Children and Youth — Issue No. 33 — Wednesday, February 22, 2017 (HTML)

Present: Jane Thornthwaite, MLA (Chair); Melanie Mark, MLA (Deputy Chair); Marc Dalton, MLA; Carole James, MLA; Maurine Karagianis, MLA; John Martin, MLA; Don McRae, MLA; Dr. Darryl Plecas, MLA; Linda Reimer, MLA; Jennifer Rice, MLA

1. There not yet being a Chair elected to serve the Committee, the meeting was called to order at 9:05 a.m. by the Clerk to the Committee.

2. Resolved, that Jane Thornthwaite, MLA, be elected Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. (Don McRae, MLA)

3. Resolved, that Melanie Mark, MLA, be elected Deputy Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. (Carole James, MLA)

5. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions regarding the Statutory Review of the Representative for Children and Youth Act.

• Lori Wanamaker, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Children and Family Development

• Cory Heavener, Provincial Director of Child Welfare, Ministry of Children and Family Development

• Martin Wright, Executive Director, Modelling, Analysis and Information Management Branch, Ministry of Children and Family Development

• Richard J. M. Fyfe, Q.C., Deputy Attorney General and Deputy Minister, Justice, Ministry of Justice and Attorney General

6. The Committee Research Analyst provided the Committee with a summary of written submissions received during the Statutory Review of the Representative for Children and Youth Act consultation process.

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
Election of Chair and Deputy Chair	741
Statutory Review: Representative for Children and Youth Act	741
L. Wanamaker
C. Heavener
M. Wright
R. Fyfe
Statutory Review: Update on Submissions	763
Other Business	763

S. Sourial (Clerk Assistant, Committees and Interparliamentary Relations): Good morning, committee members. As this is our first meeting of the committee for the sixth session, it’s my duty to call upon you to elect a Chair. Are there any nominations?

Mr. McRae has nominated Ms. Thornthwaite. Any other nominations? Any other nominations? And a third time, any other nominations?

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Welcome, everybody, and thank you for that nomination. Now we are going to nominate the Deputy Chair — no matter if she likes it or not.

C. James: Should I apologize? She’s not here because her flight is not on its way yet.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Any other nominations for Deputy Chair? Any other nominations for Deputy Chair? Any other nominations for Deputy Chair?

It looks like Melanie Mark is our Deputy Chair. We’ll welcome Melanie when she arrives.

Thank you very much, everyone, for coming today. This is a very exciting meeting, actually. But before I start, I’d like to recognize our new Representative for Children and Youth, Bernard Richard.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): The Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth is required by the Representative for Children and Youth Act to periodically review that act. The purpose of the statutory review, as stated in section 30 of the act, is to “determine whether the functions of the representative described in section 6 are still required to ensure that the needs of children, and young adults as defined in that section, are met.”

The functions of the Representative for Children and Youth are a very important part of B.C.’s child- and youth-serving system. The Office of the Representative undertakes valuable and necessary work in all three core areas of its statutory mandate, but there may be opportunities to strengthen its legislation and improve the effectiveness of our child welfare system as a whole.

This is the committee’s third statutory review. The first, in 2011 and 2012, was a comprehensive review resulting in seven recommendations. During that review, the Hon. Ted Hughes reminded the committee of the objectives of the recommendations from his 2006 report.

For example, in recommending section 6(1)(b), which provides the representative with the authority to “monitor, review, audit and conduct research on the provision of a designated service,” the intent was to give the representative a role in overseeing the functioning of the child welfare system — and that the need for public confidence in the system at that time demanded external oversight.

His 2006 report also suggested that the representative would focus, not on the day-to-day operations of the child welfare system, but on broader, systemwide issues.

During the 2011 and 2012 statutory review, the Ministry of Children and Family Development told the committee that the ministry was working to improve its quality assurance program. The ministry’s submission suggested that, contingent on certain actions by the ministry and to the satisfaction of the committee, conditions would exist within two years that would enable a shift in the representative’s functions under section 6(1)(b).

The ministry proposed that the objectives behind the section 6(1)(b) “monitor” and “audit” language would be met through stronger ministry performance, management and reporting, plus an enhanced role for the committee.

Regarding the committee, the ministry suggested appearing before the committee twice per year to make a full report to members on progress in implementing an improved public accountability framework, and having the committee’s inputs on protocols developed between the representative’s office and the ministry. The ministry agreed that the representative should continue undertaking systemic advocacy and research, in accordance with section 6(1)(b).

In the end, one of the committee’s 2012 recommendations was to amend the act to require a review specific to section to 6(1)(b) by April 2015.

For the 2015 review, the committee received a joint submission from the ministry and the representative’s office stating their mutual agreement that section 6(1)(b)
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should not be amended at that time. The committee’s report concurred with this position.

At our last meeting, in January, we had the honour to meet with the Hon. Ted Hughes. His comments focused on section 6(1)(b). In essence, he suggested that the committee should consider what conditions would need to be in place were section 6(1)(b) to become unnecessary and contribute to a plan to make it happen. Otherwise, he said, perhaps it should be that section 6(1)(b) is an accepted feature of the act and no further reconsiderations of that section should be undertaken.

With the Hon. Hughes’s counsel on the specific issue of section 6(1)(b) in mind, the committee will move forward with our comprehensive review of the act. In considering whether the act is meeting the needs of B.C.’s children and youth, the committee will look at the act holistically to ensure that it is an effective framework to support the representative’s role in the three core areas of its mandate.

As the review proceeds, we will likely hear input ranging from suggestions for minor clarifications to the act to suggestions regarding the scope and focus of the representative’s mandate. In its 2011-2012 review, the committee ultimately made recommendations ranging from minor — a change of the date regarding the delivery of the representative’s service plan to the Speaker — to more major — expanding the representative’s mandate to include advocacy in respect of young adults up to age 24 receiving services from Community Living B.C.

Today’s meeting will be our final committee meeting to hear input on matters relating to the representative’s act before the provincial general election this spring. Following the election, it is my hope that the committee will resume the statutory review.

With that, I would like to welcome our guests. I am pleased that we have senior staff from the ministries whose work is most deeply connected to the work of the representative. First, senior officials of the Ministry of Children and Family Development will discuss key developments in MCFD, with particular focus on 2011 to today and performance measures. Following those presentations, we will hear from the Ministry of Justice officials, who will make a presentation on the Representative for Children and Youth Act.

I would ask that our guests introduce subsequent guests in their ministry when they’re in the process of speaking. But because you might not know, I thought maybe a brief introduction of the members, just so you know where they’re from, might start off the meeting. Then maybe we’ll start off with you, Lori.

C. James: Carole James. I’m the MLA for Victoria–Beacon Hill and Finance spokesperson.

M. Karagianis: Maurine Karagianis, MLA for Esquimalt–Royal Roads and spokesperson for women’s issues.

J. Rice: I’m Jennifer Rice. I’m the MLA for North Coast, and I’m the spokesperson for northern and rural and economic development and northern and rural health.

D. McRae: Don McRae, the MLA for Comox Valley and spokesperson for soon-to-be-retired MLAs.

L. Reimer: I’m Linda Reimer, MLA for Anmore, Belcarra, Port Moody and Coquitlam and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development.

M. Dalton: Marc Dalton, MLA Maple Ridge–Mission and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Aboriginal Relations.

D. Plecas: Darryl Plecas, the MLA for Abbotsford South and the Parliamentary Secretary for Seniors to the Minister of Health and the Parliamentary Secretary for Accessibility to the Minister of Social Development. That’s a bit of a long title.

Jane Thornthwaite, the Chair of the select standing committee and Parliamentary Secretary for Child Mental Health and Anti-Bullying.

L. Wanamaker: Thank you for inviting us here today. I’m Lori Wanamaker. I am the relatively new Deputy Minister of Children and Family Development. I’m joined here today by Cory Heavener, who is the provincial director of child welfare, and Martin Wright, who is the executive director of modelling, analysis and information management.

We’re here today at the request of the committee to provide a bit of background information on the Ministry of Children and Family Development and to aid you in the statutory review. On behalf of the ministry, we’ll make two presentations today. The first presentation is about key developments in the child welfare system, and the second presentation will be about our performance management system.

This will be followed by a presentation of the Ministry of Justice on the legislative review process.

For the past five years, the ministry has focused on implementing strategic priorities and key actions aimed
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at improving our programs and services. These changes have created a very strong foundation for continued improvements in the child welfare system and in our public accountability.

The ministry has been actively engaged with aboriginal leaders, other ministries, service delivery partners, communities and organizations to collectively reach our vision and reshape British Columbia’s child welfare system so that children and youth live in safe, healthy and nurturing families and are strongly connected to their communities and culture.

Over the next few minutes, I’ll talk a bit about the genesis of the ministry, just as a context. Cory will spend some time then speaking about key developments, and I’ll close by talking about the engagement that we have with our independent officers and other advisers, to give you a bit of an idea of the road map that we have going forward as far as changes in the ministry.

I’m sorry that I have to go back to Gove, but Gove was really the father of the ministry. It was the report he did in 1994 that set in motion the wheels that created the Ministry of Children and Families.

Judge Thomas Gove was appointed to head an inquiry into the death of a child, Matthew Vaudreuil. This little boy was killed by his mother while he was a client of the ministry’s child protection system. During the 18 months of the review, Judge Gove looked at policies, practices of the child welfare system and other services that the province provided to children and families.

The review found a number of shortcomings in the system: poorly trained social workers lacking qualifications, without adequate supervision or policy direction. He recommended rigorous new recruitment criteria and professional qualifications. There was no effective, reliable means to measure how well children were doing. Policy and practice failed to promote continuous planning and improvement. There was no integration in the decision-making between practitioners in the Ministry of Social Services and other government ministries, and there was a gap between what individual communities wanted and what the ministry provided.

Judge Gove made 118 recommendations. Probably the most significant recommendations he made were the creation of new child welfare legislation and the consolidation of most, if not all, of the programs that were delivered to vulnerable children and youth. He also recommended the creation of the Children’s Commission.

This was followed in 2006 by the Hughes recommendation. Again, the Hughes review was precipitated by a crisis in the child welfare system. Hughes reviewed the ministry between 2005 and 2006. He made 62 recommendations and provided the ministry with a new plan for external oversight.

His key recommendations related to external oversight, quality assurance and a reinforced need for a central authority to set standards.

There is a surprising overlap between the recommendations that Judge Gove made and the recommendations of Ted Hughes. I’d like to just highlight three of those areas, because I think those areas continue to be areas inside the ministry where we work actively today.

The first, on external oversight. Both Gove and Hughes recommended external oversight. Hughes was very focused on advocacy monitoring and the review for investigation, and obviously, these are the areas that the committee will be most concerned about as far as the legislative review.

Judge Gove’s recommendations were of a very similar nature, including the review of critical injuries and a fair process for receiving complaints. Both Gove and Hughes recommended a decentralization of the ministry, that the ministry’s service delivery had to meet the needs of people on the ground and that the service delivery could not be centrally directed from Victoria.

However, Mr. Hughes, in his 2006 recommendation, also reinforced the need for a central policy-setting authority to provide standards and to provide public accountability.

Finally, the quality assurance system. Both gentlemen recommended a strong quality assurance system. They also recommended that the ministry develop the capacity to do aggregate analysis of the recommendations that it received. This is work that we continue to be actively engaged in. I would like to propose that the ministry come back to the committee in the fall, or at a convenient opportunity, to present more fully on the quality management system.

This is a snapshot of where we are today with the child welfare system. The number of children in care per thousand in the population peaked in the early ’70s and fell to a low in the mid-’90s. You’ll see that the bottom of the trough is about the time that we had the Gove review and Matthew Vaudreuil died. We rose to a peak again in the early 2000s. This was in response to recommendations that were received in the ministry that really drove social workers to be more cautious in their approach to their work and to a larger number of children coming into care.

In 2003-04, the ministry began a service transformation. You can see that the number of children in care continues to decline to the point where over the last ten years we’ve seen almost a 20 percent reduction in the number of children in care. This transformation continues to this day. The approach is one that is based on strengths and that looks at the assets of the family and tries to assist the family in developing the skills to parent their own children. We also support extended families to keep the children in the care of the broader family group or in the community.

There are fewer children in care. These results continue to be demonstrated in the work. Over the past ten years, we’ve seen a 20 percent decline in the kids in care.
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The recommendations from Gove and Hughes and the advice and guidance from the Representative for Children and Youth over the past ten years have significantly informed, and continue to contribute to, the child welfare system in B.C.

The next part of the presentation this morning is going to highlight some of the key developments in the ministry since 2011. Specifically, some of the key areas that we’re going to cover are the provincial director of child welfare, practice shifts, staffing, service delivery, information technology, and aboriginal engagement and consultation. We’ll finish up with quality assurance.

The provincial director of child welfare position — the position that I currently hold as a statutory officer — was eliminated in the ministry from July 1, 2008, to March 2011. The role of the provincial director was reinstated in 2011, as the ministry had reached a conclusion that the system required strong, consistent, central guidance and direction in child welfare. In addition, there had been, at that time, a recent recommendation from the Representative for Children and Youth to reinstate that position.

The provincial director of child welfare acts as a central position of legal authority and accountability for child welfare services in British Columbia, provides oversight to child welfare practice and quality assurance — as is outlined in the Child, Family and Community Service Act — and has oversight responsibilities that extend to practice and quality assurance, both in the ministry service delivery areas but also in delegated aboriginal agencies.

The next area we’re going to talk about is key developments in practice shifts. There have been a number of developments in practice shifts over the past five, six, seven years. I’m particularly going to focus on a few of those today.

Using the family development response to child protection reports, when appropriate. This is a response that’s strength-based and collaborative, a transparent process with parents to keep children safe. This is an approach that we use when we’re responding to child protection reports, where we actually work with children and their families at developing safety plans and keeping them safe.

We’ve been using alternatives to care such as out-of-care options and the extended family program. Out-of-care options refer to options for the care of the child or youth by family members or other significant adults, rather than approved foster parents, in circumstances where the children’s parents are unable to care for the child.

We’ve replaced the B.C. risk assessment model, which was implemented in 1996, with a new child protection response model, which was implemented in April 2012. It, again, provides for a more integrated, collaborative practice and decision-making approach when responding to child protection reports and also working with children and families. As part of that response model, we’ve implemented structured decision-making tools which support social workers with conducting structured assessments and making decisions at critical points in an assessment that they’re conducting.

We are promoting and strengthening how we support families. That’s an area, over the last five years, that we’ve definitely paid more attention to. We are going to continue to build on this area. We know how important it is to keep families together. We also know that when children do come into care — and when they do come into care on a continuing custody basis, which is permanent — we need to ensure that they have permanent homes as a priority. Definitely, over the last three years, one of our biggest shifts has been ensuring permanency for children so that they don’t remain in care and they can be in their communities or adoptive families.

With respect to staffing, the ministry, since November 2014, has increased our staff complement by 10 percent. This has resulted from the commitment to hire 200 new child welfare workers. In addition, there are approximately 60 additional delegated aboriginal staff since this time last year.

We are going through a process of restructuring ministry functions. A number of changes have been made or are underway. Where we’re hoping to go with this is to be able to support social workers to actually spend more time with children and families. One of the things we’re doing, for example, is freeing social workers from functions like payment transactions, data entry and handling non-urgent inquiries. Again, this will allow them to spend more time with clients and will also allow us to do a more consistent, centralized approach in responding to those types of administrative inquiries.

We established, in June 2014, a provincial mobile response team that works to meet the needs of our hard-to-recruit areas, our rural and remote areas, by temporarily deploying delegated child protection staff to areas that may be understaffed. We’ve also established a voluntary roster of delegated social workers that are willing and able to travel to communities for short periods of time to provide child protection services in those areas where they may be needed on an immediate or urgent basis.

We’ve established the rapid response team in the Downtown Eastside, which provides a coordinated and timely approach to working with at-risk youth in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

Moving on to service delivery. In 2011, the ministry restructured to 13 service delivery areas from four. At this time, the ministry is undergoing a service delivery redesign to address recruitment lag, business processes as well as staff engagement. This vision, over time, will dramatically change the way the ministry delivers services, creating greater efficiency and improving client service
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and the ability to focus our professionals on the services where their expertise is required.

Some examples of areas that we’ve been working on are a provincial centralized screening system, a provincial screening system for child protection that provides 24-7 service across all 13 service delivery areas, and a centralized service hub, which provides access for the public across a broad continuum of services by moving all the transactional services currently delivered by local offices to a centralized service hub.

We’ve established a central hiring model to address any of the recruitment issues, and we’re also very focused on staff engagement. This has included a focus on workplace health and safety, Internet redesign, improved internal communications and implementation of a staff engagement working group.

Another key development has been information technology. The integrated case management system known as ICM is a new case management system for social workers that was implemented in 2012. This system is used for documenting casework — in fact, all of our casework, including assessments — and is designed to improve the way the ministry manages client information with children, youth and families. Despite some challenges in the initial implementation of ICM across the ministry, the final phase of ICM was implemented in November 2014, and changes were made at that time which have made the system more responsive and user-friendly.

Aboriginal engagement and consultation. In 2016-17, the ministry identified as a key goal improving relationships with services for First Nations, Métis and aboriginal children. This started with each of the 13 service delivery areas developing reconciliation plans that would guide them for a year, including a requirement to meet with First Nations leadership.

At the First Nations Children and Family Gathering this past May — May 2016 — the government made three commitments. They were to improve our relationships with First Nations at the community level, starting with sharing with them the names of children in care, as well as working with First Nations leadership to find new ways to address the question of authority over child welfare and funding for children and family services.

Since the fall, we have been working with the child and family wellness working group to explore these new funding and jurisdictional arrangements. We are co-sponsoring with Canada a best-practices conference in March, and we are collecting information on funding and jurisdiction to understand our baseline. We have agreed on a reconciliation charter, and this is being submitted by all three parties for approval. The charter will guide our work, going forward.

We are also working with individual First Nations to explore with them what jurisdiction would look like and how we could go about doing it. This has never been done in Canada before, so we’re breaking new ground, and we’re very, very hopeful about these discussions.

In addition in the ministry, we have developed an aboriginal policy and practice framework, which is our overarching framework intended to improve outcomes for children, youth, families and communities through restorative policies and practices. The development of the aboriginal policy and practice framework was co-led by the ministry and the delegated aboriginal agencies and involved significant consultation.

At the end of the day, this work, for us, is about making a difference for First Nations, aboriginal and Métis children, youth and families. We are hoping that we will start to see better outcomes for First Nations, aboriginal and Métis children in the coming months and years.

The final key development in the ministry that I’ll talk about today is quality assurance. The ministry is continuing to implement a quality assurance framework that provides the foundation for a ministrywide continuous quality assurance and improvement system that is centred by a culture of quality assurance throughout the ministry. This approach will inform and is informing services policy and standards, legislation practice training, and service delivery models.

As you can see from the diagram, the framework consists of five interrelated domains where the focus is on ensuring that the work we do is aligned with achieving the desired outcomes for children, youth and families. This framework describes how quality assurance activities — so how our data and our information from all of those activities — are reviewed, analyzed and evaluated to inform continuous quality improvement across the ministry and, specifically, in our practices, policy, training standards and legislation.

Since 2012-2013, the ministry has implemented several quality assurance initiatives and activities as part of the overall quality assurance framework. In March 2013, the ministry reinstated the audit program with new methodology and audit tools. At that time, the audit program was launched, which looked at family service audits. In recent years, it has expanded to look at resource and adoption work. The audit program is continuing to expand and will include audits of children and youth with special needs, child and youth mental health, as well as youth justice.

We’ve also improved the ministry’s complaint process and made amendments to the CF and CSA regulations in October 2012 that introduced a new administrative review process to look at complaints. We’ve improved the ministry’s reportable-circumstance policy guidelines by providing broader policy in reporting criteria for critical injuries and deaths of children and youth. We’ve expanded the definition of critical injuries.

We’ve also, in the past year, expanded our case review methodology to include that for any time in British Columbia a child in care dies, there will be a review. In
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fact, for any young adult who was in care at the time when they were 19 and up to the age of 20, there will be an automatic case review as well.

We’ve also begun conducting aggregate analysis of the quality assurance activities that we are doing to better inform our policy and practice so that we can work to provide and strengthen our outcomes for children and youth in the province. In the past two years, in order to look at all the quality assurance work in the ministry and in order to have some guidance about moving forward, we’ve also established a quality assurance and a continuous quality improvement steering committee.

L. Wanamaker: The Ministry of Children and Families has a significant amount of external oversight. All of the bodies listed on this slide, except for the PGT, have authority to conduct periodic reviews of the ministry. The ministry has a rigorous approach to supporting these reviews, and the reviews inform improvements in the child welfare system and provide insight into what we need to do better or what we need to do more of.

You’ve heard a bit about our approach to quality assurance from Cory, and later Martin will discuss our performance management system. In conjunction with these reviews, we continuously monitor our progress against the recommendations. We use these to inform the learning and the development of the ministry.

Obviously, the independent officer with whom we have the greatest contact is the Representative for Children and Youth. We meet regularly with the representative and, now, his office. The engagement includes working collaboratively on report recommendations and reviewing upcoming reports for administrative fairness. The ministry notifies the RCY about fatalities, critical injuries and serious incidents involving children and youth in care, and we publicly report on these same situations.

As the committee is aware, last year we, in conjunction with the RCY, jointly released a report on hotel placements. We are currently working on updating the three protocols that we have with this office into a single overarching protocol. The expectation is that we’ll complete this by the end of March this year.

With both a new deputy minister and a new representative, we are looking forward to resetting the relationship, improving clarity and ultimately improving the services for the children and youth that we serve in the ministry.

Since 2007, the Representative for Children and Youth has released 36 reports directed at MCFD, 146 recommendations with over 600 details. This includes the latest report earlier this month, Broken Promises. That’s nearly four reports a year, with an average or four to six recommendations in a report. When you look at this strictly over the last five years, we have had 24 reports, 75 recommendations and approximately 360 details.

Now, I’m told that the Ministry of Children and Family Development and the Representative for Children and Youth count progress against these recommendations in a different way. I’m hopeful that we can resolve our difference in the near term so that when we present at this table, you will hear the same progress numbers from each of us.

Based on the ministry’s, we have implemented approximately 76 percent of the recommendations that we have received up to December 2015. That is 100 of 132 recommendations. In 2016-17, the RCY released six reports, two of which did not have recommendations and four of which had recommendations. Action plans have been received by the representative’s office on three of those reports.

While we continue to be informed by the work of the external bodies, we have also had a couple of expert advisors who have provided the ministry with advice and recommendations in the past two years. I’d like to turn for a moment to the two recent reports, one by Bob Plecas and the other by Grand Chief Ed John.

On December 4, 2015, the Plecas Review, Part One: Decision Time was released. This report provided a road map for improvements to the child welfare system. It included 54 points of consideration in eight areas: to rethink the management model within the ministry, strengthen staff resources, restore MCFD programs, respect and support professional decision-making and professional growth, streamline policies, fully implement a quality assurance system, provide appropriate and effective oversight and put appropriate financial resources in place. Mr. Plecas also stressed the importance of developing a multi-year plan with milestones based on points of consideration.

My read of the Plecas report is that it’s really foundational. The recommendations were to put in place both the hard and soft infrastructure within the ministry to support the front line to deliver services directly to children, youth and their families.

We’ve made very good progress against the Plecas recommendations. Seven of the recommendations are substantially complete. This includes such points of consideration as adding full-time-equivalents for quality assurance, additional funding in Budget 2016 to apply to a range of programs to assist families, increasing transparency through having ministry staff available to speak on technical issues relating to ministry operations.

There are 30 actions that are underway, including program restoration; improvements to professional decision-making and training; streamlining policies and practices — I’m told that when we started this exercise, we had over 400 policies, which amounted to about 400 pages of policy and practice guidance, and that those will be reduced significantly; expanding our internal quality assurance system and improving pay and incentives for front-line staff.

Fourteen recommendations were subject to the consideration of the Select Standing Committee on Children
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and Youth. Three recommendations are not proceeding at this time; they deal largely with staffing of individual positions within the ministry.

This review was followed by a review conducted by Grand Chief Ed John. He released his report this past November, Indigenous Resilience, Connectedness and Reunification: From Root Causes to Root Solutions. Over the course of about a year, the Grand Chief visited over 80 communities and spoke to both individual leadership and service providers within indigenous and aboriginal communities.

The recommendations provided focused on reducing the need to bring indigenous children and youth into care; increasing supports to families; enabling greater access to judicial services; creating a more equitable funding model between the province and the federal government; increasing early intervention services; and specifically targeting more MCFD staff within First Nations communities.

Of the recommendations, 71 were directed towards MCFD or require MCFD to work closely with other ministries, federal agencies or aboriginal leadership, and 14 recommendations were not directed at MCFD, although we will have a role in monitoring and making sure that these recommendations are considered by the agencies.

The recommendations included in Grand Chief Ed John’s report were largely systemic in nature and spoke to a redesign of the child welfare system and a major overhaul of current practice legislation, and many of his recommendations required significant interaction between the federal government and the provincial government.

We have begun work on 52 of the recommendations that we were provided by Grand Chief Ed John. This includes ensuring that the ministry’s regional leadership meets regularly with aboriginal communities; sharing the lists of the children in care with First Nations councils; that we increase our support to our youth advisory council; that we engage with the federal government and aboriginal leadership to initiate discussions on a number of recommendations, including jurisdiction; and that we begin to explore revisions to the Child, Family and Community Service Act and the Adoption Act.

Budget 2017 appropriated new funding for the ministry. This funding will be directed towards family preservation and supports; funding for children and youth with mental health, including intergenerational trauma; equity funding between the province and delegated agencies; and funding to implement the aboriginal policy and practice framework.

At this time, our assessment is that the implementation of the report is wide-ranging and will take many years within the ministry and depends on our partnership with the federal government.

We’ve grouped our response to Grand Chief Ed John’s recommendations into five categories. The first is the tripartite working group.

Subsequent to the Child and Family Gathering in Vancouver on May 30 and 31 of last year, we established a tripartite working group with the First Nations Leadership Council; the federal government, represented by INAC; the Ministry of Children and Family Development; the Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation; and the Ministry of Justice. This working group will be looking at systemic changes around jurisdiction and funding formulas.

There are nine recommendations that relate to legislative review, and we’re looking at those recommendations in totality and not as discrete amendments to the act. It’s our belief that work that is being done at the tripartite working group will also inform proposals for legislative review, particularly in the area of jurisdiction.

Eleven recommendations require federal participation and/or funding, and 37 fall clearly within the operational plans of the Ministry of Children and Family Development. Those recommendations are proceeding in the coming year — those that haven’t already been initiated.

In closing, since inception the ministry has made significant progress. In the last five years, there has been major change which has occurred inside the ministry. The ministry continues to evolve and improve. We are making strong progress towards the implementation of the many recommendations that we have received, and we will continue to do so.

L. Reimer: Thank you very much for this very informative presentation that you’ve done.

Back on slide 9, you indicated that we replaced the B.C. risk assessment model in 1996 with the new child protection response model. I’m just wondering if that indicated a shift in your direction from one of, perhaps, prevention to one of reaction, if you like. I’m just wondering if you could tell me what went into that decision and that sort of thing.

C. Heavener: The change that occurred was that the B.C. risk assessment model was probably more reactive than a prevention–family preservation type of model. We would have one response to a child protection report — which was a risk assessment model, based on some very detailed guidelines of how we would proceed, and more from an investigative process.

Now, with the introduction of the new child and family child protection response model, we actually have a couple of different paths we can take in responding to a child protection report. One of the paths is a family development response where we actually go out under
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various types of complaints that are made. If the family is wanting to work with us, we actually go out and take a strengths-based approach where we collaborate with them to develop a plan to ensure the safety of the children.

M. Karagianis: I’d also like to refer to the same slide. I just have a general question here about the shift with the new child protection response model. How has that translated to the front lines where there’s training? What changes have taken place for the education and training of social workers before they come into the field?

Secondly, I wouldn’t mind you elaborating a little bit more on what exactly takes place in the concept of promoting and strengthening family permanency and preservation. How does that look? What does it entail? What kind of personnel and dollars are required for that in order to make that happen for those families?

C. Heavener: With respect to the first question, with the introduction of the child protection response model, the education and qualifications for new child protection workers remain the same. Those have not changed.

What has changed is that with the new model we prepared orientation for all of the current staff throughout the ministry — our consultants and our directors of practice. I don’t have that information with me today, but we conducted numerous live meetings and in-person orientation sessions on the new policies, and those new policies and that approach are built into our training for new social workers.

As far as the following two questions go, the promoting and strengthening work with families is an area that we’ve always paid attention to. What we’re doing now is actually trying to pay more attention to that and look at what resources are needed to support families to keep children in the care of the families or with other family members or in community, prior to coming into care.

Some of the examples of family preservation. Respite care would be an option that we could provide for families. There are also a range of programs — parenting support programs, counselling programs. These are all types of programs that we would provide on a voluntary basis.

The third part of the question, with respect to permanency. There has been a significant — and I can’t understate that — priority in the ministry over the last four years to ensure that children who are in permanent custody, which is known as continuing custody, of the ministry do not remain in care and then at the age of 19, and adulthood, transition from care. We are looking at those children and working to ensure that they have a permanent living arrangement.

There are a number of options that we have in that area. Some of those options are transferring custody to an extended-family member or to another adult or another person that the family is familiar with. Then we also look at whether reunification is possible with the family or with other family members. In addition, another option would be adoption.

M. Karagianis: Are there dedicated funds to any of those? We saw some budget announcements here yesterday, and I don’t necessarily hear that reflected in your comments here. Has there been some discussion on what kind of funding is going to be specifically funnelled for those things?

Also, just to go back to the training, I would assume that if there’s this cultural shift within the ministry, that would somehow be reflected at the training end for social workers coming in. I mean, it’s not just a rubber-stamp program you take and then you come and get retrained or reoriented or introduced to the actual existing culture within the ministry. I would hope that there is some kind of feedback into post-secondary education training that reflects, perhaps, a new approach here — a shift in approach.

Just those two things. What kind of actual resources and dollars are going into this? And I would assume that there is some discussion going on with trainers. Does the ministry not stay in touch with instructions at post-secondary education facilities?

C. Heavener: Absolutely. We have regular meetings with the post-secondary institutions in British Columbia. They offer a couple of practicum programs, and they also offer a child welfare specialization program. We ensure, in the ministry, that we have capacity to take new practicum students as well as those students that are part of the child welfare specialization program.

Through those ongoing processes, at various levels across the ministry and the post-secondary organizations, we share our policies, our practices, our strategic initiatives to ensure that they’re well-informed of the direction that the ministry is going. It’s ongoing work. It continues throughout the year, throughout their practicum experiences and throughout the regular meetings.

L. Wanamaker: As far as the budget, I can give you the budget. The allocation, of the announcement yesterday, which would go towards family support — I don’t have the number for the entire ministry. But of yesterday’s announcement, about $24.2 million is invested in family support.

C. James: Thank you for the presentation. I just want to ask a couple of questions around quality assurance.
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It’s more: what happens next? It may be in the next part of your presentation, so say so. We can deal with it then.

You’ve talked, and we’ve had presentations previously from the ministry, about reinstating the practice audit program, doing more audits, expanding the audit tools and looking at more programs within the ministry.

I just wanted to hear from you a little bit about what steps are taken when the program shows that there’s a deficit. I’m thinking about the most recent audits around a number of regions where children weren’t being seen by their social workers every three months and that compliance wasn’t there. What are the next steps? How does it go from quality assurance, where it shows that there are some challenges, to actually changing practice and changing supports for young people?

C. Heavener: To answer the first part of your question around quality assurance and strengthening the system, we actually have a plan in place over the next three years to strengthen the system and to build a continuous quality improvement process and strategies within the ministry. There has been a lot of work going on in this area, and there are a lot of activities.

An audit is one area that we look at, and obviously there are a number of areas that we look at and audit. We’ve done work to ensure that our audit tools have very strong methodologies. At times that’s been how we develop. We develop an audit tool, we will go out and pilot it, and then we will come back and have discussions and revise it.

We’ve also been strengthening our case review process. We have been strengthening our complaints process, our administrative process and all of our reportables processes. Now we’re at a place where we feel that it’s really important that we look at all of the information coming from all of those various activities. We aggregate it, and we determine what are potential systemic issues, what are policy issues, what are training issues, and we have those discussions at that level as well.

We also want to get to a place where we’re actually talking to children and families and where we are building in an evaluation. Are we actually meeting the intended outcomes that we are trying to meet? Martin will talk a little bit more about that in performance management and reporting, but we work very closely with Martin’s area.

The other key piece that we’re working on is strengthening our public reporting around our quality assurance activities and being more transparent. We started that a number of years ago, and we do have a ways to go in that area as well.

We have a highly dedicated team. Beginning last year, we’ve got additional resources. This past year we’ve hired an additional eight staff that have started this year to support us with those activities, and we have an additional 13 staff we’ll be hiring over the next two years.

As far as your question about audits themselves and when we go out and do a practice audit. It’s a very complex, detailed, thorough process that we go through. Our audit tools are based on our practice standards, and our practice standards are detailed as well. There are a number of components with respect to some of the standards — not all of them, but with respect to some of them.

We go out, and we go back in time. If we’re doing an audit and it’s in the summer of 2016, we’d be looking at the work three years prior to that so that we have good samples to look at. We then apply our tool that measures compliance to all of those standards.

After that, there are three things that happen. The auditor will come back and present a report and look at the strength and challenges of practice in that particular office. Quite often there’s a discussion with the senior staff in that area about the initial findings. Any time a file is reviewed, and if there’s a concern — because in the audits, you have to have documented your work in order to get compliance or to be considered — then those concerns are brought up in real time with the senior leadership as well.

The third thing that we do: from every audit report where we do see there are gaps or challenges, we develop individual audit action plans. Those plans are intended to address those gaps. They can range from anything from training, additional orientation or maybe we need to look at our policies in a different way — those types of topic areas. Then from there, we monitor them for completion. They all have timelines attached, and we would do that on an individual basis.

The last thing I would add is that we’re now looking at all of our action plans across all of our quality assurance activities to look for the themes and the patterns and to really explore those with our quality assurance committee to see what we are learning from that and how we improve in those areas.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I actually have a long list of questions here. We’re supposed to be finishing this section up by 10:30, actually, and that also includes Martin’s presentation. So I’m going to ask everybody to be really quick and the answers to be quick, because we don’t want to be going into the time of the other ministry.

M. Dalton: On slide 13, you discuss aboriginal engagement, and you make comments about the reconciliation charter. I just wondered if you could elaborate a bit about that.

Also, do you have any comments about Métis children? I understand there are about 900 Métis children in care. It’s been expressed to me that many have not even been identified. I’m just wondering how that is going as far as tracking Métis children and data collection.

L. Wanamaker: The reconciliation charter is a document that came out of the Children and Family Gathering.
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It is not a completed document yet. Really, what it does is it spells out a collaborative working relationship between the province, the federal government and the First Nations Leadership Council, First Nations communities.

C. Heavener: With respect to Métis children, we work very closely with the Métis Commission as well as Métis Nation B.C. and the Métis service providers in this province.

We have an MOU with the Métis Nation B.C. and Métis Commission about how we will work together and how we will specifically work together to improve the outcomes for Métis children in this province. It’s work that’s underway and that’s continuing.

I guess going back to part of the request to make improvements or recommendations or suggestions to the representative’s current legislation. My questions relate to mandate, perhaps. The representative’s mandate is very clear. Part of their mandate is to make system improvement for children and families.

My question is…. Truth and Reconciliation had a number of calls to action last year, pointing to improvements to child welfare. A hundred-and-something recommendations have come out of the representative’s office for a decade. Plecas had points of consideration, upwards of just over 50. Grand Chief Ed John had 80-some-odd recommendations to the system.

The first question is: how do you decide which recommendations get implemented? Then the second question is…. Seventy-four percent of the recommendations, give or take, from the representative’s perspective, have been implemented. What are the 26 percent that haven’t been implemented? Then my last question is related to reporting out.

I know those are huge, massive, systemic questions that I don’t expect to get answered in a minute. But I think those are, for the public who don’t understand who decides which one gets implemented or why we are where we’re at today…. It’s great to have a lift in a budget, but there has been a decade of recommendations, and recommendations are about making the system better.

One of the brilliant things about being a new deputy is you can go back and look at everything that’s happened in the ministry over a long period of time. So we have gone back to the Gove recommendations, and we have mapped those recommendations forward into Hughes and into the recommendations of the RCY.

One of the problems about having so many great recommendations is that sometimes they conflict, and sometimes they’re no longer valid. The ministry is almost at the point where we have finalized a multi-year action plan, which was one of the recommendations that Bob Plecas made. That action plan incorporates what we consider to be the key recommendations over the last decade, including recommendations from the RCY, from Bob Plecas himself and from Grand Chief Ed John, and tries to move those recommendations into more of a systemic approach.

So rather than a series of recommendations, which are very tactical in nature, we’ve tried to move it into an approach that we can implement within the ministry and change practice, to move our efforts to the front end of the continuum — into early interventions, preventions, parenting education, family supports — and to reduce our reliance on residential care. I know that we have made a commitment to you to brief you on this document, and hopefully, we will do that very soon. But that’s essentially what you see.

There is a commitment to implement the recommendations. It takes time. Of the roughly 24 percent of the RCY recommendations which have not been yet recommended, I would say that the lion’s share of those are in process. So it’s not that they’ve been sidelined. It just takes time.

J. Rice: I’ll be quick. On page 5, the slide where you talk about the increased staff complement by over 10 percent, can you just remind me…? I didn’t quite catch how many new social workers that meant. And do you have the attrition numbers? How many have left or quit or retired?

L. Wanamaker: We may need to get back to you with some clarification on this, but I think that by the end of March, we’ll have hired about 250 new social workers.

C. Heavener: Just to add, Lori, in November, 2014, there was a commitment to hire an additional 200 front-line staff by the end of March 2016, and in fact, that’s what we’ve done. As far as the attrition numbers, I don’t have all of that handy today, so we would have to get back to you on that.

J. Rice: I think I’d really appreciate those numbers. I think it sounds like a great number, but I have a huge riding, and I know that every MCFD office I represent is constantly chronically understaffed or short-staffed.

There’s a lot of people. There’s a high turnover, right? So is that really an addition? What does it really look like on the ground?

L. Wanamaker: We do have a net increase of 200 social workers. But you’re totally correct. We have a very high
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turnover, especially in the north and the more rural areas. We can get you the details of that.

D. McRae: I don’t know if I have a question or more of a thought here. I look at the slide on page 16, talking about the external oversight. I believe every agency there does a really important job, so I don’t want to take anything away from them. But then we take the oversight from those five agencies. And Melanie, you’ve been mentioning all these other reports that the ministry has. It almost seems…. I don’t think it almost seems; I think it is the fact that a ministry that is so important is almost recommended to death.

Is there a way that as we evolve the ministry, we maybe involve the oversight agencies to help funnel the good recommendations? We didn’t even throw in the media or politics on top of that, which sadly, has a role. And then just the situation that many of the ministry staff have to work with in terms of really tough files with children, which is strong.

When I look at that, I just think to myself that if you constantly bombard an organization with well-meaning recommendations, you never have a chance to catch your breath and maybe do the work you want to do. One of the things that I would consider, going forward, is how we design the oversight to allow you to get meaningful reaction and input and not redundancy and to allow the men and women on the ground to actually continue to do the good work they’re doing all the time.

I don’t know if there’s a question there. I really just struggle with it. You don’t have to answer it.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I just have a quick point with regards to the relationship with the federal government. I’ve been in this role for four years now, and it seems like many, many of the issues are either cross-jurisdictional or really dependent on funding from the federal government. I know you started that good work as of last year. But can you just give us a little bit more of what you’re doing, on a very high level? We don’t need to know details, but I think this is really vital.

L. Wanamaker: There are probably three key areas where we’re actively engaged with the federal government right now. The first is the area of funding. We’ve embarked on a process of what we euphemistically call “unpacking the funding” to try and understand where the federal government is making investments in the province, how it’s making those decisions and how it aligns with their stated objectives. Right now, because we handle it as two separate levels of government, there is no clarity on the total amount of money that is being invested or where it’s being invested. So we’ve started that work, in conjunction with the First Nations Leadership Council. That’s more of a macro-level analysis.

We are engaged with the federal government on the issue of best practices. How the child welfare system operates today, there are pockets of incredibly good practice in the province — perhaps some of the best practice in the country. In fact, we have a practitioners conference coming up at the end of March, where we’ll bring together practitioners from all over the province to discuss best practices and how we can really harvest those and use them in other areas of the province.

The third area is the issue of jurisdiction in working with those First Nations communities who wish to take a greater role in the oversight or delivery of child welfare services. That ranges from everything from full jurisdiction to shared decision-making. In all three of those areas, the federal government is an active participant.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): I just want to say “good luck” on that one. I really appreciate your working and trying to delve into that. I know the relationships between ministries are something that you’re dealing with. But the thought of throwing different levels of government in there, including First Nations leadership…. Thank you very much for all of the work that you’re doing on that.

Using performance management to get results. What are we really using performance management for? How does it relate to the information that Lori and Cory have been talking about today?

I’m just going to outline three things that we do in performance management. First of all, our objectives. Secondly, what is it that we actually have? Then thirdly, the ultimate question is: how are we doing? What is our performance level?

The objective of performance management is in this chart. It’s all about better outcomes for children, youth and families. That’s why we exist. That’s the raison d’être of the ministry. So in order to be able to get to those better outcomes…. Well, we define what the outcomes are, but I’ll talk about that in a moment.

This is essentially what we do. We have our data, and we have performance indicators that tell us how we’re doing. We use our data and the analysis of those data with what Cory is doing in her shop, in quality assurance. We bring that together in order to understand how we are doing. How does that impact outcomes? That gets us to the evidence-informed decision-making, which influences our practice. It influences our practice and our policy.

Then around the edges, you can see that what we’re trying to do is to have continuous improvement in our operations. If we’re using our data, using our quality assurance, if we’re learning and understanding what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, that’s going to influence our operations — if our operations meet policy and practice and other things that we do in the ministry, as well,
[ Page 752 ]
around, for example, how we work with foster parents.

We’re also trying to influence strategy. Lori spoke a little bit about the multi-year action plan. We’re trying to finalize it. Well, how does performance management influence strategy? We’re trying to focus on that. We’re trying to improve outcomes for kids. That’s a big thing. Then public accountability is our public reporting of our performance. That’s very important as well.

We have a multidimensional performance management system within MCFD. What I mean by this is that it touches all six of our service lines. It’s not just one. We’ve talked a lot about child welfare this morning, but it’s all six of our service lines. Not only that, but we’re interested in looking at how we’re doing as a province. We’re interested in looking at how we’re doing geographically. Cory said we have 13 service delivery areas. So how are we doing in those 13? We also have 47 local service areas. We need to understand how we’re doing in those.

In fact, with our operations and our practice, we need to take a very broad look at our performance overall and how we’re doing. Then we also need to link it with our strategy. We’re doing two things. We’re looking at our strategy, which is a focused set of activities, but we’re also looking right across our operation. All of that leads to better outcomes. Of course, we don’t do all of this immediately. It’s developed over time. This is obviously a work in progress.

The public report, which I know you’ve all read many times — eight times, in fact…. Volume 8 was just released at the end of November. That includes data to the end of March. In there, that report does a number of things. It explains: what does the Ministry of Children and Family do? Who do we serve? How many cases? What’s our budget? What’s our expenditure? And, crucially, how we’re doing. We’ve got 41 performance indicators in there, across those six service lines.

This gives you a bit of a sense as to how we’re doing in those. What we do is we look at trends. Are we improving? Are we staying the same, or where are we challenged?

Now, I like to think that in B.C., we’re a leader in this kind of performance management reporting. When you look across Canada, other jurisdictions are doing this as well, but not to the same extent. Ontario has got a fairly nicely articulated set of performance indicators on their website, but there are five of them for child welfare. We’ve got 26. I’m not saying that they should have more, but they’re very high-level, whereas we like to get into a little bit more detail.

I’m going to be very brief here. I just wanted to give you a sense as to the capacity that we’ve built within MCFD in order to be able to produce this stuff. You’ve seen what a long journey it is to get to where we are. Well, in order to be able to get to that external reporting, we need to build a lot of capacity, everything from the integrated case management system that Cory spoke about to things like the privacy agreements. We need to be able to share data between different ministries so we can figure out how our kids are doing in school. We need to be able to set about the systems and the evidence and the analytics in order to make this make sense. Then that leads to the external reporting.

Now I’m going to jump back to the main theme of today, which is child welfare, and talk a little bit about our performance in child welfare and, crucially, how the ministry uses performance management. Public accountability is really important, but equally important is how we use this stuff. How do we make things better for children, youth and families so we improve those outcomes?

A big question we get that we have to answer is: are things getting better? Is the child welfare system improving? This is a bit of a crude way to do that, but what we do is look at all of our performance indicators in various categories. We produce…. I like to call this a barometer, but it’s more of a speedometer. What it does is baseline our performance in September 2012, and it says: “Well, if our performance in September 2012 equals 100, and we have an index number greater than 100, then we’re improving. If it’s going the other way, then we’re not improving, and we’re challenged.”

What this tells us, then, is in October 2016, our number is 104.7 — a fairly abstract number. But because it’s over 100, it’s telling us that things are gradually getting better. You might say: “What is that? Is that 4.7 percent? It’s not very much in four years.” But what we do is…. We’re very careful about understanding how to judge improvement. It’s really important in performance management around our credibility in this stuff. It’s not just a simple matter of, “Oh, we went up last month, so that’s good,” or, “We went down last month, and that’s good.” We have to look at things over a trend, and we have to look at statistical significance. Only then can we identify whether or not we’ve improved.

This is the barometer over six-month intervals since September 2012. It’s very conveniently increasing here, because it shows us our performance improvement. We got to 104.3. How we got there…. You can see how it’s built over time. Now, we would expect, with these dots…. They won’t all be in a nice little line like that. We will come down from time to time. But the important thing is that we have continuous improvement over the long haul.

If we continue to do this, then in two years’ time we would expect this dotted line, this trend, to continue to improve. That’s how we know, over all of the child welfare system, that things are beginning to get better.

Now, in order for us to be able to understand how to improve performance even more, we need to now know where we’re strong and where we’re challenged. Now we’re taking it down a level. We’re saying: “Okay, we’ve looked at the big picture. Now let’s take a look at the categories of performance.” Cory talked quite a lot about permanency and family preservation. We’ll go on to talk about that in a moment.
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We’ve got well-being for children and youth in care and kids on youth agreements — things like their education. Were they transitioning? Do they land up on income assistance, expected to work?

We look at stability and continuity of children in care. Do they stay within their placements, or do they move around? That’s key for their outcomes as well. We also look at cost-effectiveness. When you take a look at this dotted blue line, this tells us where things were at the baseline in September 2012.

Anything outside the blue line, with a green dot, says things are getting better. Anything inside, with a yellow dot, is where we’re challenged. Stability is just under 100. It hasn’t changed that much. We’ve certainly got some challenges in cost-effectiveness. Well-being has improved slightly, mostly around educational outcomes, which I’ll come to. But the biggest improvement by far has been in permanency and family preservation.

That tells us: okay, since September 2012, we’ve done really well in permanency and family preservation. In fact, that’s driven that overall improvement we’ve seen in the child welfare system.

Let me come and talk about permanency and family preservation. When we do performance management, and we look at bringing in quality assurance as well, we have to look at the system. We can’t just say, “Well, here’s 41 performance indicators or 26 performance indicators in child welfare,” and say, “Well, we went up in five and down in four,” and that kind of stuff. We have to understand how it all fits together in order to make sense of this so that we can think about how to improve our practice.

Permanency. Cory talked quite a bit about permanency, which is our adoption, transfer of guardianship, reunification of kids in care — really important. But at the front end of all of that is what we do with the 40,000 protection reports that we receive annually. Do we bring all of those kids into care? No. We provide services to families to keep kids together.

In effect, the better at that we are, the better outcomes for the kids. That also affects our permanency. If we’re bringing in kids who are, perhaps, on average a little easier to manage, for whatever reason — their families are easier to manage — then they’re the ones who are most likely to find permanency first. So the better we do here, the tougher this is.

Then this recidivism piece is a bit of an oxymoron. Permanency is a temporal thing. Sometimes permanency breaks down. Cory talked about adoption, for example. Well, about 5 percent of the time, those adoptions do break down. We have reunifications with parents. Sometimes they break down. The kids come back into care.

We need to look at all of this when we’re looking at how well we’re doing in permanency and family preservation.

Just jumping to the bottom line here. What does all this mean? Well, Lori spoke about how numbers of children and youth in care have gone down. Absolutely. Take a look at this. Since April 2007 — we’ve got this blue line here — the children and youth in care caseload, you can see on the right-hand side. We’re over 9,000. It’s come down to just over 7,000 today, a 2,000 drop.

At the same time, out of care — we talked a little bit about an alternative to care; keeping kids with the family, an extended family, is better for their outcomes, where we can do so — has improved, on the right-hand scale here, 200 to 1,200. It’s not quite that large, but it’s about a three times improvement.

Right away this tells us things are changing. The only way you can manage the caseload is by kids coming into care in the first place. Can we prevent them from coming into care? Number 2, if they do come into care, can we get them home again? Those two things have a big impact on the caseload, and that’s what’s driven it lower.

Let’s talk a little bit about family preservation. This is really important. This is the front end of the system, the child welfare system. What I’ve tried to do here is I’ve said: this is the number of children that are coming through the front door, the phone calls that we get, per 1,000 population. We have to put it in terms of population so we don’t have to worry about population changes when we’re looking at this stuff.

We get about 40,000 protection reports a year in the ministry. About 20,000 of those have some sort of protection concern, articulated by the CFCSA in section 13. Our workers are finding: “Oh, we’ve got 20,000 of these to manage. What do we do with those protection reports that we have to manage?”

Well, there are about 21.2 — about 21 per 1,000 child population — protection reports with a protection concern that we have to manage. Of those, 16.9 per 1,000 — about 80 percent of them — can stay at home. So we have to provide those families’ services. We’ve identified that there’s a protection concern, so we have to do something about that.

It could be…. Cory listed off a bunch of those. It could also be we have agencies, as well, that provide services. But the bottom line is those families can remain at home.

Then we have another 0.9 per 1,000, about 4 percent of this total, who then go into an out-of-care option. That’s risen. It seems very small, but it’s actually grown quite a lot. Then the other 3.6, the 16 percent, actually come into care.

You can see that the majority of children are able to stay with family or extended family, which is good, because research tells us that if we can do that safely, it’s better for these kids’ outcomes.

This little pie chart over here says that for family preservation — all of those protection reports for those children who are in need of protection — 84 percent of them
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have their families preserved. They can either live at home with their parents or with extended family, whereas 16 percent come into care.

Can we raise the bar? The answer is yes, and this is why. This leads into what Grand Chief Ed John is talking about, what will be some of the new performance indicators that we’ve put into the service plan around family preservation.

If we take a look at this now and divide it up between aboriginal and non-aboriginal — the family preservation…. Let’s have a look at the service to non-aboriginal children in need of protection first. You can see it. For the kids coming through the front door, the ones who are in need of protection that we have to manage — about 14.4 per 1,000. But look at that pie chart: 87.5 percent of those children can live with family or extended family; 12.5 percent of them come into care.

Now contrast that with the bottom triangle. This is for aboriginal children. Yes, we’ve got more coming through the front door. You may not be surprised about that. But what’s crucial is this pie chart here. Of the ones that come through the front door, 23.3 percent of them land up in care, and 76.7 are with family.

So why is it that we’ve got 87.5 percent at the top for non-aboriginal families but only 76.7 percent for aboriginal families? Most of them are still able to live with family, which is terrific. But if we think about the socioeconomic and ecological conditions that give rise to the need for our services, a lot of that stuff, most of that stuff — maybe not all of it but a lot of it — is factored in here and here, at the front door.

This tells us that there are some differences in how we practise. This is by no means an issue unique to British Columbia. This is happening right across Canada. It’s also happening in the States and in other jurisdictions as well.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Martin, could I interrupt just a bit, because we’ve only got about ten minutes. I’m forgoing, actually, the recess. I’ve already got two questions on your presentation, so maybe you could speed it up. Sorry, but we do have questions, and then we want to get on to the other ministry.

M. Wright: Yeah, sure. I can speed it up. Do you want to wait until the end for questions?

M. Wright: Very quickly, on permanency, the course book about permanency. Well, in 2015-16, 1,585 children and youth in care without permanency — a lot of kids. Yes, we had a lot of kids in adoption, but most of those kids, 72 percent of them, go home. We’re not counting the kids who’ve been in care for two months or less. Some kids come into care for short durations for family reasons. They haven’t lost permanency. We’d be cheating if we included those, so we don’t.

This is how we’re doing in terms of our permanency numbers. In March each year, we take a look at all the kids in care, and then we see how many of those kids found permanency over the course of the next year.

You can see the difference here between aboriginal and non-aboriginal in every way. There’s a spread between aboriginal and non-aboriginal. Both aboriginal and non-aboriginal are going up, which is good, but there’s a spread between them. That’s something that tells us that we need to focus on. We need to improve that. If we take a look at the 2009-10 cohort, this becomes really clear.

These are the admissions that happened in 2009-10. We look at the aboriginal in green and the non-aboriginal here in purple, and you can see that after one year, just over 40 percent of aboriginal children find permanency, where it’s almost 50 percent for non-aboriginal. That gap only increases over time. After five years, the aboriginal permanency tops out at about 56 or 57 percent. Still, most of those children that are admitted into care find permanency. That’s 23 percent of protection reports that we deal with. Most of those still find permanency, but you can see it’s significantly below that for non-aboriginal. That’s something that tells us that that’s a focus for us.

This tells us, as well, how we’re improving on this, if we take a look at it after one year of admission — what percentage of those kids find permanency within the next year. If we take a look at aboriginal against non-aboriginal here, we can see in 2009-10 — the cohort I just showed you — that 42 percent of those aboriginal children found permanency in the first year, versus 47.6 percent for non-aboriginal. But then you can see that in ’14-15 we had significant improvement.

We had significant improvements at the same time that the numbers of children and youth in care are coming down. And this is partly why it’s coming down. It’s because we’re getting improvements in permanency. In fact, the improvement in aboriginal was actually a little bit higher than the improvement in non-aboriginal. I don’t think we can really deduce that that’s very significant at this stage. We can at least point to improvements in both, but you can see, still, the difference between aboriginal and non-aboriginal in ’15-16.

I’m going to do this one, and then I’m going to finish after this one. This tells us what we need to do in the ministry and how we can use our data and our performance management information in order to inform our operations and strategy. When we take a look at aboriginal children in care, we know that an aboriginal child is about 16 times more likely to be in care than a non-aboriginal child. The question, then, is: what should it be?

If we take a look at the protection report information, it tells us that aboriginal children are 4.7 times — about five times — more likely to have a protection report than
[ Page 755 ]
non-aboriginal children. That tells us, given all the population, ecological conditions out there, we would expect about a five times more likely overrepresentation of aboriginal children in care, but we’ve got 16. How do we get between five and 16?

Well, as you’ve already seen, we’re admitting aboriginal children and youth in care far more often than non-aboriginal children in care. If we get a protection report for an aboriginal kid in care, they’re more likely, about twice as likely, to come into care than a non-aboriginal child with a protection report. That tells us this, then. This blue line here is the additional scope for family preservation. This is what Grand Chief Ed John is talking about.

Then the remainder: how do we get to 16.2? That’s the difference between aboriginal and non-aboriginal permanency rates. That’s something else that we need to focus on. That’s why, in the new service plan that came out yesterday, you’ll see that we’ve got performance indicators in there with targets, for aboriginal and non-aboriginal, in family preservation and permanency. I’ll close there.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): All right. Thank you, Martin. I’m going to ask if you could go sit down with a mike. I don’t even know how much Hansard got of that, but we appreciate you doing the presentation.

I have three people that have requested questions — perhaps we could make that brief — Jennifer, Melanie and Darryl.

J. Rice: Thank you for the presentation, and thank you for the dynamic aspect of it. Perhaps, Hansard, we could have wireless mikes…

J. Rice: …for these types of presenters that get up and move around, which keeps us alive and engaged here.

It’s a big question, but I just wanted to add…. I know you didn’t get to cover it, but the slide where you have the service areas and the occurrence of episodes where they have two or more placements. The northwest, of course, is off in the greater-than-20-percent range, compared to, obviously, some of the urban service delivery areas — which just goes back to my other point about this divide between the urban and the rural areas.

You talked about the preservation of family, with the triangle at the base, and getting those wraparound services — you didn’t use the word “wraparound” — at the early stages so that kids don’t transition up that scale into the other levels and go all the way as far as being removed from their families.

The challenge I have is that…. In rural and remote communities, when they don’t have services or service providers, that preservation of family is less likely to happen. When a lot of the services that might actually help preserve a family are independent businesses or contractors or behavioural specialists that would support a family with an autistic child….

When we don’t have those services, what is the solution? Should MCFD fund and provide those direct services from the ministry themselves, or should rural and remote communities just — pardon the bluntness — suck it up? “Well, you’re rural and remote, so you don’t get services. You have less likely a preservation of family and a higher chance of having your kids apprehended based on your geography.” What is the solution? What is the answer to that?

M. Wright: First of all, I’d like to clarify the particular slide that you’re referring to there, Member. That, I think, is the placement stability.

I just want to clarify for members and for everyone that that particular slide looks at whether…. For children and youth in care, ideally what we want for those kids, if they are coming to care, is a stable placement. That gives them an opportunity to form an attachment with their foster parent. Where possible, we would like to have a stable placement. It helps prepare the child for permanency, as well, and enables us to work with the family and bring together the family and the child for visits before reunification. There are good reasons why we would want stability.

That particular performance indicator and that particular graph just tell us that we’ve made some progress in placement stability yet still not enough. We know that we’ve got more to do there. So that is more about keeping children within their foster homes, rather than it is about providing services to preserve families.

L. Wanamaker: Every family and every child who comes into the care of the ministry requires a care plan, and the care plan will detail the services or the supports that are needed for that child. That’s really what guides our services.
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If you’re talking about family supports, again, it’s very specialized. We don’t have a full suite of services in every rural and remote area. It doesn’t mean that we can’t provide services to that family or to that child. It just means that it may be a different delivery mechanism. It might be a remote service, or it may be a different type of support. We strive to deliver the same kinds of services for kids in rural and remote areas.

Part of what we’re doing right now with the new funding for family support is actually figuring out, particularly with First Nations communities, how we can work with the community to deliver the family support services that are needed.

J. Rice: I don’t doubt that you’re striving for that. My question was the solutions. You say a care plan is developed. Is the care plan developed with the needs of the child as the imminent factor, or is a care plan in northern British Columbia designed with what’s available and what could actually happen in the north, based on the resources that are allocated to the north or what available services or supports are there? How does it actually work?

C. Heavener: The care plans are built around the needs of the child, and it’s a consistent practice and policy across the province. Based on those needs of the child, then you would determine where those services are. But it’s definitely the child that is at the centre.

J. Rice: Then, if the needs cannot be met…. What happens in northern communities when there aren’t a lot of services?

C. Heavener: I can only speak in general terms. We do everything, as Lori mentioned, to strive to make sure those needs are met and that there are those services that are available. Where not available, we would look at innovative solutions around that. Are there other types of services that may meet specific needs or what have you? But it’s not something that we would stop and say: “This service isn’t available, so that need won’t be met.” We would definitely look at innovative approaches. We intend to do that, moving forward, with an emphasis on family preservation as well.

M. Mark (Deputy Chair): Hughes, as the father of the Representative for Children and Youth, was tasked to examine and make recommendations to improve the system — the system for reviewing child deaths, advocacy for children and youth, the monitoring of government’s performance and protection in providing services for children and youth, public reporting on child death reviews, and government’s performance in services for children and youth. I’m just referring to the slide that was made in the earlier presentation.

I’m just fascinated. I’m going to go back to my question earlier about how you identify which recommendations get implemented and public reporting and to my member opposite’s remarks. If there are things to be celebrated from the ministry, let’s hear about it. If there are improvements being made, let’s hear about it.

This is the first…. Pardon me. I may have been lost in my new role as an MLA, but I’m digging through the website trying to find the performance report, volume 8. It’s not intuitive on the website. What is very clear is the Plecas review. It’s front and centre. It’s the second bullet on the first page. Then, if you go to the second page, it’s front and centre. There is no mention…. With all due respect, those are the politics that interfere with getting good outcomes.

If you’re doing great work, let’s hear about it. Put a news advisory out there saying: “Hey, we’ve made all of these reductions for kids in care.” But if you have to dig through a 118-page report to show…. As a social worker — with all due respect to social workers, because that’s going to be part of my question — who has time to read a 118-page report? I don’t know. We all know, here, what it’s like — what time it takes to get through a 118-page report.

If the report is going to be made, how is it going to make things better for front-line workers? If the performance measures being put out there say that this is what we need to do, is there training set aside for those workers all over the province to go and absorb those 118 pages? All of the performance areas that need improvement are improved and then report out publicly? Because that’s a cynicism in the public. The people aren’t hearing how great things are because there’s no transparency. That’s what Hughes asked for was the transparency from the ministry.

I really want some concrete information, with all due respect, around…. What’s the point of writing a report? The representative gets criticized all the time for more recommendations. The same can be said about a 118-page report that doesn’t materialize into better practise.

Thank you very much for the presentation. I’m sorry, again, for a big, huge, dynamic question.

M. Wright: Not at all. Thank you for the question. It gives me an opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the performance reporting that we do internally.

First of all, to answer your question about where it is on the website. I agree. It was a little bit difficult to find at first. I think if you go there now, there have been some changes to the website. If you look at public reporting, it’s in there. I’ll send you the link.
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Just in terms of social workers and how we use the report and how we use this information in order to improve practice and policy, I think that’s a fundamental question. It’s certainly one that Hughes raised.

Are we going to ask social workers to dig through 118 pages of performance indicators in order to figure this out for themselves? No. The public report is there for the public. It is also there for us to be able to use as a reference document as and when we wish, but it’s there for public report and public accountability.

In addition to that public face, we also provide performance information and analytics to our service delivery areas and local service areas, including team leaders and, in some cases, individual social workers.

So we’re providing these 26 performance indicators — on child welfare for example — down to the local service area levels. Now, we have to be a little bit careful in interpreting some of these, because some of the numbers get awfully low, so some of the analyses don’t always stand up. But what we try to do…. I mentioned earlier in my presentation that we look right across the system, and then we look to see where we’re strong and where we’re weak. We do that for every SDA.

Then we burrow down into where we think we’ve got some challenges in order to be able to improve those. And they’re different right across the province. They’re not the same, SDA to SDA. So the provincial picture can look quite different to that of a particular SDA. That allows us then to work with our regional colleagues in order to be able to identify challenges and work on them.

Within my branch, we work with the service delivery division quite closely. Our job is to bring things to light and help them to manage their business. If we’re successful, we will be able to impact operations. My staff, for example, are out visiting around the province. They’re visiting with team leads and executive directors of service and directors of operations in order to be able to not only provide this information and make sense of it but to work with them in order to understand what this means for them and where their challenges are.

So that internal piece is hugely important. I think Hughes was talking a lot about that.

D. Plecas: Martin, the last time you spoke to this committee was just after you started, and I wanted to stand up and cheer. You talked about the kinds of things you were going to do, and man, did you ever do them. I want to stand up and cheer again. It’s hard to imagine how you could have a better model of performance evaluation than you have here. When you say that we’re a leader in Canada, I’ve got to believe it goes beyond Canada. It really is remarkable.

In fact, I thought to myself, as I was listening to you and reading through your material: “Boy, could we use what you do in other parts of government.” It’s such an incredible way for us to have an understanding of what’s really going on and whether or not we’re making improvements or we’re falling behind.

The one thing that I think would be great if we could have it as an add-on — I think I know the answer to this, why it doesn’t happen — is: how do we compare to other jurisdictions? My guess is that they just don’t have the data to do it. But is there any way that you see, moving forward, where we’ll get to a place where we could also do that?

M. Wright: Yes. The short answer is that we do want to be able to do that. The reason why it’s not there now is that different jurisdictions measure things differently. Often, when we want to make comparisons, we get flummoxed by the different legislation and the data, and we can’t make sense of it. We are fortunate in British Columbia that we do have more data than most other provinces.

I mentioned Ontario earlier. Of course, they’re dealing with 47 children’s aid societies and getting data from them. We are able to make some comparisons, though, with Ontario.

One of the slides I was going to show you today was the rate of recurrence of maltreatment for children and youth in care who find permanency. They go home, but then they end up coming back into care. That’s that red arrow, that red line I showed you.

Ontario does something very similar. We can make a comparison, and actually, we’re quite similar to Ontario in that respect, with about 19 percent of children that do come back into the child welfare system within one year of leaving it.

Other areas where we can make comparisons…. One of the most important things is making comparisons with ourselves. That sounds a little odd, but because we are one jurisdiction, we do have 47 LSAs. If we’re going to improve performance, we need to be able to set a level playing field between those LSAs and SDAs. I’ll need to be able to say that SDA 1 is doing better or worse or the same as SDA 2.

Of course, when we do that, there are all sorts of reasons why they’re different. You get a list as long as your arm. Part of our job is to look at some of these key indicators — like permanency, for example — and then be able to level the playing field and say: “Okay. Once we factor out all of these things that affect permanency, such as duration in care, siblings and all of those kinds of things….” There are a number of factors. Once we model all of those out, what does that mean? That en-
[ Page 758 ]
ables us to be able to make those comparisons. That’s far more meaningful for our own managers who are trying to manage this.

We’re also making some comparisons with some jurisdictions in the States. California, in particular, Colorado, Washington state and Oregon are some of the big ones. Even Texas, actually, is looking pretty good. Of course, you’re dealing with different jurisdictions and different legislation. They also measure things slightly differently. But there is a greater opportunity, I think, to make some key comparisons in key areas like permanency and recurrence of maltreatment.

That’s probably as far as it goes for the moment. We are hoping to be able to do that within Canada, but it’s going to take a fair bit of interjurisdictional work. So I can’t promise when we’ll be able to get there. It’s probably going to be one jurisdiction at a time.

D. Plecas: Chair, if I just may say…. I just don’t think we can emphasize strongly enough what a good-news story this is. This really is something, I think, that the ministry can be immensely proud of. I think it’s particularly important because so often there’s criticism levelled at the ministry, and it’s without people having the benefit of the kind of analysis you do. Once one has an opportunity to see that, they can see that a very different picture emerges. Once again, you’ve got lots to be proud of. Thank you.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you very much, Lori, Cory and Martin, for your presentation. Certainly, we’ll put forward a recommendation to the next committee to get you to come back in the fall of this year.

The next presentation is the Ministry of Justice. Apologies to Richard. I know you’ve been waiting. If you want to quickly set up, I’m going to use the Chair’s prerogative here and say we’re not having a break. If people need to run and have a health break or grab another coffee, just do so. I don’t want to be putting people later than what we need to be.

R. Fyfe: Depending on the number of questions, I think probably the presentation and questions might take a half an hour. The presentation is just an overview of the submission.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Yeah. Because we’d like to get a little update from Alayna — the staff — on the remote recommendations on the stat review. If we could do that, that would be wonderful.

So carry on and thank you, Richard Fyfe from the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General.

R. Fyfe: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity today just to provide, as I said, a high-level overview. We will be returning later, we anticipate, to be able to speak more directly to the content of the submission and to have more time to answer any questions regarding details.

To start with, I just wanted to talk about the role of the Ministry of Justice, because it’s a unique role with respect to the Representative for Children and Youth Act. The Minister of Justice has responsibility for the act. The Attorney General has responsibility to ensure that the statute reflects the independence of the mandate of this office of the Legislature. The Ministry of Justice has prepared its submission for the committee’s consideration with the clear recognition of that role in relation to the act.

The purpose of the ministry’s submission is to share with the committee the areas of the act that could be appropriate for review. The recommendations contained here don’t offer solutions or explicit amendments. Rather, they identify areas for further consideration by the committee.

In preparing for this, the Ministry of Justice has invited and received input from several other ministries and public bodies in relation to the current act. The input was provided both informally at the staff level through discussions and, in a small number of cases, through written material. Those providing input did so on the basis of non-attribution.

Although it was acknowledged that it may be apparent which themes would be of interest to which public bodies, the input that we received was grouped into general themes or categories, along with questions and concerns that have been raised over time by government’s legal counsel and issues that were brought to the attention of the ministry by public bodies and by the Representative for Children and Youth.

Without providing specific case examples, the submission is intended to still provide sufficient detail to assist the committee. During our next appearance, we’ll be prepared to speak to specific examples, if necessary, to help demonstrate the themes and recommendations.

One of the interesting things that stood out through this exercise was the degree of agreement with respect to what was working well and where areas for improvement existed. The submission is structured around the four questions that the committee put forward in their call for public submissions. The next few slides will discuss those questions and the associated recommendations.

Question 1 deals with the three-part mandate of the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth: advocacy, monitoring and oversight, and reviews. It then asks: are the functions provided in section 6 meeting the needs of children and youth?

The main area that was raised with respect to mandate was the need to further explore whether and how the representative’s office should include young adults. This includes looking at ways in which the current act
[ Page 759 ]
deals with young adults, as well as whether or not there is need for changes to the mandate of the Representative for Children and Youth in this area, with specific focus on some of the matters that need clarification, such as the definition of “designated services.”

Currently the definition refers to “services or programs for children and their families.” That’s not consistent with the reference to “young adults,” which is found in subparagraph (e) of the definition. Continuing with the definition of “young adult,” that definition is found in section 6 of the act, but it’s limited to section 6 of the act, even though the term is used in other part of the act.

Then, section 6 of the act itself needs some consideration, both in terms of its interaction with other legislation, such as section 12.3 of the Child, Family and Community Services Act, and in terms of the actual scope of the representative’s advocacy function under section 6.

Question 2 focuses on the powers of the office and asks if they are adequate and effective in supporting the statutory mandate and whether there could be benefit from clarification. The submission recommends that the provisions relating to information sharing and personal information, as well as those relating to reviews and investigations, be reviewed for consistency, adequacy and clarity. This review could include looking at other officers of the Legislature and statutes to try to ensure consistency across the various actors in this area.

It’s also recommended that these groups of provisions — information and personal information, as well as groups around reviews and investigation — be examined at the same time to achieve the right balance between protecting rights and allowing for appropriate, necessary information at the right time.

It’s recommended that section 20, which relates to special reports, be reviewed for clarity. One specific question that has come up is where section 20 reports are intended to relate back to the representative office’s mandate and functions.

Question 3 asks about the effective accountability structure in the act and asks about possible improvements regarding accountability processes. There are questions regarding what type of accountability structure is in place, as well as what would be appropriate in order to protect the independence of the office while still providing efficient mechanisms for resolving differences of opinion regarding statutory interpretation or exercise of mandate.

This is an area in which the ministry recommends review and consideration of potential amendments. The details of that are contained in this submission.

On question 4, finally, the committee asked if there are any other areas within the act that could be strengthened or clarified. There are indeed a number of areas in which the act could benefit from clarification. Some of those are relatively minor adjustments, and others may involve more significant changes. I’ll just run through a few.

It’s recommended that the committee consider whether the current definition sections are adequate or should be reviewed, and similarly, whether, how and where services are defined could be streamlined.

It’s recommended that the committee consider whether the qualifications of a deputy representative are appropriate. As the section is currently written, the regulations could be interpreted to suggest that a background exclusively in business or finance is adequate. That’s because each one is “or, or, or.”

It’s recommended that the committee consider whether the legislation should be amended to include a more explicit structure for administrative fairness and recommendation review structure prior to publication of reports. Related to reports, the intended meaning of “the power to make recommendations in reports” could be clarified.

It’s recommended that the committee consider whether the representative’s mandate should include the power to review a public body’s or a director’s review and whether the act should be amended to clarify the intended scope of the representative’s section 6(1)(b) function.

Finally, it’s recommended that the committee review the representative’s mandate relating to the Youth Criminal Justice Act for the purpose of avoiding conflicts with that act.

As I mentioned, we’ll have more time at a future appearance to get into the details of these themes and recommendations, but if there are any questions that I can assist with today, I’m happy to do so. I thank you again for your time and for your dedication to the children and youth of our province and the work that you do as you review this legislation.

I will say that the submission that we’ve provided does itself provide more detail in terms of explaining those, but I just wanted to provide a broad overview this morning and answer any questions you might have.

D. Plecas: Thank you, Richard. I haven’t had a chance to look at — I don’t know if anyone else has — your detailed report, but I’m just presuming that you probably have ideas about what those recommendations should be, which would be very helpful to us because we could speed our process up — speed our deliberations up.

R. Fyfe: There’s a higher level of detail in the report itself. At this point, what we have done…. Because our ministry’s role is really much more in terms of collecting information and then providing it to the committee, we’re, I think, being careful not to take a position on specific things other than to point out areas where clarification is needed.

Where it’s needed — the example of the definition of “young person” as opposed to where it occurs and that sort of thing — I think that the resolution of those things,
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in a number of cases, can be quite obvious — the need to actually clarify that. If you’re going to provide that definition, you may not want to limit it just to section 6, but you may want to have it applicable wherever the term is used, for example.

Other things that would be worth considering would be, for example, the conflict in terms of disclosure, which is described in a fair amount of detail in the report, between what a ministry can disclose under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which limits disclosure in terms of the identity of an individual, and what is disclosed through a representative report. Those sorts of things can benefit just from clarification as opposed to really needing to take a position one way or the other.

The area where I think there’s some thought — and we would certainly make some recommendations or be prepared to make some recommendations — would probably be in the areas around administrative fairness and dispute resolution and review of reports. Those are areas where we think that there is an opportunity for a more collaborative approach to resolving these things.

We’ve had an opportunity, briefly, to meet with the new representative and talk about some of those things. I think that with the support of this committee, the process of getting to those things will actually develop a much more collaborative approach. So we’re optimistic about that.

As I say, our role here is to identify areas where things may be slipping between the cracks, where definitions may need to be considered further, clarification may be needed, bring those to the committee’s attention — with your support — then take them back and work with the representative and with other affected ministries to develop solutions for them.

M. Karagianis: Thank you very much. That answered a couple of my questions as well — certainly around assistance. I haven’t read your submission either, but I am going to, because assistance with us…. Although we are all legislators, we don’t write legislation.

I’m interested in your perspective. We have not heard this sort of degree of input previously, in our discussions around reviewing the mandate and statute for the children’s representative.

I’m curious as to why you’re much more detailed now. We’ve not heard this presentation before from you, in our previous deliberations in years past. Was that because we didn’t invite you to comment? Or have you looked at the act now and seen, through its performance and the children and youth office’s performance, that there are some clarifications needed or some expansions needed?

I would be particularly interested in knowing your views on the youth justice records and whether there are conflicts that you have perceived or exactly what the impetus, what the driving force is behind some of your input in your submission.

R. Fyfe: Okay. I think, in part, what we’re coming here today with is an accumulation of experience in terms of the operation of the act to this point. There have been a number of things that we, over time, have observed. That, then, coupled with the four questions that were issued, provided us the opportunity to — as I indicated at the beginning — canvass among ministries and discuss with other ministries the role that we have as the Ministry of Justice and as the Attorney General, thinking about the fact that the statute is placed with this ministry for a reason.

The reason is that we’re really a neutral representative of the interests of the representative. The representative, obviously, can deal with his statute himself, but in terms of the minister responsible, it’s the Attorney General. It’s the reason that we pull that information together, and we bring it to you, I’d say, without advocating a position but reflecting what we’ve heard from other ministries.

That’s, I think, the reason that we’re here today, and you may not have heard from us before. It’s a result of the aggregation of the experiences to date, as well as, to some extent, a reflection on what the role of this ministry is with respect to the legislation that we’re responsible for and the approach that we’re trying to take here in terms of bringing it to the committee, identifying issues as opposed to taking a position on the issues. To the extent that we do take a position on the issues, we want to do it in a way where we’re able to present multiple sides of the issues.

In terms of the youth justice issue, what we’ve identified is that there are some conflicts between the act and the federal Youth Criminal Justice Act. The act gives the representative the function of investigating critical injuries and deaths of young people who’ve been dealt with under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and it gives the representative the right to all information in the custody or control of a public body. An order-in-council, pursuant to the Youth Criminal Justice Act, provides the representative with the right to access, on request, youth justice records.

But if the representative does an investigation, they must make a report. It’s required, and they must provide that report to the select standing committee. They may provide a report to any person that they consider appropriate. What we’ve identified is that there’s a potential conflict between the act and the Youth Criminal Justice Act, because the Youth Criminal Justice Act only provides individuals with the right on request to access youth justice records and prohibits subsequent disclosure, unless specifically authorized by the Youth Criminal Justice Act. It doesn’t contemplate subsequent disclosure of information of a youth justice record by an independent officer
[ Page 761 ]
of a provincial Legislature who’s reporting on the results of an investigation.

So it’s that conflict in terms of the disclosure provisions that we’re identifying as something that this committee could look at and recommend that there actually be a reconciliation or further consideration and, to some extent, perhaps give consideration to what approach might be taken in terms of reconciling the two.

M. Mark (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation. That was great. I like getting down to the technicalities of the act — you know, your drilling down at section 6. It was a real challenge when I was at the representative’s office as well. What does “young adult” mean?

Do you have any observations on whether or not the scope of the representative’s office should be expanded to other government ministries? As an example, the representative has no advocacy measures to advocate for young people needing mental health supports, right? Outside of Community Living B.C., they’re not eligible for that advocacy. Was any of your review pointing in the direction that those powers should be expanded?

R. Fyfe: We raised that as something that, I think, we put back to the committee to consider. We do identify it as an issue. The fact is that, as you’ve just identified, there is a restriction in terms of that advocacy function. If the recommendation of the committee was that those powers should be expanded, I think what we would plan to do is to come back and talk to you about potential issues, depending on what the scope of that expansion was. Maybe “issues” isn’t the right word; maybe it’s “considerations” in terms of how it has expanded. And then we’d basically take a direction from the committee, take that away and then see what it would take to implement that, if that was the case.

M. Mark (Deputy Chair): Can I ask: can you expand on the administrative review piece? You talked about…. I didn’t have a chance to look at your submission. I just got it this morning. Can you expand on where you’re landing around administrative fairness?

R. Fyfe: Administrative fairness is an issue that we raise with legislative officers frequently. It really relates to making sure, as with any situation where decisions or recommendations are being made, that there be an adequate opportunity to understand what the case is that’s being addressed and an opportunity to have input into that case. We’ve raised that here, in conjunction with an issue around dispute resolution functions, as well, because there may be cases where there is disagreement and there is a different perspective being brought forward by a ministry. And we would suggest it’s important that that other perspective be capable of being brought into the discussion.

We identify areas where the disclosure puts a ministry in a position where they’re not able to respond publicly because of restrictions on what they can disclose, under FOIPPA. The representative, of course, doesn’t face those restrictions. So it can result in an imbalance. I think there was a comment earlier about a plethora of recommendations. It may be that the input from a ministry allows the clarification of what recommendations are the most important to move forward with and in what direction the ministry is going with respect to an initiative or something, rather than just having recommendations in general.

L. Reimer: Thank you for your presentation. I just wanted to ask a question with respect to clarifying what is in slide 1 here, under question 1, and then what is on page 4 of your submission. When I originally read the definition of “advocacy” here, under question 1…. You’re talking about “working directly with children, youth, young adults and families requiring assistance interacting with the child and youth service system in respect of services specified by the act.”

I don’t have the act in front of me, but you’ve said here in your submission: “The advocacy function under the act provides the authority to ‘support, assist, inform and advise,’ as well as to provide ‘information and advice’ respecting designated services.” Then it goes on to say it allows the representative to advocate on behalf of a child and on behalf of a young adult in relation to CLBC services. Then it says that the act does not authorize the representative “to provide designated services to children and young adults.”

In my mind, the “advocacy” definition under your question 1 relates to individual advocacy, and there’s nothing under question 1 here that relates to systemic advocacy. Yet you have made reference to systemic advocacy in your submission. Is this what is actually in the act?

R. Fyfe: I’m not sure I fully understand. I think what I understand you to be asking is whether the provisions in section 6 provide authority for systemic advocacy…

R. Fyfe: …as well as individual advocacy. And the question then is: for who? Are you talking about systemic advocacy for children and youth? For young adults…?

L. Reimer: Well, I’m talking about more in the representative’s role. I mean, obviously he and the former representative provided recommendations to government on how things could be improved. So that really is
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systemic advocacy. But what I’m saying is, in this definition here on your slide, it didn’t really include systemic advocacy. Not having the actual act right in front of me, I just wanted confirmation that the systemic advocacy is referenced in the section.

R. Fyfe: I can tell you the section provides that the representative is responsible for performing the following functions: supporting, assisting, informing and advising children and their families regarding designated services — we’ve identified the need for clarification in terms of “designated services;” supporting, assisting, informing and advising young adults and their families respecting prescribed services and programs, which is providing information and advice; advocating on behalf of a young adult receiving or eligible to receive a prescribed service or program and supporting, promoting in communities and connecting publicly on advocacy services for young adults and their families; then monitoring, reviewing, auditing and conducting research on the provision of a designated service by a public body and commenting publicly on those functions; reviewing, investigating and reporting on the critical injuries and deaths of children; and performing any other prescribed functions.

So it does not actually specifically talk about systemic advocacy. It touches on a number of areas where there may be aspects of systemic advocacy that could be considered. But it really is focused on individual advocacy as opposed to systemic, I would suggest.

R. Fyfe: I’m not, probably, the person to talk about the reason for it, but I think one of the reasons for that was that the expansion of advocacy services to young adults, which was something that was discussed at this committee some time ago, has been, I suppose, expanding by degrees. The initial expansion related to young adults who were receiving services from Community Living. At the time that happened, the then representative indicated to us that there were some issues with that, and her view was that it would leave some people out of that. But again, it was on an individual advocacy as opposed a systemic advocacy basis.

So I would have to check, but I don’t think that a recommendation for systemic advocacy for young adults was ever put forward as a recommendation for expansion.

L. Reimer: But I’m not necessarily referring to young adults. I’m referring also to children and youth. I’m referring to the role of the representative. I’m asking if there is a reference to systemic advocacy in section 6, because the definition here that is provided on your slide refers to individual advocacy only, and I know that we have been doing systemic advocacy. I guess what I’m saying is: it’s not included in here.

R. Fyfe: I think that’s correct — except to the extent that you’re looking at a designated service.

Under 6(1)(a.1): “support, assist, inform and advise young adults and their families….” Then it talks about, without limitation, under “(ii) advocating on behalf of a young adult…” and then “(iii) supporting, promoting in communities and commenting publicly on advocacy services for young adults and their families….” That is, I think, the closest that you get in that section to a systemic advocacy function.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): We can pull up the act if you want to take a look at it, Linda.

M. Mark (Deputy Chair): My question is related to the member opposite’s, and that’s related to designated services. Before, you had mentioned…. There was a specific emphasis on young adults and how that can be coordinated with other acts across government. Was there any analysis or recommendation about expanding or redefining designated services for children and youth? I think that’s partly what the member opposite is getting at.

Right now, it says the advocacy mandate is for anything related to child, family, community services, mental health, addictions, services for youth and young adults, transitioning to adulthood, early childhood development and childcare services, and any other services prescribed under this act.

Two areas that came up frequently when I was with the representative’s office were that family law is a huge gap in advocacy — it doesn’t fall within the current designated services mandate — and education. Education is huge for children.

I think what I’m getting at is that systemic advocacy that the member opposite is trying to address. If you’re only focusing on children and family, what about education, where kids interact? What about family law, where kids fall through custody battles? Do you have any thoughts or analysis or brief recommendations on whether it should be expanded or redefined?

R. Fyfe: Redefined I think our submission talks about, and maybe redefined isn’t fully the point, but it is clarification in terms of the definition, because there is some conflict between…. Over time, I think, how services are provided have changed such that the definition of designated services does not necessarily capture the services that are or ought to be within the scope of the representative’s mandate.

What I think we’re saying is that there is an opportunity to review how designated services are identified and
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what is actually happening in terms of the delivery of those services and to make recommendations or suggest changes to the definition of designated services to capture what’s on the ground.

In terms of broadening that mandate or expanding that mandate into areas such as education and families, I don’t think we have any recommendations at this point. That’s something that we could probably come back with when we return.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Yeah, that would be good. You’ve indicated that in your report — that you have requested to come back?

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Yeah. Okay, so that would be included. Okay. Thank you very much for your presentation. Very much appreciated.

We now have just a short presentation from Alayna on a high-level explanation of the consultations on the statutory review that staff has received from the written, audio or video submissions to date. I recognize that none of these are public yet, so we need to do it at a very high, high level.

I just wanted to provide an update on what we had done to support this process in terms of inviting written submissions and opening a consultation portal for public submissions as well.

We sent emails directly to about 57 organizations or individuals — academics in the social work field, for example, were also included — specifically asking them to make a submission if they were interested doing so. Many of those people and organizations were included in the 2012 round of consultations, so we had a good list to start from in existence already, and then built on that with members’ suggestions. We also emailed all the delegated aboriginal agencies.

Following that and following opening a consultation portal to the public, we ended up with 16 written submissions. We will endeavour to get those into members’ hands as well, so you can read them directly, because while they were not large in number, they were certainly thoughtful and substantive, I think, in every case and also quite well-focused on the actual topic at hand, which is consideration of the act. That was good, as well, to get what I would consider to be relevant feedback for committee members.

I should also perhaps mention that, as part of our trying to structure or elicit feedback that was very relevant and connected to the act, we did issue a couple of optional discussion questions, if people chose to use them, to inform their consideration of what they would write or else to specifically structure their submission.

Those were the discussion questions that Deputy Minister Fyfe referenced in his presentation. I hope that didn’t cause confusion, because not everybody chose to use those questions. Question 1, for example, was sort of a summary of the act that we had put out there so people would understand, broadly, what we were getting at and what we wanted them to comment on, without being too directive or asking leading questions.

In any case, I think the amount of feedback we have at this point is pretty consistent with what happened in 2011-12, where we received about 12 submissions. Again, as the review continues after the general election, there could be an opportunity — if members thought it necessary and appropriate — to conduct further consultations, open a consultation portal or anything like that. We would, again, facilitate that as you like.

Unless anybody has any specific questions about themes or people who made submissions, I’ll just leave it at that.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Okay, so you’ll be getting those to us at some point?

M. Mark (Deputy Chair): I’d be curious to know who the 16 were, if you can give a quick rundown.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): We would have to go in camera for that, because they’re not public. Why don’t we just be patient? She’ll get it to us in due time.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Given that this is probably our last committee meeting, I’d like to thank all of our committee people — including Carole, who’s not here — and, certainly, everybody here on our side for all of their help and their dedication and commitment to this topic. It’s been quite a learning experience, and I think we’ve grown a lot with regard to the topic. I just want to say thank you.

M. Karagianis: As a retiring member of this committee, I will not be returning, as will some of the other colleagues here.
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Having sat on this committee since the Hughes report, I just want to congratulate this committee for the outstanding work they have done over the years. This has been, I believe, one of the most highly functioning select standing committees of government. We have, over time, accomplished some really excellent work in a bipartisan way.

I think about the poverty hearing forums that we did. I think about the youth mental health forums that we did over time. That’s exceptional work.

I want to just congratulate all of us, and our predecessors that sat on this committee and all, and to say what a privilege it’s been to sit on a committee that has worked so well and done extraordinary work outside of simply sitting and listening to reports from the children’s representative. It’s been a great privilege, and thank you all for the time that I’ve been here.

J. Thornthwaite (Chair): Thank you, Maurine. I think that we all agree on that one.

On behalf of the rest of the committee members, thank you very much, everybody, for your commitment. Onward we go.

Access to on-line versions of the report of proceedings (Hansard)
and webcasts of committee proceedings is available on the Internet.

Chair:	Jane Thornthwaite (North Vancouver–Seymour BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	Melanie Mark (Vancouver–Mount Pleasant NDP)
Members:	Marc Dalton (Maple Ridge–Mission BC Liberal)
	Carole James (Victoria–Beacon Hill NDP)
	Maurine Karagianis (Esquimalt–Royal Roads NDP)
	John Martin (Chilliwack BC Liberal)
	Don McRae (Comox Valley BC Liberal)
	Dr. Darryl Plecas (Abbotsford South BC Liberal)
	Linda Reimer (Port Moody–Coquitlam BC Liberal)
	Jennifer Rice (North Coast NDP)
Clerk:	Susan Sourial

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
CHILDREN AND YOUTH