually qualified to provide this service.

What happens now is it’s like an auction. They get together. They get on the teleconference and say: “I’ve got this kid. He pulled apart the drywall in his room last night. He can’t be at this foster home. I’ll trade you him for what you have.”

It’s a horse-trading system. While no one takes pleasure in doing that…. And then sometimes it’s like: “Well, he’s been in a hotel.” Seven of these kids were in hotels, frequently for weeks at a time, and there are kids in hotels in British Columbia today. Maybe they’ll be there for a week or two. I don’t know. The worker calls me, desperate. The family doesn’t really call me, because sometimes the families don’t even know their kid has been in a hotel.

But the issue is…. Even bring in the cattle auctioneers association of British Columbia, because they can probably do a more efficient system. I don’t care what model you want to bring in. Bring in something better, and try it. We are not matching the needs of the kids to the resources. So pre-qualify and build it. Audit if it’s working. Inspect it. Make sure you see the kids match the supports, and give the kids a sympathetic, positive approach.

These are kids and families that are labelled. You know, you’ve got the child that is yelling, swearing, throwing something — six, five, four years old. You have to do something about that, right? What do you do about that? If what you do about it is say: “Oh, by the way, stay denned up at home. Get him a couple of good, violent video games and let him sit in front of the television, because he’s going to be sent home from school and he’s not going to get any medical care. He’s going to be on a wait-list. This is a good technique.”

This is not a good technique. A good technique is to be in school, be in the community, get good health care, get visibility, get the parents supported, understand what’s going on with the child, respond to that, get a sympathetic care team — but fundamentally, understand what’s happening to the child, their unique medical, developmental and social needs so that they actually get support.

Every society, every province in Canada, every jurisdiction in the world has a group of children with developmental disabilities, sometimes coexisting with mental health and behavioural issues.

These are the complex-needs children. They exist in families of all social class, of all races, of all variety. In British Columbia they do not get consistent care. Many of them end up voluntarily coming into care and end up in what I describe here as a pretty horrific system.

When they’re in the system, what happens to them? They’re physically abused, they’re sexually abused, they’re retraumatized, and they age out to the street. Not acceptable. We have to change it, and as I say, I’m willing to entertain any option.

I want the best option. I’d like us to take the advice of these wise people that advise on special needs, that work with families. But we need Health, Education and MCFD, at a minimum, to actually come together with an air of realism.

Even maybe things like respite. Let’s just start respite tomorrow — give a little bit of respite while we wait, while we’re figuring it out. Let’s not have a ten-year plan, and then on the ninth of the ten years we decide we have to do something about it because somebody made a ten-year plan.

The disconnect. I have to just fairly say to members of the legislative committee that there is a huge problem. There’s a problem with procurement, the business practices. There’s a problem with the audit. There’s an issue about value for money. But fundamentally, my issue is best interests of the children. This is not a best interests….

We have brilliant people in the B.C. health care sys-
[ Page 414 ]
tem who are geneticists, who are developmental pediatricians, who are skilled special needs teachers. They all tell me the same thing. They all work with the same families. It doesn’t work. So kids see them, they leave with a care plan, and there is no follow-through. We have to fix that.

It’s a fixable problem. I don’t care how we start; I just want them to start somehow. First of all, we have the CLBC. It does 19 and over. We’ve had debates over the years: should they do zero to 19? Whatever. I’m not even saying…. I’d entertain anything. Just get a different model.

Then you call the Ministry of Children and Families. They say: “Sorry, your special needs program gives you nothing.” You sit on a wait-list, you burn through everything, you burn through relationships, and your child is basically hidden and harmed.

There can be a different path. I’m confident of that. Again, I’m really grateful for organizations that do receive government money — and I’m glad the government supports them — and that help parents, that hold the hands of parents as they go through this crisis so they feel better. They do really good work, and they try hard, and they’re really good advocacy organizations. I’m grateful that they’re there. Parents are supporting other parents.

It’s just that most of what you hear in their meetings are so many good suggestions for improvement that don’t then translate into…. I mean, these are constituents in each of your constituencies, so I appreciate that as Members of the Legislative Assembly, you carry forward their concerns, and you bring them to my office. But they don’t necessarily get heard in the government service ministries where they need to plot and plan real change.

M. Bernier: Thank you, Mary Ellen. Again, I definitely don’t want to come across as if I’m, I guess, arguing with you on any of these points. I’ve researched this. I’ve lived with this. This is an issue that I’m very knowledgable about — in this report.

I guess some of the things you…. I was going to say “touched on,” but I’m going to bring them up again anyway. You know, a lot of it is around the frustration. I mean, I’ve been researching and doing work on this since the late ‘80s, and not much has changed since then. I wish I could say that this is a new issue and a new problem, because then it might identify, maybe, where the cause came from.

One of the things I could definitely say…. What I’m hearing, obviously, as an advocate for the representative’s office, is that at least we have an identified group where people are saying their voices are being heard. And through reports like this, it holds people to account, I guess, which is really important.

A couple of things that you brought up which I hear a lot are around the respite. When you look at families that get to the point where they have to go into a voluntary care agreement…. And you would know better than me. Most who get to the point of a voluntary care agreement usually come from families that actually don’t want to be at that point — families who can actually take care of those kids, or want to take care of their kids, maybe have the financial means. They might have the desire.

You mentioned respite. To me, that is something that I would like to see us really focus and target on, because the best place for a lot of these kids is actually to stay in the home where the safety mechanisms and the love might be. If that’s, you know, after the guides have been put together…. Your other report, obviously, highlighted a different situation. But I think that’s something we really want to maybe address more, where the plans of care make sense for that.

For rural British Columbia, I can say it’s not always about cheaper. It’s about: what is there even available? Sometimes you get to that point where you have a mother, a father, great-intentioned people who are willing to volunteer or open up their homes to help people, to help children. Are they perfectly trained for that? No. But you get people who are in a position where they do that voluntary care agreement because it’s the last hope, and they’re hoping there’s somebody out there that can assist that child.

Does it always work? No, and obviously your report addresses that. This is something that I’ve always tried to push for. How do we do the best that’s possible for the child to keep the kid in the home to begin with, where possible? You touched on respite. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are — a little bit about that.

Really, when it comes to the clinical side of things, early diagnosis and getting the proper medication if it’s an option — all of those things…. That, to me, from the health care side, is almost where a lot of these kids have been failed. Then the parents don’t know where to go, and like I say, the care agreement is a last resort. Anyway, I’ll stop there.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I recognize not only your passion but your experience in this area. I think that you’ve absolutely described it right, which is that no family in this group — that I even reported on here — that may have had other multiple challenges in their life wanted their child to come into care.

If you look at some of the stories…. There’s this story — I’m not going to read it — on page 40, Tyler’s story. The grandparents…. I mean, the child has a developmental challenge. Things are going okay. At about 11 things start to change because, suddenly, new things present themselves — maybe a behavioural dimension.

They call the ministry and want some respite. They’re shut down. The next thing you know, he’s in care. And what did he have? He moved 21 times, 14 different locations. He’s in the justice system. It’s a loss. Like Bill talked about, we knew where this was going to go. Like, we knew maybe….
[ Page 415 ]

People that understand child development and special needs — we know where this will go if you don’t go in this way. Respite is at least a beginning. A relationship with a family is important, but meeting the needs of the child is crucial. We don’t have to have Tyler end up in that situation.

I think what causes a lot of distress in the child-serving system — parents, advocates and others — is the constantly being shut down and being presented with another high-level, cross-ministry framework that, frankly, seems like a lot of hoo-ha to people that are actually sitting there waiting to get something done — people who have no primary care physician, let alone a pediatrician, let alone a plan, let alone assessment, let alone even just a bit of respite, even if it’s another mom that’s got a lot of love and kindness and tolerance for highly challenging children.

I want Dawn to speak to it a bit, because Dawn works a lot with some of the families that do call around kids with special needs and how we see those really stable families just feel like their kids slip away.

Let’s put it positively. We’re losing an opportunity for MCFD to work with families positively. We’re become the child welfare ministry because we can’t work with families positively.

D. Thomas-Wightman: I think your point about the volunteers and the respite is a good point. Many of the families that have children with special needs and complex needs burn out their family and they burn out the volunteers. You do need highly skilled caregivers to provide the respite.

Even if there is the money available through programs — Mary Ellen’s quite correct — there are no caregivers — even in Victoria, for instance. Trying to find quality respite and trying to develop relationships with those families…. A respite worker that comes in needs to have a relationship with their family and get to know the children, but they often move on. They’re sometimes university students, working in social work or child and youth care who graduate and move on, so you get a constant stream of new respite.

Having an actual supportive respite program to provide to families is important. I just want to tell you about a family that we’re working with and why it’s so important to have skilled caregivers. We have a very high-functioning family, what you may say is upper middle class or middle class — owns their own home, both professional working parents, had a pretty typical experience in Victoria growing up here, well supported by family, well supported by their church, etc.

Two children, and their youngest child started to develop some special needs and at five and six started acting out. No diagnosis. This has been going on for a couple of years. So even for getting a diagnosis, like when you talk about early diagnosis, the wait-list to get to the CDC is significant. This family, the stress on them — I can’t tell you.

The young boy has been asked to leave school on a number of occasions. When he’s asked to leave: “Don’t come back for three or four months. Settle him down, get him on another medication, and he can come back to school.”

The mother in this situation took a leave for one year from her work, so there’s a financial implication there. She went back to work, but he was still being sent home on a regular basis from the school. Incidents of aggression for a six- and seven-year-old, two other children. They say they can’t support him so send him home.

She subsequently lost her job. Her employer, who she’d been working for, for 17 years, had said: “We can’t continue like this. You can’t keep leaving and getting phone calls from the school.” So significant financial stress. There’s emotional stress between the two parents. What was a loving, supportive marriage is starting to have stress.

The young boy has been taken to the hospital on a number of occasions. The parents aren’t sure how to respond when he’s acting out. The devastation of having to see your six-year-old in emergency, on a stretcher, she can hardly talk about. Then also parenting their other child.

Having respite would be so important for this family, right? They can’t even get a diagnosis. They can’t even look for a system of what kind of respite they would need or what kind of caregiver they would need because they can’t even get a diagnosis. He’s been diagnosed with ten different things, and they’re trying ten different medications. They have a navigator through the Ministry of Health, but the navigator says there’s nowhere to go. So I don’t know what the help of a navigator is.

There was a recent incident where the young guy was back in school and out on a caregiving trip with the teacher. He bolted from the car — got stressed out and took off. Nobody could find him for two or three hours. The police are called. Ambulances are out looking for him. He ends up back in the hospital again.

These events are happening every three or four months for this family. She’s lost her job. There’s crisis. They’re involved with the police, health, the Ministry of Children and Families, a psychiatrist, all different types of medications and the expense of that. But respite is nowhere near this family. They can’t even get into CDC, etc.

The importance of early on, when this family first started experiencing some of these problems, having respite or having someone that could go to the school and pick up this little guy…. Never mind the responsibility of the school and the education system to not be sending a young boy home for four and five months at a time. She’s at her wits’ end. I don’t see it being far away that she has to go to a voluntary care agreement because it’s starting to impact the care of her oldest daughter, their marriage,
[ Page 416 ]
a lost job. That’s exactly the pathway that happens here.

If we corrected this and tried to interrupt that pathway, this young boy could maybe have some real success. He has a right to education. He has a right to health care. Unfortunately, if it continues the way it goes, I’m not convinced he will have a good outcome. He’ll end up in exactly some of the places that these kids in this report have.

This is in Victoria. It’s not in a rural community. The availability of supports, I’m sure, is worse in a rural community. Even in Victoria, where you would think that it would be easy, it’s been about two years with this struggle. They just got their navigator last month, about the fifth trip to emergency with their child. She was very excited about getting a navigator: “Wow. Somebody is going to help me manage the system.” Their navigator just says: “There’s nothing for you.” So it’s not a help to the family, right?

I think having a system of support where this family can go and get respite today…. Where can they go and sign up and get the support? I’m not saying volunteers is a bad idea, but they do need to be trained and skilled. I know the families tell us that they burn out volunteers. They burn out their parents. They burn out their friends.

These children have some complex needs. They can be supported and can be successful, but you have to have the right training and the right supports, and it’s not cheap. That’s the point, I think, Mary Ellen makes as well. It’s going to cost some money, but it’s so needed. The social impacts to this family are significant, and we’re just early on days for this little guy, right?

C. James: Thank you for the report, and thank you for sharing the individual story.

I think what we see so often is that because this is complex, because it covers other ministries, because there isn’t a quick, simple answer, the hands get thrown up. Government says, “It’s too difficult. It’s across ministries. We’ll put another report together. We’ll put another workplan. We’ll put another joint committee of ministries together,” which does absolutely nothing for those families.

I think the frustration…. I share the frustration. I’ve seen it in my work as a foster parent. You know, you see it in families every single day. I’ve seen the school system — in my time as a school trustee, and it’s actually getting worse — send kids home. That’s their only solution. Kids can’t go to school. Your committee can talk about that in many more cases than all of us can. You see those families frustrated.

I just want to touch on, as well, the training for the foster parents and for those caregivers who have the experience who also get burnt out because they’re the only ones who ever get called. There may be one in a community, and that’s the person that everybody phones. That’s the person that the ministry phones and says: “Won’t you take one more? You’re the only trained person in the community.”

I think the basics that you’ve described…. Your comments, in particular, Mary Ellen, around there being no one solution and there is no one perfect answer — just get going and get started on something — are something that I want to emphasize. Begin some respite care. Begin some training with those caring parents who are willing to take on special needs kids. There are lots of people, including your committee, who are more than happy to provide support and training. Let’s just get on with that kind of work.

Just to touch on…. I appreciate Darryl’s point around the accountability. I can see the worry that it just becomes another level of bureaucracy. I think the hope here, and my hope, if we ever get to the place where the ministry is doing the job it should, is that they don’t only make change when they get called out. They don’t only make change when a report comes forward or when somebody raises a case or a media story comes forward. They have their own accountability practices and recognize that it’s their job to get it done. It shouldn’t only happen when this has to occur.

Just one quick question on the issue of critical incidences. I think, again, it’s a band-aid solution. It’s not the end result that you talk about for recommendations. The case that you mention in the report around Peter, where there was a critical incident and it wasn’t reported…. You’ve raised this before with the committee, where it’s not clear what critical incidences get reported to your office. Often, until we get to that fix, that’s sometimes the place where your office is able to say: “Something needs to change for this child.”

I wondered if you could just talk about critical incidences and whether that’s still ongoing work that has to happen.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Yes, I think you’ve really touched upon the point about the critical incident. I became very alive to this…. Again, with having Faith Bodnar here from Inclusion B.C., it’s a valuable reminder. That is, there have been multiple instances in the education system of use of seclusion and restraint and children being sent out of their classroom to sit somewhere and then children being sent home, and the principal or others saying: “We just can’t keep Johnny here. Please take him home.” Dawn has talked about one, but we have multiple cases. Then we have cases of restraint because you have behavioural issues — whether the schools can deal with it.

It’s a really good area. Again, my hand is up to Faith and the board and others. That includes families and Inclusion B.C. It’s really hard for families to come forward and talk about that. They don’t want to be identified. They need a confidential way to bring it forward.

I can’t even review those cases. Those are not in my mandate. Inclusion B.C. asked that the representative’s
[ Page 417 ]
office look at the 200-plus cases. I don’t have a mandate for that. So the Ministry of Education formed an internal committee to look at it. Is the minister going to have a policy directive on restraint — that you can use it in certain circumstances? I’d like them to never use it, and if they use it, I’d like a debriefing and a report to someone.

You’re absolutely right. Are we receiving critical incident reports when a child is tied up to a fence or kept in a room or there’s been an incident? I’m not saying there are never going to be incidents. If you have positive behavioural support, there shouldn’t be incidents. These are really significant.

I’m not asking for the responsibility, but I am really responding to Faith Bodnar and Inclusion B.C. and all of those families. They don’t want to be in front of a camera talking about how their child was restrained 50 times and sent home. They also don’t want to have to go to the Ministry of Education and be handled, because the minister…. In all due respect, the minister is a wonderful person. But does he want to meet with 200 families who are going to tell him what’s going on? No, because people don’t want to actually meet with these families and see them.

I’m fortunate enough. I love working with these families, and I want to hear from them. I want to see what their kids are doing. But there are not very many places in the Legislature or the government of B.C. where people actually are proactively reaching out to these families.

They’re coming forward for a reason. Critical incidents are not being reported. They’re not being reviewed. A school board or a school or a district is not really looking at what they’re doing. Are we tracking: “Oh, the child sat in the seclusion room 100 of the 220 instructional days”? Or: “The child wasn’t at school for half of the school year” and why? No, we’re not.

We rely on the parents to come forward, who then are often in these processes. As many members will know — if there are parents of children with special needs, they’ll know — the parents are labelled as bad parents. “Well, you know, the father is upset because the child had to go to the seclusion room. But the father seems to be a problematic person, so the child is probably problematic.”

I’m not saying we don’t have a sympathetic education system, but when you don’t have skilled people helping to build bridges and you don’t have good people working together, everybody defaults to a blaming mentality.

We don’t review critical incidents. We don’t learn from the critical incidents. So even in each of these cases in my report…. Did MCFD do a protocol investigation, review it, engage with the staff, engage with the school, engage with health authorities? No, they didn’t.

That’s why I went from the one case on the boy with the tasering, which really was about maltreatment of a child with special needs, to where now we have a whole group of cases. In our 13,000 advocacy cases they come in, not to mention all of the organizations I work with to try and support parents even if they’re on the perimeter of my mandate…. Really, I don’t want them to be on my mandate.

I don’t want them to put their kids in voluntary care. I want to have a good voluntary care system if they have to. But I don’t want them to have to make that terrible decision, like this family will be facing in Victoria, which is: “What do we do?” You have to listen to them and stand with them, but you have to change the system. The emotional distress of those families will change if we change the system.

Are we changing it fast enough and effectively? I have to be really, really clear to you. This report is quite clear, if you look at the conclusion. I’ll just direct you there. The conclusion to the report…. I stand by it, even though this report is a few months old. It’s on page 52. It says:

“Overall, B.C.’s piecemeal approach to residential care is neither cost-efficient nor effective over the long term. Without a continuum of care across services, delivery areas and age groups, the gains made by one program or caregivers will be lost as young people move through their lives.

“Government must show strong leadership on this issue, engage in meaningful collaboration and make a full financial and emotional investment in the well-being of children and youth. Otherwise, these tragic stories will inevitably and needlessly repeat themselves with each new cohort of young people in government’s care.”

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you, Mary Ellen, for your report. I apologize in advance. We’ve got to get on to the next agenda item. But certainly, you’ve explained the situation very well. Sadly, we’ve heard it and read about it numerous times before. But we appreciate your presentation and also inviting your committee members, as well, to present along your side.

I think what we’ll do, then, is get into our next agenda item with regard to the special report and what we’re going to move forward on. Then when we’ve done that, we have to go in camera to deal with the statutory review issue.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): In front of you, you have the special project, youth mental health. You’ve got the timeline. You’ve got the suggested people to ask to come and present or at least to solicit written items for the committee. You’ve also got in front of you a sample draft selection of questions. I thought maybe we would start out with that.

We’ve got a lot of questions. It’s probably a bit cumbersome. We might want to streamline it. But we should also focus on the public call for written submissions, which is on the bottom of page 2 as well. I’m just going to throw this over to the committee right now with regards to your comments about the phase 2 special project re the youth mental health handout.
[ Page 418 ]

M. Stilwell: I know the time is getting close. But when I was thinking about the fact that we’ve invited people to come from far away to talk about their successful experience, it seems to me that for them to just come and talk to the committee may not be the best possibility.

I am wondering about the idea of having a bigger space — still have a committee meeting but allow educators, stakeholders, providers, families to hear what they say, rather than just assuming that they’re going to go on line to read it. I am wondering what the committee would feel about that — for example, having this meeting at the Wosk Centre where people can simply come and listen to what these people are saying, just as a knowledge transfer. That was just a thought.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Well, I’m seeing nods and, you know, inquisitiveness.

M. Karagianis: I think that’s actually a really good suggestion. Having people come and be able to pay witness is a very good move on our part. I think it is good for more people to hear the presentations. It does lose something when you just go and read the Hansard or even just hear the audio of it.

I have no objection to that at all. I think it is a good idea. In many important community-related events having someone come and pay witness to that is really important. We do it in all kinds of other…. You know, public hearings on land use. I think that this is pretty important stuff and could generate more awareness, more conversation, just more interest from the community as a whole. So I’m happy to support that idea.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): It’s actually not a bad idea. The only thing is…. If you look at the timeline sheet, the actual meeting dates that have been suggested are when we’re sitting here. We’re actually physically in the building. That might be something we could do in June, when we’re not sitting.

M. Stilwell: I guess my point is to just share the experience of hearing. Can we not video-link it or stream it on line so that people — teachers, educators — can watch?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): This committee room is equipped with video conference equipment. I can certainly look into the mechanics of that. The meetings, of course, are all public. So perhaps, once we have confirmation of the participants, we could try to promote them more proactively than we do others.

The intention was, with the approval of the committee today in terms of the direction and next steps, that we would launch an announcement on the committee’s website. There could be a news release issued to announce this phase of the committee’s work on the youth mental health topic.

We’re hopeful to get some public interest into the work of the committee’s next phase.

C. James: I think the questions are well done. You’ve included opportunities on the questions for people to be able to raise both future models but also things they’re doing now. I think that’s important. I think we want that opportunity for people to be able to say: “I’ve seen this great model somewhere over here. Also, perhaps, there’s this great model right now that’s working.” I appreciate that that’s there.

I do think we have to add one more piece. I know we’ve got, at the bottom, the general public call for written submissions. I do think, in order to be true to the process we started, that we really need to have a section for parents and youth themselves. We were very clear in our first round that we wanted to hear the voices of people who were receiving that service.

I think we should just put together some questions and a section for parents and youth themselves. It’s very important that we don’t go out and just talk to the service providers and the health authorities and education without recognizing that we include something for parents and for youth themselves.

I really like what you said about the solutions-based and the fact that there are good things going on. I mean, despite when the representative comes here…. Obviously, her reports are on what’s not working. We could equally have somebody come here and tell us what is working.

For instance, everybody has heard the story of Mountainside Secondary in North Vancouver. I happen to know because it’s in my riding. They’re doing a lot of what we want. They just need a little help. We should be rejoicing in the work that they’re doing and profiling them, because they are looking for solutions.

I like what you said, Carole, there. Make sure that we don’t ignore the good work that people are doing and the capacity that we already have in certain sectors that perhaps just need more resources, more help. Good people and good things are happening.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): With respect to the proposed questions on the bottom of page 2 and in reference to Carole’s suggestion, I would just note that I think the intention when we were crafting some of the elements of those questions was that there would certainly be opportunities for families and youth to share their experiences.
[ Page 419 ]

You can see that we’re probing into things that are being done in school districts and actions that individuals might be taking to reduce youth mental health. So perhaps it would be best to frame those questions, if they are the lead questions for public engagement on the website, to try and provide more context that we’re particularly keen to hear from youth and families in the context of this public consultation process and try and find a connection through that kind of narrative.

C. James: I would agree. I think most of those questions are suitable to use, but I think we need to name it. Because we’ve got so much around service providers and community groups and health authorities, parents and youth may read this and believe that it’s not their consultation, that it’s somebody else’s consultation. So I think we actually have to name them as a specific group to be able to deal with. But I agree. I think those questions are suitable.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): In reference, then, to the actual questions that you’ve got in front of you and the list of witnesses. First of all, with regard to the questions, is everybody basically happy with the list of questions? Can we just refine it and send them out? Okay.

Is everybody happy with the list of witnesses? Obviously, we’ve got a lot of witnesses here. Perhaps people would prefer just to submit something in writing or do it by a teleconference, etc., as opposed to actually physically coming to present to us.

M. Karagianis: I’m a proponent of not constraining either the questions or those invited. I think that they may self-select, some of them saying, “We can’t actually travel anywhere. We’d rather send it in,” in a variety of ways. Maybe people will do a little video clip that they send in to us that we observe. I just think that we’ve embarked on something now, and trying to in any way constrain it I don’t think is a good idea.

Often in these things, more questions…. People will answer what they want to answer. They’ll pick and choose how they answer. I think that allowing more rather than less is better all the way around.

C. James: Just under the education section I think we’ve got a lot of administrators there, which is great. They deal with a lot of the issues. But the teachers are in the classrooms dealing with the issues. I think we need to talk to the teachers themselves.

There are PSAs, professional associations for special needs teachers, teachers of students with special needs, within the structure. We might approach the professional association for teachers of special needs — and school counsellors as well. There’s a PSA for school counsellors. I think we need to hear directly from the people in the schools as well.

I think these names are great. These people obviously have some connections. But I think we need to hear from people on the ground.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Yeah. We did hear from counsellors and people in the schools in the first phase, so we’re out there, and they are absolutely aware that this second phase is coming.

Then with regards to the draft timeline, you can see that we’ve got some ideas coming up with regards to our work with the representative, depending on times and schedules, etc. We’ve got suggested individuals and groups to come and present. The one that’s coming up in the next couple of weeks is the April 13 one.

We do not have Dr. Peterson and Dr. Morrison actually confirmed as of yet. We’re hoping that they’re coming. I’ve got a phone call with them, actually, tomorrow morning. They’re already coming to Edmonton, so we would just have to get them to come a little bit farther. We’re hoping that we will be able to confirm that by tomorrow in either case.

It’ll be good to have them physically here, but obviously, if we can’t physically get them here, we’ll get them to do something by teleconference. Just keep in mind that that day, if they are physically here, then I think we had arranged for a lunch with the committee.

Then with the other suggested people to come while the House is still sitting and while we’re physically in the building, obviously we’ve got ministry people coming and health authorities. These are just suggested times. We don’t know if they’re available at this point, but we just wanted to make sure that the committee was okay with this draft timeline and at least the beginning of moving forward and the types of people that we would be asking to come and present.

C. James: I’m good with the timeline, but I think, as we always do, we’re trying to cram too much into the date. We’ll never be able to make May 6. I can tell you that. Between nine and one with all of those, we will never do this. I think we should look at a couple of dates in June. I know that it’s tough, but I think it’s the only opportunity we’ve got, really, to be able to have full days, where we can do a half day in the morning with someone and a half day in the afternoon. I think it’s unreasonable to expect. I think we’re just setting ourselves up for being frustrated.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I think the whole point of this was just to give the selection of the options. As I said, we have no idea who’s available. But you’re right. I think we decided the last meetings that we’re obviously going into June. It was just that getting us together, even when we’re sitting, has been a struggle with all of our schedules. We definitely have to go into June.
[ Page 420 ]

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): How do you want to do that? Do you want to do that via e-mail? How do you want to do that?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Well, certainly, we will follow up after this meeting to confirm members’ availability by e-mail. But if members have a sense now of possible openings in their June calendar…. I think I had an informal chat with the Deputy Chair earlier, and he advised perhaps the week of June 8, from his point of view.

If there is an agreement in a general sense as to when we might be able to schedule, perhaps, two full-day meetings, that would be ideal. Downtown Vancouver sounds like it’s a convenient location and will give a bit of distinction from the Victoria-based meetings.

As the Chair mentioned, the outline, for example, on May 6 presumes not only the availability of the various government agencies but a willingness to come forward with a coordinated joint presentation, so we’re anticipating and very optimistic that we will be able to fill that time. If the government representatives that we’ve designated here as possible witnesses are unavailable, I’m hopeful that we’ll be able, with your agreement, to have some of the other identified witnesses scheduled for some remarks, too, that day.

M. Karagianis: Just doing a little consensus along the table here, it looks like that week is good for the members of this side, June 8.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): It’s actually not good for our side. The eighth is, but potentially not the ninth. I can’t speak for my colleagues. But definitely not….

M. Karagianis: Can we at least grab the eighth if everybody’s available for that?

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): If we can grab the eighth, but the ninth is iffy, and definitely not the tenth — not those later on in the week.

M. Karagianis: But at least that one day gives us a morning and afternoon. We could get a lot of work done then.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): In Vancouver, the Wosk Centre. I don’t know. We could do it here, I guess.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): We can follow up with your legislative assistants to confirm. I think the initial proposal on Monday, June 8, would be a full-day meeting in Vancouver. If that works for the majority of members but not everyone, we can always have a conference call option.

Perhaps if you’re able to participate through technology, we can facilitate that. If that date doesn’t work, I’m pleased to canvass any other dates that the committee can identify in June. They needn’t be back to back, although that sometimes is ideal, but if it’s June 8, possibly, and then perhaps one the week thereafter, we’re pleased to work around your schedules.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Let’s do that. Let’s go back to the calendar drawing board, and we’ll figure out about that one day or maybe the week after.

Thank you very much for giving us guidance on moving forward with the questions, the possible people that will be presenting, etc. That’s been very, very helpful.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes. Members will have received a copy of the draft report on your statutory review. I have print copies here, which we’ll now circulate, but a motion to go in camera would be ideal.

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): I move that the committee approve and adopt the report amended today and, further, that the Chair present the report to the Legislative Assembly at the earliest available opportunity.

Hansard Services publishes transcripts both in print and on the Internet.
Chamber debates are broadcast on television and webcast on the Internet.
Question Period podcasts are available on the Internet.

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

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
CHILDREN AND YOUTH